7 Tips to Successful Journaling

"You cannot change what you do not recognize in yourself."

Making a Positive Change Online Journal

 “I just don’t like me.” Many people make this statement because they lack clarity about themselves, and what they don’t understand, they judge negatively.

A worthwhile goal, then, would be finding a way to improve this understanding of your inner self. Understanding can be improved through communication. How do you communicate with you? Journaling can be an effective tool to enhance communication with your inner self.

Recognition (being self aware) is a key component of emotional intelligence.  Emotional intelligence is simply the awareness of, and the ability to manage and command, one's own emotions through respect of those emotions. Recognition creates the opportunity to reflect, assess and make necessary changes. It also helps you to become clear about what you truly want out of life and to have something to focus on, put into action steps and achieve what you actually want.

Journaling is one way of gaining a true picture of yourself, developing emotional intelligence and becoming clear about your core beliefs and goals in life. However, journaling also has many other benefits including enhancing growth and knowledge.

The power of journaling is taking what you think in the ethereal plane (somewhere out there) and bringing to reality in writing. Once it is in your journal, it becomes your truth.

Journaling is not the same as writing a daily diary. A diary is a record of daily experiences, thoughts and reactions to those events.

Journal writing is an effective way to record personal thoughts, dreams, barriers, fears, excitements, experiences, ideas, inventions, successes and evolving insights. Journaling can also serve as a way to gain mental clarity about events, experiences and emotions. Just writing every day in a diary is not sufficient in itself to bring about deep changes in one's life.

Journaling gives you the ability to gain insight into, and the expression of, complex ideas, visions, intentions and recognition to the subconscious to reach a deeper understanding.

Journaling can serve as a platform for your personal opinions, hopes, barriers, fears, inner conflicts, dilemmas, challenges, issues, evolving views, confusion about core values and beliefs, life changes and other problems that come up in life.

Here are 7 simple tips to effective journaling:

1. A journal is your private record just for you and only you.

2. Sign up for the Making a Positive Change (MPC) free membership and gain access to the free live daily journal so that you can comfortably allow your feelings, thoughts and emotions to flow without fear of someone seeing your entries.

3. Find a time with the least distractions to write on your computer in your MPC journal. Be comfortable and express yourself freely. 

4. Create different portions in your MPC journal. Section off a part for gratitude, wishes, joys and visions of the future and create another part for barriers, problems, ideas or resentments that keep you stuck from getting what you want.

5. Write without worrying about grammar, form or judgment. Writing without restrictions and judgments produces a deep focus known as being "in a creative zone.”

6. Write for quantity. Give yourself permission to open your mind to express every thought and emotion that arises that affects your actions or relationship with your inner self. If you come up with a "Wow” moment, acknowledge it and keep writing. You can come back to it later.

7. If you intend to express emotion, use phrases beginning with "I feel …" For wants or visions, begin sentences with “I deserve …” Ideas and thoughts start with “I think …” This allows you to separate them and recognize the differences.

Remember, you can create and write a journal for every area of your life - gratitude, dreams, memoirs, emotions, intentions and dreams. Journaling is a key to knowing yourself more intimately and improving your relationship with you.

Be inspired and start a journal today. You deserve it.

Benefits of journaling:

·      Increases clarity in your thoughts

·      Find out what is subconsciously blocking or motivating you

·      Identify various subconscious negative core beliefs

·      Reveal buried resentments

·      Discover hidden problems

·      Determine subconscious dreams

·      Gain perspective over difficult situations

·      Open a channel for communication with your higher intelligence

The effectiveness of journaling is determined by the way you approach the writing. The approach should be authentic and positive. Write openly without fear, judgment, blame, justification or shame. In fact, the very act of writing this way can lead to personal freedom. Journaling can create the opportunity for greater self-love and self-understanding.

Questions to ask

 Have you kept a journal in the past? 

      
     Why did you stop?

     Have you kept a journal for years? 

Why do you continue journaling?

     What’s the greatest benefit you've found from journaling?

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