Every year when the new year rolls around, many of us resolve to focus on our wellbeing. Given the long hours every entrepreneur faces when scaling their company, physical health undoubtedly must be prioritised. However, in reality, it’s often difficult to know where to start. Whilst we may have the best of intentions, they’re soon abandoned along with the intention to start each day with a green smoothie.
Keeping a journal is the one resolution that will enable you to take practical steps to achieve this focus on your health and wellbeing, as well as enabling you to make your goals more than just pipe dreams.
Journaling helps you face issues
When you journal, you focus your thoughts and realise the importance of the task at hand. Journaling forces you to have a candid conversation with yourself and really face things that you were ignorant about. Once you face these things and see them written in front of you, it’s much easier to do something about it. For instance, you may be overspending or you may have been following the wrong marketing strategy and journaling can enable you to explore alternative methods.
It’s a positive habit
It’s as easy to pick up as picking up a pen and paper to write down you goals and takes very little time. On average, it takes two months before a new behaviour becomes automatic and after this period of time, it can become permanent. By incorporating this daily practice it’s not only a conscious activity that helps create clarity and commitment but it produces positive benefits, actions and attitudes you want to acquire.
Express yourself
Expressing yourself in a journal can bring your thoughts to the forefront and allows you to reflect on your mistakes and possible solutions. Journaling helps get thoughts on paper that would otherwise stay in your mind and for all you know – you might have a breakthrough business idea and without journaling you might forget it. Given that we retain approximately 10%of what we see, about 40% of what we see and hear and 90% of what we see, hear, and do – having a journal will escalate your growth as an entrepreneur as well as in other areas.
It helps you brainstorm
When we write, we see things from different perspectives. Journaling assists you to brainstorm and come up with creative solutions that you may not have necessarily thought of before. Hence writing will allow you to act on these decisions and help you achieve your goals more effectively.
Journaling increases your gratitude
Many multinational companies ask their employees to write what they are grateful for every month after they complete a project. By writing about the positives, you foster more optimism. With a journal you experience gratitude, giving you a medium for daily recovery and re-nourishment which, in turn, helps you find clarity in your cognitive abilities. Journaling gives intentional alignment to actions. When you encounter a crisis, your journal either may have a solution or help you to find one through past experiences.
In our busy lives, it’s hard not to let our mundane miseries take over, forcing us to lose focus on our goals and stop us from remembering to be grateful for all that we have. The mental clarity that comes with using a journal, coupled with making space for meaning in your day, will have a hugely positive impact on your entrepreneurial journey both in the short and long term. It’s just a case of remembering to prioritise what is most important to you and your business, making time for it and putting it in to practice.
