Looking To Level Up Your Leadership? Try Journaling
New to Journaling? Skeptical about how it can really help you lead better? Here are some resources to help invite you into the daily practice of journaling.
Journaling is a powerful tool for self-inquiry. Writing, especially stream-of-consciousness free writing, allows parts of you to be voiced in an unedited way. It creates the opportunity to discover what deeper parts of yourself — parts that may be tuned out during normal day-to-day work activities — may feel or believe. We suggest you embrace artisanal journaling (the old pen and paper format).
“Research has documented that outstanding leaders take time to reflect. Their success depends on the ability to access their unique perspective and bring it to their decisions and sense-making every day. Extraordinary leadership is rooted in several capabilities: seeing before others see, understanding before others understand, and acting before others act. A leader’s unique perspective is an important source of creativity and competitive advantage. But the reality is that most of us live such fast paced, frenzied lives that we fail to leave time to actually listen to ourselves.” — Nancy Adler
How Journaling Can Improve Your Leadership
- As a mindfulness practice, journaling supports your slowing down and noticing what’s happening in your life.
- Journaling gives you a way of tracking your learning over time, enabling you to discover the arc of your journey as you look back on what you’ve written.
- Journaling supports you in claiming or “owning” your own learning and development process.
For further reading, check out “Want to Be an Outstanding Leader? Keep a Journal,” by Nancy Adler from Harvard Business Review. It gives some practical advice for starting your journaling practice. You can reap great benefits from just 10–15 minutes a day of journaling reflection.
Turning Inward
Jungian analyst Dr. James Hollis considers journaling as a dialogue with deeper parts of yourself. In his book Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times he writes:
Undertaking a dialogue with our own depths brings greater purpose, dignity, gravitas, and meaning in this journey we call our life. It helps make it our life and not someone else’s. It involves a measure of discipline, to be sure, to check in with our own souls and to pull out from the melee of our journey, the noisy distractions of our necessary duties, to ask, What’s going on here? […]
He suggests finding a time, every day, to set aside “to formally address the workings of your psychic life.” What then, do you write about to strike up a conversation with these parts of yourself that are alive within you? The practice of journaling is more than recounting the things that happened in the day for the sake of recounting them in a “Dear Diary” sense. The deeper practice of journaling hinges on these questions Hollis offers us:
- What got touched today?
- What generated a significant amount of energy?
- Where did that energy come from?
- What did today’s experience touch in my history?
- What satellite issues might that have activated?
He asks us to consider the bigger emotional events of the day, or consternations we carry, and inquire where they come from.
“Perhaps you had some conflict with someone in the course of the day that continues to ripple for you. It’s easy to dismiss it as something that happened “out there.” But you can also pursue it a little bit and ask, “Where does this come from in my history? You may find it stirs significant rings of influence, fear of conflict, or the difficulty of holding one’s own in the presence of a large Other. Your journaling needs to ask:
What was that about?
Where did that activate some aspect of my history?
What do I need to know about that?
How do I need to bring the wherewithal of my adult capacity to it?”
These prompts will not only support your own practice of radical self-inquiry, but they will also support your ongoing growth and development as a leader.
Questions to Help You Build Your Journaling Practice
Journaling is a potent leadership practice. In addition to the questions Hollis points to above, here is a set of questions to frame a daily journaling practice:
- How are you? (Red — Yellow — Green?)
- What are you feeling? (Name the feelings, or do some expressive doodling on what you’re feeling now. What would those feelings look like?)
- What thought patterns do you notice?
- What are three things you are grateful for?
- What can you celebrate?
More Resources
Journaling is also one of the many powerful tools we encourage here at Reboot with our clients, both for themselves and for what gets shaken up and stirred during and in between coaching sessions.
That is why we’ve created our latest email course — 365 Days of Journaling — which is designed to help you establish your own journaling practice.
We hope that this course, and the prompts included in it, will not only support your own practice of radical self-inquiry but will also sustain your ongoing growth and development as a leader. Learn about the course and sign up here.
