Keeping a personal writing journal has a powerful way of healing the soul. When writing about what troubles you and all your immediate thoughts on the subject it creates space for solutions to enter your life. When you write down things that excite you it creates an opportunity to reflect back to that feeling and experience with happiness and bliss. Your greatest teacher will become your personal writing journal as you write down your inner thoughts, special events, future plans, successes, difficult challenges, dark thoughts, bright thoughts, major frustrations and life’s loves in your journal. You will discover more and more about who you are in the world and why your life is the way that it is.
Your personal journal can be the hidden key to self-discovery and personal growth. This is your own story told in your own words. Find some personal space and write down anything and everything that is going on in your head and your heart and let it flow on paper. Personally for me as I battled deep depression and felt I could never talk to anyone about this darkness I found solace in my journal. I chose a beautiful leather bound journal.
This is not to say that everything you write will be remarkable, but occasionally you will surprise yourself. Personally for me, as I began to attempt to unravel my mind, answers slowly came to me. More importantly it gave me a sense of peace and was a great release of negative energy. My journal was the destination where I got to unburden myself of my troubles by writing them down. It is never good or healthy to “bottle” up your emotions especially if they are serious and negative. These feelings and the energy that surrounds them has to be released. If you feel you cannot talk to anyone about these feelings, write them down. You will surprise yourself! This unlocks doors to solutions and healing.
Writing and keeping a personal journal can put you in control of your life and destiny as it gives you the clearest insight into where you are going and where you have come from, and gives you the opportunity to change the path you are on if you don’t like what you see. What you have at this moment will not be what you will ever have for eternity. You can discover what is truly important and rid what is poisonous and useless in your life and put you on that path to happiness and bliss. The three most important words I ever heard.. “Follow Your Bliss”
Where do you find the motivation to write a daily journal entry? Good question. Life is busy enough so why sit down and write in your journal? Read these three motivators to maintain daily journaling success.
Perhaps you know some of the benefits of journaling but haven’t been motivated to make it a daily habit. Journaling is the most important action you can take today to increase your success rate, stay focused and maintain a positive mental attitude. If those aren’t reasons enough, then keep on reading.
1. Getting and Staying Organized
Well, journaling is the best time and place to combine some very important daily habits: getting organized in your mind and your daily action plans, visualizing a better life and to reconnect with your inner-self and what is really important to you. Taking time each morning to mentally prepare how you want your day to unfold will set the wheels of focused energy in motion. It will be easier for you to recall your to-do list and top priorities when you’re in the midst of a hectic day if you actually took pen to paper (or typed it on in a word processing document).
2. Mindful Meditating
Daily journaling is a form of mindful meditations. You learn to relax and let go of stressful thoughts when you learn to journal. Whether you write about your diet habits, your feelings toward your annoying boss or how you’d like to build your own on-line business, journaling daily will help you focus on what you really want and discard the thoughts that keep you from attaining those desires.
3. Treasured Personal Time
When you journal daily, you’ll start to reconnect with your inner voice. This quiet voice tends to get overlooked in the harried lifestyles we live. Being disconnected from it will leave you with a sense of unfulfillment. As kids and young adults, we had more time and those quiet times lead to listening to this inner voice. Regain that insight by sitting down daily with pen, paper, you and your thoughts. You’ll come to cherish these moments alone.
Start motivating yourself today to write daily in your journal. Get up and journal in the morning with your morning cup of coffee or tea and discover that this quiet time will be your most treasured. You’ll find your day flowing more smoothly with these daily mindful visualizations, a deeper sense of purpose and organization. What more motivation could you need?
Now is the time to start a gardening journal; as you start planning your garden, start making notes in it. It can be a 3-ring binder with pocket folders, a calendar with pockets, or an online gardening journal. Keep everything pertaining to the garden in it.
Keep your garden designs in it. Every year when you do a new graph for a layout for your garden or one of the garden beds, place it in the gardening journal so you have it for the next season. This will help with plant rotation.
I also make a lot of notes during the season that become a wealth of information for the following years on what to do, or how to change it, or what not to do.
You’ll want to write down the last frost date, how severe the winter was, and anything unusual about the winter. Write down when you were first able to work the soil, as well as when the perennials started coming back to life and the seeds that self-sowed start popping up, germinating. Keep track of bloom and harvest dates, fertilizing dates, and what kind of fertilizer.
The more notes, receipts, seed packets, and pictures you add to your gardening journal the more helpful it will be for the following growing seasons. If you tested your soil’s PH, write down what you used to test it, when you tested it, what the PH was, and any amendments you may have added to it. Note any insect pest damage or critter damage. Take and keep photos of the actual insects, damage they’ve caused, and the course of action to rectify the situation. Pictures of your seed beds, seedlings, plants, blossoms, diseases and anything else you want to photo will be a great help in your future gardening endeavors.
Remember to keep your gardening journal up to date with:
all dates
what you have planted
what you have tried
what has worked well
what needs improvement
unusual changes to the weather
new insects, birds, butterflies
soil amendments
compost
changes, additions, or deletions that you may have made, etc.
Keep track of the nurseries you purchased seeds or plants from. Also any handouts you’ve acquired. Check with your local county extension office for handouts and garden journals.
After all these years I still get excited with each phase of the gardening season and the possibilities it brings. I’m still experimenting and learning something new everyday with all of the new techniques and theories that continually come out.
If some of your plants didn’t make it this year, that’s okay. It happens to all gardeners including me. For reasons we may never know a certain percentage of our plants (flowers, fruit, herbs, vegetables), just don’t seem to make it sometimes. Other times we know why – due to an extremely rainy summer or we didn’t provide for enough drainage, or we had a drought, or a hungry little rabbit that has decided to have it for lunch. Perhaps the bee population had decreased.
Sometimes these things just happen – we can’t predict it, we’re just left wondering what happened. Keeping track of everything in your gardening journal, may provide some clues as to what really did happen and help you prevent it the next season.
Extra Items To Include In Your Gardening Journal:
How you prepared your soil, exactly what you did
Seeds started indoors, when and exactly how you did it
Transplanting dates
Hardening off dates
To do list
Individual Plant Profiles
Fertilizing Schedule
Disease Control
Harvest, dates as well as plants that did well and those that didn’t
Yield Amounts, did you grow enough, do you need to grow more next season
Records of Preserving Your Harvest: drying, canning, freezing, jellys, vinegars
Recipes for Canning, Freezing, etc
Tool maintenance unless you have a tool maintenance journal
Enjoy growing and using your herbs and do take time to sit out in your garden and enjoy the colors, aromatic scents, as well as the birds and butterflies that have taken up residence. While you’re sitting there, make notes in your Gardening Journal. Take care, and take care of your garden!
What if you used a trip diary to record a different kind of travel – a journey into the milestones of your life or the lives of loved ones? Did you ever think that your everyday life is an adventure worth preserving?
We travel for lots of reasons, such as to enrich our lives, to relax, or to visit friends and family. Travel journals are the perfect tool to capture our travel experiences, so we can preserve them and relive them.
Historians use diaries to gain information about the past. A good example is Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. Her father’s restlessness caused the Ingalls family to move across the Unites States, which became the basis of these famous books. A more tragic story comes from one of the most famous journals, The Diary of Anne Frank. The author described a journey that forever left a mark on history.
What do Anne Frank and Laura Ingalls Wilder have in common? Neither knew they were making history when they started their journals. Both of these girls lived extraordinary lives but started out writing about ordinary circumstances. When Anne Frank made her first diary entry, she wrote about her birthday. She did not know that her diary would become a book and historical document.
The words ‘journey’ and ‘journal’ come from the same root, from the French word meaning “a day.” Anne Frank and Laura Ingalls Wilder captured the journey of a day. All those days added up to a legacy.
What if you were to start your journal as travel of a day? Can you imagine what you would have if you wrote one sentence and took a photo of something, every day for one year? Perhaps you start out recording the ordinary, but if something extraordinary happened, it would be easy to write about it since you have already begun your daily journal.
You could concentrate on special events, such as social and family gatherings, trips, family traditions, holidays, or historical moments. Perhaps you could write about tiny trips, such as going to a movie or out to dinner. These may not seem important now, but can you imagine your grandchildren reading what you wrote?
What if you made this a family project? Imagine what you would have if every night before bedtime, your children wrote something about their day? In these days of economic uncertainty, a keepsake like this would be priceless.
If you want to, you may add photos to your journey journal. You can keep them on a CD or DVD and store them in a pocket in your diary. If your journal doesn’t have a pocket page, you can attach a CD sleeve to the inside back cover.
You can start your armchair travel anytime. Your birthday, the New Year, or today. Remember, you are capturing history, and history does not make an appointment. So why not start now? You never know what will happen tomorrow.
Oscar Wilde wrote, said, “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” Perhaps your journal will not make for sensational reading now, but later, when the memories are cold and forgotten, you will have created a legacy.
Blogging has been around for years now and a good percentage of netizens have already tried their hand at blogging. Others have grown out of it, while others have invested time and energy that their blogs have become a source of income. If you have never tried blogging, you might want to consider the benefits of the sport of online literature that is blogging.
Blogging is typically used for publishing an online diary. Composing a journal entry and publishing it online for everyone to see can be rewarding especially when you know that there is someone out there who is interested in your life, and is going through something similar in their life. It is also a form of networking with other bloggers, and if you join a blogosphere (blogging community), you will receive comments from people who enjoy blogging or reading blogs. It is a great way to make new friends online.
Although journal writing is what most people do with blogs online, its purpose is certainly not limited to that only. Over the years, companies have added a blog section to their websites where they can update their customers with the latest news from their end. This is very useful and informative, as customers are able to be informed at their own will. Companies don’t have to spam their clients with newsletters, as blogs are equally useful but less invasive.
Blogs are used by scholars who enjoy publishing the latest information about their chosen specialty. Blogs are generally set up in a way that they can be socially bookmarked if the particular post is a recommended read. Visitors can also comment on every post. Blog layouts are also very simple to browse, so it is not limited to the computer literate population.
A fun way to blog is to fill up a site with collaborative content. Friends can all have user accounts, and everyone can blog whenever they want to. The contents are made public to each author’s circle of friends, and everyone can contribute either a post or a comment.
Although many blog for fun alone, a handful of bloggers out there provide content to the public to earn an income. They earn an income through advertising on the blog space. They have to provide a good number of posts every week and have to keep the content fresh for regular visitors. It takes a lot of time and thought to post such entries but it can truly be worth it in the end.
Any ideas what journal articles are? Have you tried to write one before?
Scientists and engineers who want to present original work often do so by publishing them as journal articles in peer-reviewed publications. These types of writing tend to be similar to formal reports in content, although they tend to differ in length and format.
Because of the limited space that most journals can accommodate, submissions will usually need to be abridged from their original report versions, making some rewriting as well as a good software proofreader necessary.
Summaries will need to be either descriptive or informational with descriptive elements. Other summary formats usually won’t serve the need to learn about the topic while taking up little space.
There is little to no room for appendices, so you might need to get rid of them.
Forget about tailoring the material for multiple audiences. The limited room makes having that unlikely. As such, try writing for as general an audience as you can handle, keeping in mind that the majority of people perusing it will likely be your peers in the industry, students and members of the academic community.
Basically, journal articles are usually picked through recommendations from professors and other influential individuals in the field, so look towards those people when hoping to get your work published in one. Different types of journal articles can be seen in these types of publications, including letters, research notes, full articles that range from five to twenty pages, supplemental articles and reviews.
Ways to re-commit to your Diet.
1) Re-commit. Take a minute to look back and remember why you decided to diet in the first place. Perhaps it was out of a health concern or perhaps you decided to go into this out of wanting to shed a few pounds. On a blank sheet of paper write down what ever action brought you to start a diet.
Next ask yourself to remember the feeling that brought you to this resolution. What where you feeling when you decided to do this? Where you feeling fear, disappointment, concern? What ever the reason or feeling you had at the time, revisit that and re-focus your efforts.
2) Start a Diet journal. Starting a journal of any sort can be a daunting task but can be a very powerful tool to add to any diet. A journal can help dieters keep track of food by adding accountability. I can think of at least one VERY well known diet plan that uses accountability as it’s prime tool in the battle of the belly fat.
The two things you’ll need in order to make a diet journal work are honesty and regularity. You must be honest enough to write down what you’ve had and you must make entries with regularity in order to make sure you’ve stuck to your.
3) Drink lots of water. You hear it all the time but it’s a fact, water is good for you. Some studies have also shown that people often mistake thirst for hunger. And we all know that hunger is a dieter’s worst enemy. That said, the next time you think you might be hungry, stop for a sec and be sure. If not it may just be a question of easily extinguishing this urge with a glass of water.
I might also add to be sure it’s water. None of this sugar substituted iced tea stuff, just plain old water.
4) Read the nutritional information. Whether you’re on a diet or not, reading the nutritional information is always a good idea. In fact I dare say that a dieter who does not read the nutritional information is akin to a financial expert who refuses to read bank statements. After all how do you know what you’re eating if you don’t even know what’s in it. Burying your head in the sand might make eating that tasty treat easier in the short term but you owe it to yourself and your diet to read what’s in it.
I sure hope this helps, they’re just a couple things I’m trying out myself so I decided to share with all of you as well. Till next time.
Happy Dieting
What you do with your journal depends on many things.
You may be using the materials for personal development – to understand yourself better through the objective recording of your story. Or you may use it as a unique resource for your fiction writing, recording stories drawn from life – your own and other people’s. You may write down conversations overheard on public transport, or in the pub, or at the doctor’s surgery. And you can turn all this into a story without end – writing this in daily or weekly installments until it grows into a volume of anecdotes with its own themes and enhanced with images, cartoons and objects whether discarded tablet packets or sea-shells.
From either of these kinds of journal you have ideas and notes which will make your fiction and your autobiographical non-fiction authentic. And this will mark out your writing’s unique selling point – its individual ‘voice’.
When you come to review your materials, of course, other issues become significant.
OK. So you’ve had an interesting life; your journals are waiting to be mined for information; your family and friends are clamoring for ‘the book’. What next?
Autobiography is now an industry and – as with any other kind of writing – certain rules underpin success. Even if you are thinking of self-publication, consideration of these can make all the difference between a book people want to read and a book that stands neglected on the shelf.
Your reader – the audience – is as ever in pole position. Who are you telling your story to? This will dictate what words and expressions you employ. Would you, for example, want your mother to read what you write for your friends?
And then, there’s the thorny issue of what you include and what you leave out.
The trick lies in the vexed issue of goal-setting. A recent visit to a writers’ group left me convinced that not one among the seven people who read their ‘stuff’ out had the least idea about goal-setting, either for their literary career or for their individual project. Planning for this group was anathema and so was review. People wrote what came into their heads with no idea of where to go with it. The resulting prose excerpts were shapeless, unstructured and cliché-ridden. Their material was raw beyond belief – although not irretrievable. And their goal, if any, was to enjoy their writing. So – in that sense – they had achieved one goal. And yet – in spite of all this – they still hoped that publication would happen.
Money is one of those things that makes most of us crazy! You either have lots of it or none of it. It’s seems that we give this commodity a lot more power than we should, to the point that it actually controls our lives and base our beliefs and values systems on it. Sometimes, there comes a time when we really need to think of money for exactly what it is, a state of mind. Our attitude towards wealth and money seems more important than any other aspect in our lives. For some it is even more important than anything else in the world. Which, from my point of view seems very sad indeed.
Let’s think about it. How we think and feel about money seems to determine how we live in society these days. If we have lots of money, and a high paying job, then it seems logical to think that we are better off and positive about our future and in turn, others in society are likely to be attracted or think highly of us. However, If we don’t have a great deal of money, don’t have a job, or have the security of a permanent job, then we are much more inclined to develop disorders such as Depression and such as well as the opinion of other in society looking down on us for not ‘Keeping up with the Jones’.
To instigate change in our thoughts about money, either having or not, we really must start with changing our mindset and our predetermined opinions we have towards others around money and social prosperity. From change comes the power and determination to adjust and really see the real value in life.
Here are some things you may like to do for those situations where you feel uncomfortable when you spend money, or feel depressed about your financial state, or at any other time when you need to keep positive of your outcome in life.
Gratitude
Be Grateful for what you have. This may sound basic and like something your parents used to say to you when you were little, but, to be honest, it works. Take a notepad and write down all the good things that you have in your life. Don’t concentrate on what is lacking and don’t focus of material possessions or bank balances. Think of things like: Your Best Friend, the love of your dog, a roof over your head, the birds that fly around in the garden. the heat that makes your shower hot, the family members you have in your life and so on. Once you’ve done this, write a list of the things that someone from across the other side of the world might have to feel grateful for in life. Compare the two lists and really think about the differences in your answers compared to the answers in the other list. Chances are you will have a lot more to feel grateful for than you realise.
Self Esteem
Whenever you feel bad or negative about money, try to see it for it really is. Whenever you receive your paycheck or you get that payment deposited into your bank account from a client sale, why not pause for a moment and think to yourself “I’ve earned this money by working hard for it but I will not take it for granted. The money itself is only a reward for my personal efforts, it is not an acknowledgement of my status in the world.” To become successful is not just about how much money you have, it can also be about your reputation in your line of work. For me, being successful in my business is more about how many satisfied clients I have, rather than, how much money I have in the bank. My reputation in the business world and how far I have come in my journey is much more important to me than having money to flash around.
Money Journal
Creating priorities is essential to find the money you need for your own self-care. To decide what your priorities grab a note pad and create a list with these categories:
Amount Spent (e.g. $8.50)
On What (e.g. Books, Lunch, Songs or Apps)
Feelings (e.g. Felt guilty afterwards, Felt good to read to magazine)
Once you have written down all the things you have spent for one month have a look at the patterns and try to figure out what to spend your money on in the future. For example, I don’t enjoy buying my lunch but I love buying apps for my PDA, so I make my own lunch and save money every week to buy a $20 music voucher so I can buy more of the things I like. By paying attention on how you feel when you buy things you can rearrange your resources to better suit your real needs and feel good about the things you buy instead of feeling guilty or feeling bad.
Intuition
Next time you want to buy something you want, why not get in the habit of asking yourself:
Do I really need this?
Why am I buying this?
If I buy this will I still have enough money to pay for…?
Give yourself time to try to hear your inner voice of wisdom. Asking these questions will trigger your intuition and help you when you’re feeling unsure if you should buy that latest item or not. If you think about it before you act, you can think about the effect it may have if you buy it or if you don’t. It may leave you short for that power bill you need to pay next week or it might be okay to buy it this week but you may not be able to buy the following week.
When it comes to money, I agree it does make the world go around but I feel that there is way too much emphasis on how much of it we have and the importance that some of put on money as being seen as a successful person. If you have tips, stories or comments then I’d love to hear from you.
People have been keeping journals and diaries for a long time and for some very good reasons. Journaling has many benefits that can impact a person’s mental health, creativity, and memory. If you don’t keep a journal, perhaps you should consider it. Here are a few reasons why journaling every day is a great idea….
To express your feelings. Every human being experiences emotions and some of these feelings can be hard to handle. If you’re going through a rough time or need an outlet for your emotions, writing in a journal can be a big help. It can help you process difficult feelings like loneliness, depression, and anger, and also serve as a record for your more positive emotions. If nothing else, writing about your feelings can help you sort them out so you can accept them and move on. It’s almost like free therapy which can be really helpful.
To record your life. While many people record their activities via social media websites such as Facebook, there’s something homey and quaint about recording one’s activities in a journal. For one thing, you don’t need an Internet connection to do so. (That is, if you’re using a paper journal as opposed to an online service like LiveJournal.) All of your experiences will be chronicled in a book that you can take down off the shelf so you can remember the good times (and the bad times, if you wish).
To keep track of inspiration. Writers and artists can really benefit from journaling. If you’re out in the world and inspiration hits, you can jot down your ideas or even do a quick sketch so you can work with the material later on. Trying to remember creative fragments (i.e. a few notes of music, a phrase for a poem, bits of a dream, etc.) can be difficult, but if you have a record of them, you’ll be able to use them at a later time.
To save mementos. You don’t just need to draw and/or write in your journal. You can also use it as a kind of scrapbook and paste photos, postcards, ticket stubs, and more in it. This is an especially good thing to do if you take a special trip somewhere or go to a great concert. It will also make looking through the journal really enjoyable in the future.
To get creative. The best thing about journaling is that your journal is yours. You can get as creative as you want with it; no one will judge you for how you keep it or what you put into it. You can write with colorful markers or soft pencils. In all caps or small letters or a mix of both. It’s up to you. If you want, you can even create your own journal if you have cover stock, paper, and access to a binding machine. This can make the book really special and you won’t have to shell out money for a store-bought journal.
Journaling every day can be beneficial for many reasons. It can help you process feelings, record life events, and encourage you to be more creative. Start keeping your own journal today.