You should never underestimate the power of keeping a written journal, there are many ways in which a journal can help you to better succeed in life. You can use it to help yourself associate your feelings with your thoughts and your thoughts with your feelings and this is what is most important in order to succeed in life. Your journal can help you to find out what motivates you in life, develop new skills, learn new strategies for dealing with life in general, write down ideas and plan them through and find out more about the person you are by asking questions of yourself and writing down answers to those questions. A journal is an essential tool when it comes to learning about ourselves and if we want to be a success in life, and knowing about ourselves is a must. While we may think, we know ourselves very few of us actually do. By keeping a journal, we begin to realize all the little things we do not truly know or understand about ourselves.
Develop your intuition
Your own intuition is your greatest asset and if more people developed an ear to listening to what we are actually saying inside then more of us would know the way to go and how to successfully achieve what it is we want out of life, simply by following our own inner guidance. Your own personal journal can be a great way of developing your intuition and listening to yourself and what lies within you, record all the little things that you might let pass you by, such as flashes of inspiration, premonitions or hunches about something, basically anything that your intuition is telling you.
Keeping a journal is essential because inspiration can strike at anytime, some of the greatest inventors and thinkers kept journals including one of the most prolific inventors in history, Thomas Edison. One of the most helpful things a journal does is give us the ability to look back on records and refer to them, for example if you encountered a problem and overcame it in the past and a similar problem crops up then you can reflect back and apply the same solution or adapt it for a more positive outcome. Your journal can remind you of past achievements and this goes a long way to building self-confidence and helping you succeed in life when things get tough and can help comfort you.
Learn from the past
A technique which is very popular and one which keeping a journal can help you accomplish is the “best-better” technique, this technique can be applied to any situation that crops up in life and simply relies on you looking back on the situation and finding what you liked about it or what you experienced from it and then deciding how you could do better next time or how you could have better experienced from it. The key to recovering from past mistakes and succeeding in the future is to learn from your mistakes but remember to focus on your strong points rather than your weak ones. If you concentrate more on your weak points rather than your strong ones then very often this leads to you unconsciously reinforcing them which then lead to low self-esteem and of course having a low self-esteem isn’t positive. It is only by building on your strengths can you increase your self-esteem and your self-esteem is the crucial factor to understanding your weaknesses and correcting them and therefore building a positive outlook on life which greatly increases your chances of success. So by noting down your experiences in your journal you are able to look back on them and gain a clearer understanding of yourself and how you feel which ultimately determines how you think and how you think determines how successful you are in life.