In my book ReArchitecting, I refer to the example of a journal as a tool for exploring your perspectives and your voice. I am often asked what is the point of keeping a journal and how to do it. It seems that many people find the idea unappealing – perhaps they don’t like to write or think it will be a burden to keep it up.
I will share here why I think a journal can be valuable as a tool to find your voice, plus suggest ideas to help make journaling fit your style more easily. There is no right way to keep a journal. Any approach that works for you is a good one. My way of journaling has evolved through trial and error, as I journaled in some way since I was a child. Your way will evolve, as well. Trust it.
A Purpose for Journaling
My journal helps me find and clarify my voice. It serves as a place to gather my thoughts and as a tool to sort through them to identify what is meaningful to me. I find my voice through a journal through two steps:
1. I create a holding place for my ideas and emotions by capturing them as I have the time or feel a need to express thoughts or experiences every few days or weeks.
2. My journal becomes a tool to create my voice when I read back through it and highlight the ideas and phrases that strike me as most meaningful. Then I can see the themes and trends. It’s that accumulation of my most meaningful thoughts that builds the momentum to shape my actions. And so, I find my voice.
Starting and Keeping Your Journal
If you haven’t tried using a journal, it can at first seem a bit mysterious and difficult to get started. Perhaps these specific suggestions will help:
Make it easy and open
Think of a journal as a flow of your ideas which do not need to be connected. I consider a journal different than a diary in which a person might record the details of every day as my grandfather did faithfully each morning of his retirement. I keep my journal hand-written in a flat notebook that I can easily carry with me. My journaling instrument of choice is a pen. When I feel like it, I take out my journal and write a few notes or a paragraph or more. I might be at home, in a coffee shop, sitting at my desk in the office, or on an airplane. I might spend 5 minutes with it. I rarely spend more than 30 minutes at once.
When you see that first blank, white, empty page in front of you, it often helps to get started by writing something easy as a warm-up. I usually note the date, the time, where I am and a sentence or two about what I see around me. Then I move on and ask myself a question such as “what has been on my mind today or lately?” And I answer the question in free-flow form with whatever comes to my pen. Whether three sentences or three pages later, when I feel little more to say, I simply stop.
Perhaps promise yourself to write once a week on Fridays. Or some people recommend writing something every day for a while; I never could keep quite that regular a schedule. My ideas come when they feel like it! I usually write something about three times a week, but I still have weeks during which I do not write anything at all. No worries. I just keep the journal handy and pick it up when I am ready.
What should I put in my journal?
Journals require no rules. They take on their own lives and characters over time. You can always write in them. I sometimes draw little (absolutely unartistic) sketches to remind myself of an idea or something I saw. You might clip pictures from magazines that strike you as relevant to things you’ve been thinking – even if you don’t at the moment know why it strikes you that way. Sometimes I record a quote I like (and note the source in case I want to use it later). Occasionally, I’ve been in a period of venting emotions. Sometimes I make lists of things I’ve learned.
Most of the time, I simply try to notice what has been on my mind.
Whatever feels right to you will work. I’ve seen excellent web sites built for journaling. It remains my own style to keep my journal in a form that I feel is intimate – via pen and paper – and always quick to access.
I take very little care about my hand writing form or accuracy from day-to-day. Sometimes my writing appears neat and orderly. Sometimes, I’ve scribbled so fast it is difficult even for me to read. Once or twice, I’ve simply scrawled a frustrated word or two on one page with a trail of exclamation points!!!!!!! Seeing your penmanship in hindsight can prove very interesting. One friend who receives a letter from her father every week says that sometimes his handwriting tells her more about how his life is going than the words themselves.
Then what?
Let’s say that you’ve kept your journal for a month or two. What might you do now? Just stack them on a shelf? No! Now is the time to turn your journal into a tool to find your voice. Reflect and highlight. About every month, I go back through the last pages with a highlighter pen and emphasize the ideas, thoughts or phrases that strike me as particularly relevant and clear in a way that matters to me. This is not to say that the writing is good or intended for others to read. The purpose is to note those thoughts that are meaningful in your view for your own reasons.
And then, I step back even further and simply read through a few months of highlights. How did my thoughts and feelings evolve over time? What has changed? What has not changed? Often, I note any conclusions or observations in my next journal entry. Sometimes I also find it interesting to look at my day “about one month ago” when I finish a current journal entry. Just for fun.
I only occasionally go back to read previous years. My typical journal notebook fills in three months; so, my reflection look-back period is about 6 months as the new and old notebooks are both fairly handy to find. I will sometimes look quickly over a year of journals as I consider a new year of goals or to compare what I was thinking and feeling at a specific point in time that is on my mind. But that’s not a discipline; it is an instinct to compare situations from a distance once in a while.
Your Journal; Your Friend
As I expressed in ReArchitecting, a journal can become a tool and a friend to help you step back and see the key points that matter to you from above a fog of activity and emotion. Your way of journaling should fit who you are. And over time you can trust yourself to draw helpful conclusions from it in your own way.
I find it rewarding when – once in a while – a thought in my journal comes through my lips in discussion. Then I know I am speaking from the perspective of someone who knows me very well:
With my own, meaningful voice.
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