Journaling Course: Day 2

[Vanessa Keranovic, Mindfulness Coach] Welcome to day two of the course Journaling for Beginners. I'm happy to see you again. In today's video, I will talk more about journaling for self-improvement, personal growth journaling and reflection journaling. Okay, let's get started. Journaling for self-improvement and personal growth. One of the main parts about this type of journaling is setting intentions. You've probably heard about this. You can set intention about almost anything in your life. This can be something in your personal life, business, relationships, social life, really anything you want to set an intention about. Setting intentions helps you get more clear on where you want to see yourself in the future, of what does your future self look like, your best future self. Setting intentions can be done daily or it can be done as needed. I recommend doing both. I recommend first doing setting intentions as needed as a way to clarify what are your intentions. This is done maybe once a year, maybe at the beginning of the year, whenever you feel like your intentions have slowly shifted and they're maybe different now than they were as before when you first set them. So every time you feel there is a new shift inside of you, you would set some new intentions. These intentions then can be repeated daily and this is something I do every day. Every day, I write my same intentions, the ones that I'm working on, and this is because as we go through our day, we get distracted by the day-to-day stuff and we always kind of shift our focus away from the big picture of what we are actually trying to achieve longterm. And this is fine, obviously, we don't have to always think big. We can simply enjoy the moment as it is. But setting intentions daily, writing your intentions daily, day in and day out, helps you at the end of the day or at the beginning of the day slowly refocus back to where you want your focus, your attention to be at. Writing them daily is like repeating that same task, making more and more sure this is where I want to see myself in the future, to not get sucked into the day-to-day stuff, into the daily grind and to the stuff that occur day in, day out. Setting intentions really helps you shift your focus to what actually matters to you at this moment. Another big part about journaling for self-improvement and personal growth is setting goals. Now this I'm sure you have already tried some time in the past. So setting goals is actually an actualization of setting intentions. For example, if your attention would be to be more active, your goal would maybe be to exercise two or three times a week, or to go for a hike once a week, or some other specific goal that you could attach to your intention. So my advice here is to first be clear on your intentions and after that, start with setting your goals. Once you've set your big goals, the big ones, for example, exercising three times a week, then you can start on dividing that big goal into smaller, easier, doable goals that you can easily achieve. For example, you want to start exercising three times a week. Maybe you don't wanna start right away with the three times and get discouraged and maybe give up. So maybe your first goal will be exercise once a week or twice a week. And once you get used to that, maybe you'll build up to more to three or even four times. Once you start setting them, maybe you want to get even more specific, so when are you going to exercise? For how long? Which exercises are you going to do? This all helps you achieve that first goal and that helps you achieve your intention to be more active. We'll talk a lot about this, the organization part and tracking progress in day three, so tomorrow, but for now, I just want you to remember that journaling for personal growth and self-improvement is all about setting intentions, setting clear goals, and being clear about where you want to see yourself in the future. What does your best future self look like? Once you're clear with that, once that journaling is done, then you can use the journaling from day three to help you set actual action steps that will make it possible for you to accomplish it. Another type of journaling I wanna talk about today is reflection journaling. Now this is usually done at the end of the day and you usually reflect on the day behind you. This can also be done at the end of the week and you can reflect on the week behind you, or month or even a year. The frequency is really up to you so what aligns most with you and your routine and how do you wish to go about your journaling. Reflection journaling helps us to see the positive aspects in our life, the positive experiences, to cultivate more gratitude, and to observe the less positive experiences in a way that we can take it as a lesson and not just a bad experience, so learning from our past mistakes so we can do better in the future. For example, sometimes we really hold onto some past experience and keep going over that again and again. Reflection journaling can help us see where it is there that still asks us to learn from it. That once we have learned that lesson, we can leave that experience behind us and move forward in life. It is a way to make sense of the ruminating thoughts that keep going on and to simply have an outlet for whatever it is that is worrying us. Some of the examples of reflection journaling is already mentioned. First one is gratitude journaling. Now this is probably my favorite one. Gratitude journaling can be done first thing in the morning or last thing in the evening. It's really up to you and what fits your schedule the most. I usually do it in the morning. It's a great way to start my day, but it's also a great way to end your day as well. Gratitude journaling usually consists of you listing different things you feel grateful for. I usually list three things every morning, but if you're just starting, you can start with one thing and slowly progress to a larger number. Gratitude journaling isn't about ignoring the bad experiences, the negative experiences, the difficult emotions in your life. No, it's about acknowledging the good in our life. It's about creating space within our realm of experience. It's creating space for the good as well and knowing that even on the worst days, there is still something to be grateful for. There is still a day that you are alive and breathing and can fully experience life as it is. Some days, your gratitude list will be long and extensive and you'll just feel so good about it. And other days it will be smaller, but still it's worth coming back to it every single day. Another advice I would like to offer you as you're writing your gratitude list, as you're writing each item on your list, or maybe just one item, it doesn't matter, but as you're writing that one item, before you jump onto the next thing, see if you can, for a moment, maybe even close your eyes and for a moment, truly appreciate that thing you feel grateful for. This really helps cultivate the thankfulness of gratitude feeling within us, raising our vibrations and our positive emotions. Besides gratitude journaling, another great method of reflection journaling is writing your daily reflections. So daily reflections consists of two parts. First part is going through your day and seeing all the positive experiences, all the great things that happened that day and writing them down. This is a way for you to acknowledge all the good parts of your day, all the good things that happened. And another step would be going through your day and seeing which parts of your day didn't go so well and could be maybe turned into a lesson. So this isn't about analyzing your day and seeing what you did wrong and beating yourself up about it, it's about viewing the last positive experiences as a learning opportunity, as something you can learn from and do better in the future. Sometimes we feel overwhelmed by everything that happened that day, and even when we write out positive experiences, or the less positive experiences that can be turned into lessons, we still feel the weight of the day and this is the moment where you can write all the things that you are now letting go of, so all the things that are stuck in your mind and you keep going over and over and you feel the weight of them. This is a way for you to let go of them by letting them shift on to outside of you onto the paper. That's it for now. Thank you for being here with me and I'll see you tomorrow.