Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
The Power of Journaling
How Journaling Fosters Self-discovery
Introduction
Do you sometimes feel as if you wandered into a maze and every attempt to emerge into an open field slams you into a new barrier? Before you slump to the ground conceding that you can see no way out, consider a different path — one of self-discovery.
Self-discovery is not a quick fix. Discovering who you truly are can take a lifetime.
Self-discovery reveals and strengthens awareness of our unique value, purpose, creativity, merits, circumstances, and perspectives as we boldly face our inner wisdom, bringing healing and greater acceptance of our innate self-worth.
Other aspects of self-discovery include the following:
- Improving self-awareness
- Improving self-knowledge
- Improving skills and/or learning new ones
- Building or renewing identity/self-esteem
- Developing strengths or talents
- Improving a career
- Identifying or improving personal potential
Before you initiate a lifestyle redesign and improvement, it is essential that you make the effort to get to know yourself.
Knowing yourself means understanding your strengths and weaknesses, your passions and fears, your desires and dreams. It means being aware of your eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, your likes and dislikes, your tolerances and limitations. Knowing yourself means knowing your purpose in life.
It is foreseeable that you will have to make your own introductions, but the outcome is clearly worthwhile.
The Power of Journaling
One of the most powerful ways to learn who you are is through journaling. Journaling helps quiet the inner and outer voices that distract and confuse you, enabling you to truly listen and comprehend your life from different perspectives.
Writing daily will help advance your journey of self-awareness by documenting your thoughts, making it easier to reflect on them than on your memory. As you write, you’ll learn what’s holding you back. Daily writing will provide a constant reminder of why you want to make this change in your life and disclose how to make it possible.
Here are a few reasons to include journaling in your self-discovery journey:
1. Release your mind. Transfer the energy your mind uses to cling to untested thoughts to creating written words.
2. Prime your creativity. The writing process is a physical representation of your stream of consciousness. Let the pen liberate your ideas so ideas can create more ideas.
3. Create a baseline for shifting your habits. Habit development starts with acquiring self-knowledge through the practice of self-awareness.
4. Design new perspectives. Putting your thoughts into a written form offers unique perspectives and encourages you to view and analyze them in fresh and unexpected ways.
When journaling, it is wise to write the yearnings of your heart and mind without filters, mixing honesty and vulnerability into the process. This will clear, cleanse and clarify your mind, opening deeper levels to your exploration and unveiling even the faintest, lurking thought.
Be open to the different ways you are able to hear or sense information and trust your own inner processes to give you awareness. Writing everything down helps intensify your intuitive voice, the keeper of some of your finest answers.
A tool to jump-start your writing is the journal prompt. It is a simple statement designed to inspire you or suggest ideas of what to write. Just set a timer and start writing anything that comes to you. As your creative juices flow, you limit the influence of your rational thought. Don’t stop until your timer rings.
If you also track your time you might consider a list of predefined entries dividing up your time into 30-minute periods to fill out as they occur.
Some useful prompts to help get you started follow:
- Write about a recurring dream
- Write about what brings you comfort and calm
- Write about your favorite activities to do alone
- Write what peaks your curiosity
- Write about the tastes, scents, and surroundings that delight you
- Write about your favorite season and why that season intrigues you
- Write about what you’d make with your hands if you had the right skills
- Write about your favorite way to celebrate
The Benefits of Self-Knowledge
Self-knowledge implies a substantial knowledge of your character, values, abilities, and emotions along with the desire to seek information necessary to direct the development of self-concept. The search for self-knowledge is the search for your true self.
Perhaps you are scratching your head, muddled about why you might want to know your own nature. Here are a few reasons:
- Happiness. You will be happier when you can express who you are and increase the chance that you achieve what you want.
- Diminish inner conflict. When your external actions are in accordance with your interior feelings and values, inner conflict decreases.
- Improve decision making. When you know yourself, you make better choices and have strategies applicable to solving life’s diverse problems.
- Self-control. You understand your motivations for challenging bad habits and acquiring good ones as you gain insights into the values and goals that trigger your determination.
- Challenging social pressure. When you are grounded in your values and preferences, it is easier to say “no.”
- Tolerance and understanding. Your awareness of your own weaknesses and struggles allows you to empathize with others.
- Vitality and pleasure. Being who you truly are releases you to experience a richer, grander and more exciting life.
Self-awareness
As much as 45% of daily behavior is habitual. However, human might be one of less than ten species to possess the capability to be self-aware, making self-awareness an extremely scarce and valuable resource. It is a defining, perhaps the number one, enabler of success.
Still, we can’t boast that we excel at exercising this power. Perhaps this is because we aren’t aware of our talents and the components that make up self-awareness.
Three levels of self-awareness follow:
- Thoughts & emotions: Self-awareness from meditation and other mental activities, often called mindfulness, allows you to observe thoughts and feelings as they occur.
- Beliefs & attitudes: Knowing who you are as a person and what traits define your character.
- Behaviors & decisions: Awareness often provided in the form of direct feedback. For example, if someone calls you selfish you can evaluate the actions that led to this outcome.
These elements are linked such that one influences the other. What goes on in your head determines your character. Character impacts how you make decisions. Decisions on health, wealth, fame, love or happiness dictate your outcomes in life.
Consequently, the earlier in the process you become self-aware, the better it is. Recognizing your thoughts and emotions enable you to adjust your beliefs and attitudes, leading to healthier behaviors and decisions that enrich results.
As you progress and enhance your self-awareness, it is easier to prevent interference from conflicts or sabotage and become more certain about wants. By the Law of Attraction, you attract the very thing that resonates well with your spirit and soul.
Useful self-awareness activities can be grouped into three categories, related to the 3 levels listed above:
- Thinking: Activities you can mostly do by yourself and in your own head.
o Taking a walk with a friend
o Reading
o Asking why three times
o Label your thoughts and emotions
o Meditation - Voicing: Exercises to evaluate your attitudes and beliefs with others or alone, relying primarily on writing
o Keep a Journal
o Take quizzes and personal development tests
o Create an individual manifesto - o Create The Freedom Diagram sketching the three components talent, fun, and demand. The biggest chance to succeed in business is represented by the area where all three overlap
- Implementing: Strategies and activities to generate results in the real world.
o Say no. Saying no helps self-awareness because it forces you to analyze your gut feeling, providing the time and mental spark to develop responses.
o Practice the pause-and-plan response. When a problem appears, resist going into the fight-or-flight mode and choose the freeze response, a sudden moment of inaction that pauses the decision-making process long enough to shift towards your abilities, skills, and attitudes
o Apologize. Owning your mistakes is the first step in acknowledging them. This triggers self-awareness, prevents hypocrisy and permits you to consider alternatives for next time.
o Conduct a feedback analysis on a regular basis.
o The previous night, write down the three most important tasks for the next day to avoid lost time
o Capture a result that can be compared with your performance at the day’s end.
Getting to Know Yourself
Just as you are attracted to certain qualities in others, you’re likely to be attracted to certain qualities in yourself. You may boast about your work ethic, revel in being the life of the party, have a generous spirit or an adept mind.
Explore and pursue these elements because they indicate that you have intuited something good in that quality or habit. Focusing on that characteristic may reveal even more intriguing information you like about yourself.
There are countless aspects of your life you can monitor but here are four areas that will generate high-quality information quickly and help establish benchmarks for designing your ideal lifestyle.
Your Feelings: Monitor your most positive and negative feelings each day to connect with who you really are. Your subconscious mind often knows what you really want before your conscious mind does.
Your Energy: track your energy levels throughout the day to identify your peak performance period. This offers a more accurate record of your natural energy levels. Note activities when they energize or drain you.
Your Time: Monitor how, with whom and where you spend your time.
Your Spending: Monitor how and why you spend your money, recording each expense by hand to increase awareness.
Identify Wants, Values, and Vulnerabilities
The process of getting to know yourself begins with recognizing your wants and following up to consciously identify the activities, ambitions and impulses that drive you.
While needs are nearly universal, wants tend to be expressed as complaints. Based on this, start paying attention to the following:
- What am I complaining about?
- What do I feel angry about?
- Where am I starting to function poorly?
- Where do I want to point the finger of blame?
The answers point out your areas of unmet needs.
Another factor that will impact your self-discovery journey is identifying your values — another lifelong project. A good place to start is to pay attention to times when you feel down or withdrawn. These low points may be camouflaging a disregarded value and can serve as indicators of what you care most about.
Take some time to consider the following:
- What has your body been asking for that you’ve been ignoring?
- What has your mind been asking for that you’ve been ignoring?
- What has your spirit been asking for that you’ve been ignoring?
- What are you holding back when you interact with people?
- What are you worried other people will find out about you?
The answers to these questions unveil your vulnerabilities. Reframe each in your mind as a strength.
Tips
Carry a small note pad with you or use an app to write down your wants, values and vulnerabilities as they occur. Journaling is an opportunity to communicate with subconscious feelings you might be overlooking or ignoring. The act of writing provides a stage for those feelings, so you can easily bring awareness to them.
Later, review the list and identify factors that may be connected to something greater. Keeping a journal in the context of developing your self-awareness helps you get to know yourself in a more profound way than ever before.
There are a variety of reasons for starting a self-awareness voyage, but one of the most common reasons is to make a big change in your life. Transforming your lifestyle requires changes in your thoughts, habits, and behaviors. To change them you need a benchmark.
Decision Making
Decision making, the process of selection by identifying a choice, gathering information and assessing alternative resolutions, is integral to self-discovery. Deliberate, thoughtful decisions happen by organizing relevant information.
The decision process has seven steps:
1. Identify the decision. Clearly define the nature of the decision you must make.
2. Gather relevant information. Pertinent information includes key data, best information sources, how to get it.
3. Identify all possible and desirable alternatives. As you collect information, look for possible paths of action or opportunities to construct new options.
4. Weigh the evidence by imagining what is necessary to fully complete each alternative. Evaluate whether the need would be met or resolved and identify those variables with high potentials for success. Prioritize the alternatives based upon your own value system.
5. Choose among alternatives. After weighing all evidence, select the choice or combination of choices that seem best for you.
6. Implement a positive action using the selected alternative.
7. Review your decision and its consequences. If the decision has not met the identified need, repeat the steps to make a new decision.
How to Understand your mind
Mindfulness and self-awareness are functions of the physical brain structure and products of the mind — thoughts. Our brains are the busiest parts of our bodies, working steadily to sort out the chaotic mess amassing from day to day. Duplicate, erroneous, trivial, contradictory, critical, amusing messages assault our memory randomly or deliberately.
It is no wonder we juggle opinions, emotions, ideas, solutions and recollections as we try to focus on one thing at a time. Although we don’t know the exact process, key findings that won Daniel Kahneman the Nobel Prize, show that our brains have three major frames or processes.
1. Engaged Mind Frame is the state of being when our thoughts and attention are fully connected to what we are doing in the present. People that engage in their daily activities rather than remaining oblivious to their surroundings or distracted by other thoughts are generally more satisfied with their lives and relationships and exhibit lower levels of stress hormones.
2. Automatic Mind Frame describes the non-stop stream of information that humans swim in, including changes in the environment, our bodies, instantaneous deviations and unexpected incidents. We easily make decisions about things we must do and need to remember, catalog our experiences, draw conclusion and resolve problems using memories and prior learning.
While the automatic mind is essential for subsistence, it is filled with misrepresentations, half-truths and prejudices that are often sources of our greatest problems and discomfort. If the information from the automatic mind is so negative, strong or disturbing that it stifles the engaged mind we lose self-awareness and perspective.
3. Analytic Mind Frame relies on our standing as self-aware beings with complex reasoning to deliberately draw back from our ongoing thoughts, mindsets and capabilities and impartially observe them, manipulate information in our minds and problem solve.
Below are six broad categories of processes accessible to both the automatic and analytical mind. The difference is that the analytic mind intentionally chooses to use these abilities.
Categories of Automatic and Analytical Mind Processes
1. Observe: observe other people as well as the workings of our own minds
2. Reflect: retell events in our memories to arrive at new viewpoints
3. Solve: take immediate issues and problems and find solutions or acceptance
4. Plan: plan far into the future and create alternative options
5. Focus: maintain attention on something important
6. Imagine: use imaginations to visualize how something may play out
Mastering Your Mind
It is uplifting to realize that the mind’s capacities are synched to make us better. As we strive to intensely engage in our lives, the automatic mind creates protective barriers while keeping track of what is happening in the environment. Our ability to retrieve memories of prior learning and experiences introduces other information to analyze and act on and with time and repetitions, become habits in our automatic minds.
Combining this knowledge with our ability to practice self-awareness is invaluable to understanding ourselves. (Don’t forget to write your insights in your journal where they can be accessed as needed.)
Deciding on the Right Career
Life has a habit of not always working out as we imagined. In an ever-evolving technological and economic world, the types of careers we can pursue are vast. This reality makes choosing a job or career highly problematic.
To complicate career choices, we ourselves change and grow in unexpected ways. These factors challenge us to figure out what we want to do that will give us a sense of involvement and meaning.
An excellent step to energize your brain and start ideas flowing is to think of as many talents and abilities as you can then write them in your journal. When you have your list ready, research the different steps you need to take and get started. Here are some steps you can use as a guide.
- Brainstorm your interests and dreams. Start by taking some time to think about your biggest hopes and dreams.
- Take a good look at your life. Consider the choices that you have before you.
- Think about what’s important to you.
- Make a list.
- Don’t choose just one thing.
- Talk to people.
- Test the waters.
Deciding Where to Live
It is not surprising if you are considering a new career that your thoughts may of necessity turn to a new place to live. Important factors to consider include the following:
- Weather/Climate: consider the type of activities you enjoy and the effect of weather on those activities.
- Culture, Entertainment, and Lifestyle: list things you like to do, including activities sacrificed because of insufficient living space.
- Employment: if career is paramount to your decision making, thoroughly research job opportunities.
- Infrastructure: add infrastructure pros and cons to your journal and include them in your final overview
- Safety: determine community involvement in crime prevention and policing
- Politics: consider values, social structure and political preferences of the community
- Cost of Living: measure the cost of living in a variety of cities nationwide
- Spiritual: for many, a community that supports one’s spiritual needs is an important consideration.
Refer to your choices and compare each indicator with all the other factors that have been finding a page in your Journal. Review your journal entries relative to your career choice and compare with your ideal place to live before committing to either.
The Value of Journaling
Humans are not very good at retaining information. We forget most of what we read and hear. Conversely, when you write down the things you’ve learned, even if you never re-read them, retention is far better. The simple act of writing something down increases brain development and memory.
As you journal, you are not only wholly involved in the process from the moment you take the first step, but you engineer the journey around each curve, over each mountain, across each stream, through hostile territory, on dark nights with tears blinding your vision. Still, you puff and chug onward, writing every thought, idea, failure, fear, intuition, breakthrough and hunch into your journal, your spirit rising as “I think I can” evolves into “I knew I could.”
Before you know it, you have drafted a blueprint for the meaningful life you were meant to live. Because you have captured your personal, unique circumstances, thoughts and feelings in a journal, you are free to examine their origin and identify patterns of thought and behavior whenever you wish.
Your journal writing highlights different responses to stressful situations and feelings that are more positive and self-affirming. You are no longer preordained to simply react to the demands or expectations of others.
Not only will this crystal-clear vision bring clarity to your sense of identity and path in life, but you are made aware of what needs to be removed and what should be included in your life.
When you write about things you plan to consider the next day, journaling directs your subconscious to ready a smorgasbord of ideas for intake during the daylight’s creative planning session. Journaling in the morning and evening is a powerful keystone habit to focus on the incongruencies in your life.
Each touch of pen to paper tells your own story, singling out journaling as a distinctive, unique and irreplaceable method.
Summary
A prime way to develop new habits is to practice self-discovery. The term self-discovery refers to a series of events whereby a person ponders their personal feelings about values, concerns or priorities, rather than following the opinions of family, friends, neighborhood or peers.
Self-discovery uncovers and strengthens awareness of our unique qualities. Self-awareness is what you notice in life by paying attention, consciously and actively collecting and analyzing information from your surroundings. Self-awareness connects you to your inner wisdom and introduces you to yourself. It is how you live life.
Self-discovery may include improving self-awareness, self-knowledge, skills, career, individual potential and self-esteem. It means developing strengths or talents by using your brain, thoughts, and emotions. The effects of self-discovery include happiness, fulfillment, clarity, and illumination.
Being aware of the distinctive mind frames helps us understand the multiple functions of the minds and determine the best Frame of Mind to be in at any given time. For example, when there is something fun or important going on, we should be engaged but if there is a complex problem at hand, analyze it.
The journey of self-discovery can include fear, confusion, misunderstanding, doubt as you literally revisit all your previous life choices. It necessitates harsh decisions and sticking to them because the results can be life changing as you release your hang-ups and learn to co-exist with others and prevent them from controlling your actions.
As self-discovery progresses you will use your enlightened understandings to make decisions, from small to momentous. These decisions such as career, relationships, where you live, politics, spirituality and lifestyle will fashion and build a meaningful life that conforms to your unique qualities and characteristics.
Conclusion
Journaling will help you learn more about yourself faster than any other method.
Journaling is a beautiful and powerful facilitator of self-discovery that is superior to other methods of change. The key to making meaningful changes in your life is to stop passively consuming information and start actively engaging with the ideas we encounter.
The more you know yourself, the more empowered you become to decipher whatever is troubling you and find new meaning. In the course of changing a hodgepodge of random ideas into rational sentences, you tend to ask tougher questions.
Journaling allows you to review memories, experiences, revelations and aha! moments. You draw deeper insights, discover new connections, and reach more creative solutions. Reflecting on goals in writing reminds you to take the next action necessary to achieve them. Journals give you a record of the progress you’ve made toward your goals to keep you motivated in the marathon of actually reaching them.
In practice, journaling is whatever you want it to be. Underneath, it’s the gateway to recording life, experiencing all manner of emotions and uncovering parts of yourself you never knew existed. I dare say that journaling is one of the most important things to do in your life. If done effectively, it will change everything in your life for the better.
Putting self-discovery in perspective, many ask if it is possible to really understand oneself? The answer is yes and no.
Yes — after introspection and critical thinking, tremendous self-understanding is achieved.
No — completely understanding oneself is not a realistic achievement.
“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” ~ Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
