I'm going to talk about starting a success journal as a tool to achieving the life of your dreams. With so many demands on your time, who honestly wants to add yet another task to their already hectic schedule? But I'd like to point out that keeping a journal can actually be more of a time saver than you probably realize. I've been an avid believer in the power of keeping a journal for most of my adult life. But the truth of the matter is that I haven't always been as dedicated to the process as I'd like to be. I've probably started journals over a dozen times in the past 30 years only to stop and tuck them away until the next time I get the encouragement to start up again.
If you already keep a journal, then I'd like to commend you. It's not an easy thing to keep up. I used to try to coax myself into keeping up my journal by purchasing really nice journals that felt luxurious in my hands. My thinking was that I had to feel good about going to the journal to capture my thoughts and ideas. But truth be told, I probably wrote less in the fine leather bound volumes than I have in the more reasonably priced composition books that you can pick up for $1.00 at your local drug store during their Back To School sales. I must have over a dozen leather bound volumes with maybe a month or two of entries before abandoning the project.
I've tried buying expensive pens and multi-colored pens to give myself the ability of writing topic specific thoughts in respective colored ink, but that was extremely impractical. It wasn't until I started keeping morning pages (a method of simply writing just to write) that I discovered in the book entitled The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, that I really stuck to my daily updates. I must have over a dozen of those black and white composition notebooks completely filled on both sides of the pages because the writing was simply just flowing from my thoughts to the page.
The most rewarding part of having the journals is that you can go back and rediscover things that you've been through in your busy life. You can capture those fleeting thoughts on paper so that there is a record available to you for future reference. Journals can help you organize your life and even become a time management tool to keep you on task. The uses of a journal as a tool to achieving succes in life are unlimited. I can now go back and relive various periods of my life, whether they be good times or bad, and see what was going on. I can draw conclusions from all of the data and maybe even get some insights as to the root causes of some of the things that seemed to escape me at the time. They say that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Do you have a good record of your own personal history? I do, and it's taught me a lot, not only about myself, but about those I surround myself with.
The key to successful journaling is that it doesn't become a chore. If you feel restricted or confined by the process you won't keep at it. Trust me on this, I've started and stopped so many times that I can't even begin to count. If you make it as much a part of your daily routine as your morning cup of coffee or brushing your teeth, it will someday just become automatic. But it has to be embraced with comfort before you get to that point.
I like to write, and I suppose that this blog was born out of my love for writing. I've started and stopped other blogs too, but this blog has given me the purpose of helping others. I am truly interested in this as a process, and also as a learning experience and to a lesser extent, a therapy of sorts. I am capturing thoughts and ideas with a common theme all designed to help others to reach their goals and to start living the American Dream. I do this for myself as much as I do it for others. I just hope that somebody else will benefit from these posts. Even if I can reach only a handful of people, I've succeeded in what I set out to do; inspiring others to reach for the stars and realize their own best life today.
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