A New Week | May 16th, 2022
The unspoken truth about journaling for leaders in transition (new parents included ;) )
My husband and I host 3-4 journaling challenges within our bravespace community every year. Ambitious leaders, high-performers, executives, founders, new moms, and dads come together to find a moment of stillness while being embedded in a container of people on the same journey. It's beautiful. And as I am getting better at hosting those 30-day environments, the more profound are the breakthroughs for my people.
But what makes journaling so powerful?
Here are five (of the many) benefits of journaling that I observed with myself and with the over 250 participants we had over the last 1.5 years:
If we can't be present with ourselves, we erode trust in ourselves. Journaling gives us space to find the truth, confidence, and connection to ourselves daily.
The same questions might result in entirely different answers a few months apart from each other. Don't think that you won't need to upgrade parts of yourself over time because you have done the work before. Journaling keeps you on a path of felt and recognized personal growth and behavioral patterns over time. If you're someone who chose additional therapy or coaching, journaling will significantly improve the depth of the conversations with your therapist/coach.
Journaling is like exercise for the mind. It builds muscles for self-inquiry and objectivity with yourself. If you're in a transition in your life or are going through steep learning curves in your professional leadership, journaling will help you remain focused, committed, and organized.
Choose journaling questions that put you out of your habitual thinking zone. Our own choices of self-inquiry can become deceptive and feed only the parts of us that we can currently see. Opting into a journaling challenge, finding shadow work journaling prompts, asking your coach to send you some, or researching some in your desired area of growth makes this a challenging experience that you probably need.
Journaling offers us the chance to get better at articulating ourselves, our needs, boundaries, and mental and emotional state. Looking inward creates mindfulness, calmness, and somatic (felt) awareness and can thus improve how we engage, lead, and connect to others.
What would you add? What do you love about journaling, or why is it hard to build this daily habit?