Three Ways To Activate Your Journal
Journaling is just the first step. It’s cathartic even if you burn the pages, but writing is game changing when you consider the long game. When journaling becomes a sense-making companion that you can always lean on, the challenges you face seem a little more navigable. Your perspective is more clear and your decisions are steeped in self-awareness.
By creating a consistent writing practice, your stacks of journals become your council of invisible advisors. In Napoleon Hill’s Think And Grow Rich, he explained a thought experiment where he hosted imaginary meetings with famous people from history. He used their perspectives to help him solve challenges. In our case, replace the famous people with your journals.
Maybe you’ve been journaling for years, but have you ever gone back to your old notebooks? It’s one of my favorite past times, especially when I’ve hit a rut creatively, or need a fresh take on something.
When you write what’s on your mind, you enable a conversion. Thoughts in your brain become physical things on the page. Your writing motion causes pencils or pens to leave behind lead or ink.
These are physical assets. Your assets.
Think of them as Lego blocks to build things. Many of them won’t change the world, but a few could kick start something special.
Here are three ways to activate your journal pages:
Encapsulate - Take a look at your old journal pages. Circle or highlight interesting words or phrases. Don’t think about what they could be, just encapsulate them and close the book.
Pick Two - Come back a few days later (important), and pick two words or phrases that you identified in the previous step.
Explore - Two separate objects usually have a space between them. The space can be big or small, but this is where potential and opportunity reside. This step requires being okay writing down bad ideas. You have to be willing to be a little silly. Why? Because divergent thinking requires a release of knowing the answers. The fun part is exploring the possibilities. Really think about how these objects are similar, different or even how they could be combined to make new things. These are your personal writing prompts. Some will turn into themes that will help you navigate the biggest decisions of your life.
Try it today. You may surprise yourself.
