Writing in your journal brings many benefits and helps you to explore your thoughts, feelings and emotions privately but have you considered you can also use your journal to look back and reflect.

For me, I feel the power in your journaling is not just about using it to release your thoughts but to use it to find patterns and similarities in your behaviours, monitor your progress (or highlight your lack of progress!) and show you what needs your attention now.

Reflection is an important part of life, where you will find learning from the past and consider how to use this to help you moving forward.  Your journal is the perfect, private space to do this!

Writing in detail about your experiences and your thoughts surrounding them, provides you with the groundwork for reflecting and learning about you.  We do so much on autopilot that we can often miss things that need our attention, so reflecting regularly will bring these to the surface so you can start to understand things that have happened, how they happened, how you react to things and what you can learn from past experiences.

Self-reflection is where the personal growth and development occurs, so when you self-reflect in your journal do so without judgement from others, with honesty and with compassion. 

Ten journal prompts to help you self-reflect:

When do you feel most powerful?

What helps you to feel calm?

When do you feel most in control?

What are your unique talents?

What is your happiest memory and why?

What have you learned this month?

What has been your favourite moment this year and why?

What has been your greatest lesson in life to date?

List everything that makes you happy right now

Who do you believe you are as a person and how is this aligned with who you want to be?

Give yourself some time to read over past journal entries and give yourself some written feedback to help you process everything more deeply.  When reading, make a few notes on any physical and emotional reactions that come up for you.  Write about these reactions, how they feel and consider where do you think these originate from?

Look for any recurring phrases, behaviours, emotions, similarities and anything else that comes up more than once.  What could these be telling you?

Reflection raises your self-awareness, but what you do with the reflection determines how you move forward in life.  Do you reflect, do nothing and stay as you are, or do you reflect, take notice and take action from your learning?  The answers are there in your journal, you always have the choice on what to do with them.