Steps On How To Start Writing A Self Help Journal
This article is a complete guide on “How To Write A Self Help Journal”
After you have chosen a journal book to put down the required information, a pen to write and identify a secure place to store the journal.
The following steps should give you the writing tips :
- Observe and explore your feelings: This is where you analyze your moods and emotions. Try understanding what you are feeling in order to put it down on paper. Whether it’s happiness, anger, sadness, disappointment or any other emotions that are affecting you, both positive and negative. This is something that only you can explain as they are in your conscience and only felt by yourself. Exploring and understanding your feelings and emotions basically provides the topic to put down.
- After discovering the above you now clear your mind by writing all that you feel. At this particular time I assume you have the push to do it and you just let the pen flow. It is always advisable to write it on daily basis but it’s more important and effective when it’s done when a person is moved to do it. This will eliminate chaff and what will be there is important information that will help you move a step forward. It should be in a way that if you go back to the words put down, you seem to relive the moment and are therefore specific details of the emotions felt during writing.
- Define your goals and list them down. Everyone has what they anticipate, plan and aim at. It is always important to note them down as reference in case a challenging situations comes up and drives you off the track. Reminding oneself of personal goals is a source of self motivation and provides one with tools to lay down a foundation in life as well as build on it till the day the ultimate goals are achieved.
- Practice self reflection. It is always important to look back at your old ways of approaching things, how you go about your day to day activities and the effectiveness of your methods. This will help you determine your strengths, weaknesses, skills, problems, solutions and achievements. This will help you work on your down areas and maintain the things that build your character.
- Write freely because you are free from judgement and also don’t judge yourself and think that you should not write something because of certain reasons. Keep it in mind that you are doing aa this to help and improve on yourself.
- Be as simple and creative as you can. This basically refers to not beating around the bush with yourself. Simplicity eliminates confusion and creativity improves one’s living.
- Also write things that you are grateful for. Add positive quotes, affirmations and words that captures your soul.
- Make sure that you write down the date of your entries. Clarity on the records is important to facilitate self reflection and keep track of your actions. It also makes sure you don’t get mixed up along the way.
- Be honest with your self while writing. You can hardly lie to yourself but its important to eliminate excuses on things you did wrong or make assumptions that would rather change the true meaning of something said or done.
- After writing it is advisable that you take a break off all that. Try and accept yourself and forgive your self if there are reasons to. Dwelling so much on your own life may dim the rest of the world irrelevant. As much as you are trying to improve on yourself remember you are not in this world alone and others are in some ways similar to you. Recreation as well is some way of improving yourself
- After the break get back to it and start being your own therapist. Dig deeper and know what your blockers are. This are things that prevents you from achieving your goals and if it’s about feelings and moods you ask yourself questions as to why you are in such a situation or why you feel what you feel.
- Uncover initial feelings. Dig deep and find out what you feel beyond the feeling you currently have. Ask yourself what you felt before and how your feelings have advanced. It helps you keep track of events and discover causes of some of the changes taking place in your life
- Then start getting answers to those questions. The process of question and answer continues until you feel you are satisfied. Solutions come out of this series of questions and answers and you finally get to discover a version of yourself that you had no idea about. It brings self-realization
- After getting answers why start implementing daily strategies. This is where you start getting solutions as to what you will do to make it better than before. Use it like strategy ground.
- Indulge in your dreams. Try to act and live them. This will eventually get you there as it’s a form of practice which will finally pay off as perfect.
- Put it all together. This is where you combine the goals or the problems and the solutions or strategies you have made. Each problem should relate to its solution and weakness give a basis for strength. Skills and achievements should also be included as they help you appreciate who you are and who you are becoming.
- You start empowering yourself by telling your self what you want from there hence forth. This is simply setting out a base of your next goal. It should all be well noted in forms of milestones to help track your progress.
The whole process involves digging deeper into one’s inner self. It is like you are profiling yourself by asking yourself questions facing your fears and all those feelings, and understanding the source of all that you feel.
Getting to know whether or not you have had similar experiences and it is through this process that help comes from.
What Is A Self Help Journal?
This is can be described as a regular personal record that shows someone’s physical and emotional well-being. It is a safe space for a journey of discovery.
It is written by a person expressing all his/her thoughts, feelings, needs, and desires. It is written to make a person feel better, happy, and contented when they understand themselves better.
It is also a way of living a more well-being and conscious life. Helping one’s self involves processes and actions done by a person to better themselves and overcome problems and difficulties.
When journaling is done regularly it results to self love, forgiveness, and healing, joy, satisfaction, and discovery
Types Of Self Help Journals
Some people find journaling hard because they take it as an obligation they are supposed to fulfill since it is said to be written on a daily basis. It can be written weekly, daily, or as regularly as you feel you want to write.
Bellow are the types and also ideas for writing a self-help journal.
Gratitude Journal
When you start journaling you can do it by writing a gratitude journal. This is whereby you write down events, people, things, and circumstances that you are grateful for.
In this, you can decide to be detailed or brief depending on what you are grateful for.
- Helps one appreciate life even more due to what they are grateful for In life that day.
- Helps one be optimistic. They stay positive and focus on themselves in their lives eliminating negativity.
- Help people by boosting their self-esteem and start approaching this prevents people confidently.
- Reduces stress since it makes a person stay happy and prevents them from being resentful towards others.
- People can sleep well at night or even spend the whole day in a good mood. This depends on the time you write it whether it is a few minutes before bed or in the morning before you do anything.
- Helps a person stay strong and motivated even when tough times strike.
- Helps in self-realization and understanding of the things that make you tick or rather happy and with this, it is easy to focus on what matters in your life.
Goal Journal
This is whereby you write your goals or objectives of the future or daily achievements and accomplishments.
To understand the priority of your goals you are advised to write them each day on a different clean page and without checking your previous writing.
With this, you will find out that some goals are recurrent and others are not. With this, you will know which ones to focus on first before the others.
This type of journal helps a person to :
- Get motivated and maintain focus throughout. When writing these great ideas hit you and you get the urge to work on them until they become a reality.
- Be able to measure the weight of each goal and be able to manage what comes when trying to achieve them.
- Provides one with clear directions allowing them to make decisions.
- It gives a person a sense of purpose in life and self-satisfaction when you achieve what you want.
Log Journal/Daily Journal
This is whereby a person writes of everyday events, and happenings since you woke up.
This might sound stupid but believe me it helps a lot because the more honest you are with your self the more you discover yourself and grow.
Problems Journal
When journaling your problems you list down the problems you have. With this, you feel less weight and a little bit relieved. This is because when you write them down they appear minimized or less.
Human beings tend to think a lot of their problems making them enlarge and they feel like it’s too much for them and they cannot solve them.
However, when they are listed down a person can analyze and try to find a solution by asking themselves a couple of questions.
Stress Journal
Journaling for stress happens when you have got too much than you can handle. You get to open up to yourself and write it down.
After writing them down you realize that it feels different than before. After the space has been created you now start asking yourself questions and you start solving those equations slowly.
Questions you will start asking yourself are like :
- you are stressed
- Why do you feel what you feel
- What you can do to eliminate the feeling
You can journal for the best and worst things that happened on that day.
Everybody’s day has better and the worst part. This can be due to different things depending on where and with whom you have spent your day with.
You write of all the things that made you happy and all that made you sad and angry.
How To Use Your Journal For Self-Help
Once you have followed these steps and now you know how to start journaling for self-help you now do the following to allow the above information to help you.
- You write down your goals. Write all that you want to achieve. Research has shown that when goals are written down they are fulfilled.
- Make journaling one of your goals.
- Make an effort of consistency in writing.
- You expand your creativity. Here is where you start embracing and using other styles to journal.
- Styles like sticking out pictures in the book, drawing, painting, and so forth.
- In this, you discover a lot about yourself that you never knew existed. why
- After a period of time like a month or so, you track your progress.
- This is where you go back to the book and you look at where you started and where you are and analyze your progress on the situation.
Journaling Prompts That Aid In Writing Self Help Journal
This are questions that a person should ask themselves while in the process of journaling for self help.
You get to ask yourself evocative questions that you feel you need answers.
They help a person keep on writing effectively because they stretch their minds to new places where you get more information and more answers.
They help you kick off the next time they are journaling and reflect on their personal journey.
They can be broken down to :
- Self love : This includes questions that shows love and care to you self. For example : whose compliment matters to me most?
- Self discovery : Questions from this section shows a persons character which is finding their true self. Here you ask yourself questions like : what your insecurities are, what your passion is, what excites you and many other.
- Self improvement : Involves questions meant for bettering ones character and knowledge. Questions like: what is best, what is worst, bad, nice, high, low and a lot more.
Advantages / Impacts Of Writing A Self Help Journal
- You are free to write about anything in any way that you want and at any time you please.
- You have no restrictions.
- It discourages the feeling of helplessness when a person is facing challenges that they find difficult to disclose to other people.
- Allows a person to understand his/her self better than anybody else thus motivating them to go for what they want.
- It improve a persons moods by changing them from sadness or anger to happiness.
- It boosts a persons creativity. It involve a lot of questions and discoveries.
- It strengthens self discipline. When a persons learns how to focus on something by the motivation she or he gets.
- It improves a persons overall health condition.
- Helps prioritize problems.
- Helps in tracking growth and progress
- Improve in writing and communication skills
- Strengthens a persons memory
- One can find inspiration from writing it.