by Kimberly Love | Self Awareness
Are you interested in living a life that you designed? Are you ready to be in control of all of your decisions and be accountable for your life? Are you curious how journaling can help you?
A self-aware life is a life that requires you to know who you are and what you want. You need to know your preferences, your personality, and how you want to live. Journaling ideas can help you with your journey to self-swareness.
Different people have different motivations and goals. You have your own personality and approach to life. If you’re not tuned in to who you are and what you want then it’s quite difficult to live a life that makes you happy and leaves you feeling excited, motivated, fulfilled, and challenged.
It’s not always easy to live a self-aware life. Denial, fear, and other emotions can get in the way. Let’s take a look at how journaling can help you. This is one habit that can support you to stay self-aware and to improve your personal awareness.
What Is Journaling?
Journaling gets a bad rap. People feel like they are back in junior high school keeping a diary that they have to hide from their siblings. However, you’re an adult now and writing down your feelings, thoughts, and plans is cathartic and clarifying.
How Journaling Ideas Can Help You
There are different approaches to journaling. You might sit down every morning and write for five minutes or three pages. A better approach might be to pose specific questions for you to answer. For example, “what are my strengths?” You can then journal to answer that question. You can focus on that question for one journaling session or twenty. You get to make the rules.
When you write down your answers to your questions and get your thoughts on paper, it is easier to get clear. Some people prefer to meditate on questions and that can work very well if you’re able to focus. However, if you’re like many others, your thoughts become muddled and a bit chaotic when you try to meditate. You start off thinking about your strengths and before you know it you’re making a grocery list or thinking about that attractive co-worker. When you have to write down the answers it can be easier to stay focused.
How to Get Started Journaling Ideas
Choose the tool that’s best for you. You’re going to have to think a bit about your preferences and personality type. Would you prefer to journal on a laptop, smartphone or mobile device, or would you prefer to journal longhand on paper? Would you prefer to journal first thing in the morning or at night before you go to bed? (These are the most reflective times of day for most people.)
Gather your materials, choose the best time to journal and start making it a habit. Journal once a day and begin answering the questions that will help you learn who you are, what you want, and where you’re taking your life.
by Kimberly Love | Self Awareness
The more you know about yourself, the better. Here are three self awareness activities for you. When you know what you’re capable of, you can make the best choices for your relationships, career, and life. For example, at a very simple level, if you know that you are not a detail-oriented person you can create systems to compensate for that attribute, particularly if being detail oriented is essential for your job.
Knowing you’re an introvert can help you with your relationships, and understanding your values and opinions can help you find the best friends and co-workers to collaborate with. In short, the more self-aware you are, the happier and more supported you may feel both professionally and personally. There are a variety of tools and exercises you can leverage to improve your self-awareness.
#1 SWOT Assessment
A SWOT assessment stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It’s a personal assessment that you can create yourself. In general, you create four quadrants on a piece of paper and you begin to list your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in each quadrant.
For example, a strength might be compassion and a weakness may be laziness. An opportunity may be your current employer and a threat may be your financial situation. You can also skip the O and T portion of the assessment and focus on your strengths and weaknesses. This assessment will help you learn more about yourself, your present situation, and help you make thoughtful plans for your future.
#2 Who Do You Admire?
Consider writing down or journaling about someone that you admire. Think about why you admire them. What attributes do you find appealing about their personality, their strengths, their values and their achievements?
Amongst their qualities, what attributes do you feel like you already possess or wish to possess? If journaling isn’t appealing to you, you might consider creating a video diary and talking it out. The point is to put some thought into your answer to this question. It can help you find clarity about yourself.
#3 What Do You Believe?
Consider your beliefs on everything from God to money. What do you believe and why do you believe it? You may find that some of your beliefs are no longer true and that you have new or different beliefs. You may also find that some of your beliefs are firmly engrained in who you are and they’re very important to you. Again, you can journal your response to this, you can think about it and meditate on it, or you can create a video or audio journal. You choose the method that works best for you.
If you want to get to know yourself better, it can take a little time and effort. Life gets busy and we become active in the lives of those around us. It’s easy to put your own thoughts, needs, and wants aside. Yet if you take some time to become more self-aware, you’ll be a happier and more fulfilled person.
