When The Going Gets Tough Use Your Daily Journal

I am a great fan and advocate for the daily journal as a part of the personal development and self awareness journey. I have cultivated journaling each day as a habit and over time have developed an array of very useful tips for assisting to keep the daily journal interesting and stimulating.  There could be nothing worse for me than to have a habit which is mundane and boring.  And I coach people using the daily journal as a key element to attract and maintain life success.  I am even in development phase for a commercial product around a daily journal.

So it came as a great surprise to me this week to discover that 6 days had passed since I had made an entry in my daily journal and 10 days had passed since I had written about my thankfulness, gratitude and appreciation for life. It happens that I had been feeling a bit low in mood and unmotivated over the last three days and yesterday I decided to explore that in my journal.  I opened up and noticed how many days since I had made an entry.  Well, I thought to myself, be your own coach!!

So I went through my daily habit, entering in my journal what was happening and working through how to move forward, going over my years goals and writing about how I was working towards them, listing my gratitude for what I have right now and what is coming to me in the future. Lo and behold, it worked, got me back on track and I decided on a couple of processes to help me through this low motivation phase.  My mood lifted almost immediately.

For the moment, my daily journal will consist of decisions on the actions that I am taking towards my life goals and I will check back over that each day to see my progress. With that inspiration, I completed 2 of my 3 tasks yesterday and one that was not on the list but the time was right.  Today I am well on the way with the 4 that I committed to for this day.

Learning? Sometimes it helps to just go back to the basics and I know that the daily journal is one of those basic but essential habits.  Oh and just for a bit of fun I had a look back to where I was this time last year.  Happily, much progress has been made and some of my big life decisions are coming to fruition right now.  Attract success – you betcha!!

Bring on 2010!

I wish all of my readers, entrecard droppers, friends and family everything that they desire in 2010 so bring it on I say!  And make the very last thing that you do in 2009 and the very first thing that you do in 2010 be a celebration of the very best of this year that we are leaving behind.  Just take a moment to acknowledge with gratitude your own achievements, your own special and unique talents, strengths and gifts.

Do it quietly alone or do it with your friends – just do it.  And then prepare to use everything that you are and can be to make 2010 the very best ever for yourself and the whole Universe.

Happy New Year!!

Decide For Yourself About Your Personal Development

Yesterday I was reading an article on using gratitude as personal development and the advice given was to focus on gratitude once as week as that is said to be more effective than doing it more frequently. To be honest, this surprised me immensely as anything that I had previously read and done suggested showing gratitude as a daily habit that will get you into a permanently grateful space.  I have personally followed this advice and passed it on through my coaching and through my articles.

Now this got me to thinking about how to work with personal development ideas and activities and I realised that it is a very personal thing. What works for me, may not work for you.  Then I realised that there are many divergent and contradictory ideas in books, videos, articles and so on and like many things in life, understanding personal growth can be like herding cats.

Just as you get one idea in the cage, it slips away while you get the next one!! However, it does not have to be that way.  I know now that what I do is to use my skills of inquiry and inform myself through reading, videos, CD’s, youtube and any number of interesting media.  I then give some time to considering how I feel about everything that I know on a subject and decide for myself what I believe or how I will participate in a particular activity or with an idea.

So it works for me to journal on personal development and gratitude every day, it gets me in the right space and is a constant reminder of all of the good things in my life. It is just one of the things that I do to set up my day in the way that I intend it to go and to assist me to hold the attitude that I desire.  I intend to use gratitude daily and I encourage you to decide for yourself what works best for you.  Just do it from a place of knowledge and information.

An Excercise in Gratitude

I was recently tooling around with Entrecard and read a blog (unfortunately I did not keep a record so that I could acknowledge it) and the writer was going to blog on what they were grateful for every day until Thanksgiving. Now since we do not have Thanksgiving in Australia, I decided that I would do something slightly different until Christmas Day and create my own gratitude list.

So I am writing on Facebook about what I am grateful for every day until Christmas Day. And I would love it if you would join me and add your own gratitude list.  Lets create a few great vibrations for peace and goodwill on earth.

My thanks to whoever owns the blog, who had the good idea.