How Journaling Can Help with Achieving Your Goals

I am currently working as a Maths teacher in Oman. I am also an amateur part-time author. I keep a regular journal to put down thoughts – sometimes about current events, often reflections, and occasionally ideas for short stories, books or poems. When I say ‘regular’ I mean at least once a week; sometimes daily, sometimes three or four entries in a day! SO why keep a journal?

Journaling can help you achieve your goals because it will force you to think about them, consider the why and how, and delve deeper into the situation so that you can examine all sides of it. Read on to find out how journaling can help.

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  • It Forces You to Write Down Your Goals – When you start a journal, it basically is a way to force yourself to document your goals. Whether you write them down on paper or you use technology to get it all down doesn’t matter. Once they’re written, they are ready to tackle.
  • It Makes You Consider Why and How – As you enter data into your journal, you’ll be forced to face the why and how of your goal. This is especially true if you write down a goal and focus on it in your journal.
  • It Enables You to Examine the Opportunities and Threats – When you are focused on goal making with your journal, you’ll also explore opportunities and threats coming your way due to your goals. It helps you avoid roadblocks in advance.
  • It Makes You Develop Steps for Success Based on Your Goals – When you see it written down, you’ll want to notice and pull out any steps you’ve developed in your journal and put them in your calendar for scheduling.
  • It Helps You Improve Goal Setting and Achievement – Each time you intentionally set goals, define steps to achieve the goals, and perform them, you are setting yourself up for being able to improve your skills.
  • It Provides Accountability – Even if no one else is reading your journal, a private journal can help you become accountable to yourself. If you develop the habit of looking at your journal each day and put something else in there each day, it’ll work great for helping you become more accountable.
  • It Provides a Permanent Record – Having a permanent record of the things you’ve done in your life, whether it’s personal or work, is a beautiful thing. Hardly anyone has a perfect memory, so you’ll maintain the lessons learned better with the record to look back at.
  • It May Be Inspirational – Depending on the journal, you might even be able to take the information inside and compile it into a real book for others to read to inspire them. You might also take from it steps for your success for a project and turn it into a course to inspire someone else.
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Journaling is an excellent way to work toward achieving all your goals. It will even help you make better goals because the process of entering facts in your journal will cause you to see them in a more logical way that is more useful.

Are you a writer? Do you keep a journal?

I am currently writing about my life here in Oman, and the challenges of working in an International School full of ignorant people – and I don’t mean the students!!!

What types of journals should we keep?

I end to keep as a sort of diary with reflections from the past. When I find something of interest I can go back to see how I dealt with something similar in the past.

So here are some ideas for jornalling.

Ten Types of Journals You Can Create

When you begin journaling it will likely occur to you that having more than one type of journal might be the best way to keep everything organized better. When you have more than one type of journal, you can simply go to the specific journal to work on one issue at a time or keep something organized so you can make better decisions.

1. Bullet Journals – This type of journal is useful for anyone who has lots of to-do lists, loves using a pen and paper, and who enjoys goal tracking. Your journal should have a table of contents that you create as you add to the journal so you can find things. You will use symbols, colours, and lines to make your bullet journal. You should be able to understand at a glance what is on the page.

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2. Vision Journals – You may have heard of vision boards and this is essentially it, except it is a journal that helps lead you to your vision. The way it works is that you set up the journal to have only one goal per page. Then you can write words, add pictures, or draw something that enables you to make plans to reach that goal. When you do reach the goal, be sure to go back and add the date of achievement.

3. Line a Day Journals – Basically this journal is what it is called – you write down only one line a day. You will simply write in the journal a short line about what you did that day. It should be only a sentence or two at the most, and should not take up that much space in your journal. Some people like using a calendar and a pen for this.

4. Classic Journal – This is simply a diary, and you can write whatever you want in it every day. It can be long, short, or you can skip days if you want to. The classic journal is just like the diary that you maybe kept as a child. You write whatever you want in it daily.

5. Prayer Journal – This is a particular type of journal where you essentially act like your diary or journal is your higher power. Write God your prayers instead of saying them. Write them down so you remember them and can look back on them.

6. Dream Journal – Some people really like tracking their dreams because they believe that dreams provide signs for life. If you want to track your dreams, you have to train yourself to write in your dream journal every morning while you still remember the dream. Write about the dream and then research what it means and write about that too.

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7. Food Journal – Write down everything you eat every day. Some people like to include the calorie contents and so forth. It can also help to write down why you eat it, how you felt about eating it, and things like that.

8. Travel Journal – A wonderful way to remember your travels is to keep a travel journal. Some people like making one for each trip so that it is easier to remember. You can write your thoughts in your journal, but you can also attach tickets, pics, and memories.

9. Gratitude Journal – This is just what it sounds like. It is a journal where you record each day what you are thankful for and grateful for. Nothing can be negative in this journal because it is designed to help you think more positively.

10. Project Journal – This is a handy journal to keep, especially for anyone who continually works on projects. Keeping a journal of each project you work on that records actions taken, results, and data, will help you improve every project but will also help you look back on this one with excitement.

If you want to journal to help work through a problem, keeping specific journals for different things is an effective way to go about it. It is also a wonderful way to store your thoughts and memories for the future in a more organized and useful manner.

Why Is Mindfulness So Important to Creativity?

You’ve probably heard at some point in your life that being mindful is an essential part of a healthy and happy life. But you may be wondering just why this is. And this is because being mindful has the power to change many different aspects of your life.

Mindfulness Helps With Mental Health

When you spend your entire life running around, worrying about all the things which may be happening in your life at present and in the future, you’re likely to run into mental health problems. When you aren’t mindful of yourself and how you feel, you become stressed, which can have numerous effects on your mental health. To take care of your mental health and lower your stress levels, it’s crucial to be mindful of your environment and how you feel and respond. This will help you be more at peace mentally and keep your brain feeling fresh. 

Mindfulness Boosts Creativity

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Not only does mindfulness help preserve your mental health, but it also nurtures your creativity. This can be especially important when you face challenges in your life, as creativity is a part of learning to overcome challenges. According to various studies, mindfulness has even been discovered to improve brain function and memory, which can also help an individual navigate the twists and turns of life more easily. And those who were more mindful in their everyday life didn’t tend to suffer the same memory loss issues later in life as those who weren’t mindful.

Mindfulness Keeps You Healthy

Besides just mental benefits, mindfulness also has several physical benefits for your body. It works to improve immune function so that you can stay healthy and fight off infections more quickly when you do get sick. One study even discovered that being more mindful increased enzyme activity in the body which slowed down the aging process (Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress, Epel et al.). This means that mindfulness is scientifically a part of leading a longer, healthier life.

Conclusion

Mindfulness is an integral part of leading a happy and healthy life, no matter how you look at it. Mindfulness helps to keep you mentally sane, boosts your creativity, and works in several ways to keep you physically healthy as well. So, if you want to live your best life, it’s time to start being more mindful today.

Other thoughts on Creativity

How Multitasking Hurts Your Concentration

Have a lot on your plate to get done for the day? It might seem easier to get it all done if you multitask. But the truth is, multitasking hurts your concentration big time. Read on to find out just how bad it is to multitask when trying to concentrate on getting things done.

Your Brain Can’t Multitask

According to the American Psychological Association, there is no such thing as multitasking when it comes to your brain. Although you may think you are doing multiple things simultaneously, your brain is constantly switching back and forth between tasks. Thus you will tire faster when you multitask than if you focus on one task at a time.

Task-Switching Takes Time

Besides just tiring you out as your brain goes back and forth between two tasks, this task-switching takes time, which is valuable for meeting deadlines. You may not notice it, but it can take up to three minutes for your brain to fully switch over to a new task. And if you are taking three minutes between each of your tasks, this can quickly add hours you can’t afford to be wasting.

Thoughts Aren’t Allowed to Flow

It isn’t just the time and energy wasted. When you are constantly demanding that your brain switch subjects, this doesn’t allow your brain to think very deeply. When you multitask, you’re much more likely to accomplish two tasks of lower quality than when you focus on each task individually because your brain hasn’t had the time to think through both tasks completely.

Creativity is Stifled

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Additionally, when your thoughts aren’t allowed to flow, this stifles your creativity. And depending on your line of work, this creativity could be essential to creating and innovating. It will also make it more difficult to overcome roadblocks that might come up as you work. And if you can’t solve challenges while you work, you may find yourself stuck—wasting more time than if you hadn’t tried multitasking in the first place.

Overall, although there are many reasons to multitask, your brain actually can’t focus on two things at once. This process of switching back and forth between tasks is both a time and energy waster. Plus, it doesn’t allow thoughts to flow, thus stifling your creativity and increasing the chances you’ll come to a problem you can’t solve. This is why you should absolutely stop multitasking during the times when you need to concentrate.

Just write. Or paint. Or make pots. or become a film star!!

6 Ways You Can Develop Your Creativity

I love the creative mind! I love to read books in most genres and by many authors. In the last couple of weeks I’ve read three Agatha Christie novels, featuring Poirot, Tommy and Tuppence, and one stand alone called ‘They came to Baghdad’ – nothing changes…

I have three of my own self-published books featuring Fairy Hanny, available on Amazon, though I will be moving them somewhere else soon; I am fed up with Amercan Oligarchs taking control of the media.

So this week I will have some thoughts on creativity.

Do you keep a journal?

Having a creative mindset can help propel you forward both in your career and your personal life. This reason is why it can be so disheartening when you struggle to develop your creativity. Below are six ways you can develop your creativity to be more successful in life.

  1. Build Your Confidence

Often creativity is stifled when you are afraid or embarrassed to tell others what you are thinking. A huge part of creativity is sharing and further developing your ideas with others. This is why you should work to build your self-confidence if you want to develop your creativity.

  • Have Creative Time

If your schedule is so full of activities that you don’t have time to sit and think or time to create, of course, you won’t be creative! Help develop your creativity by setting aside time each day to be creative.

  • Brainstorm

Brainstorming is a great idea to get your creative juices flowing. You can brainstorm anything, from latest ideas for your free time, new date ideas or even how you want your dream home to look—the sky is the limit! Sit down and start filling that paper with ideas!

  • Try New Things

Nothing gets creative juices flowing quite like trying something new. Is there a class at the gym you have always wanted to take? Go for it! Or maybe you want to vacation somewhere new? That’s an idea too! Anything that will make you step out of your comfort zone is great for your creativity.

  • Spend Time In Nature

Nature is one of the best ways to get inspired and start feeling creative for free. Take some time each week and sit in nature or go for a walk after work each day. You’ll be surprised at the ideas you produce while just being outside.

  • Journal

If you want to develop your creativity, you should consider journaling regularly. Keeping a journal helps your thoughts to flow and helps you overcome problems and think more creatively. Try to write a journal for 5-10 minutes each day.

Wherever you may be in life with your creative journey, there is bound to be something on this list that sparks your creativity. You don’t have to use all these things to help your creativity develop, but if you manage to incorporate them all into your life, you may just be surprised at how easy being creative is! So don’t hesitate and start developing your creativity today!

Swifty’s diet tips…have a great weekend

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  1. Wear big clothes.
  2. Eat less.
  3. Don’t eat burnt fish!
  4. Bacon is sane.
  5. Eat banana skin so nobody falls over.
  6. Kale looks good on a model railway.
  7. A steak tastes better and is less chewy than a stake.
  8. Fairy cakes should be ordered by Gnomes.
  9. Fried lettuce burns
  10. Elephants should be consumed one piece at a time.
  11. Eating shellfish is selfish.
  12. It is difficult to follow a recipe in the dark
  13. Recipe books make great door stops.
  14. Celery sticks, so be careful.
  15. Voiding your bowels before a meal is best done in a lavatory.
  16. Chicken is a good substitute for coward.
  17. Oranges and Lemons add colour to a religious stoning.
  18. Earl Grey and Cannabis make a lovely High Tea.
  19. Donuts should be devoured via the end of the alimentary canal.
  20. Raspberries are a great dish for liars.
  21. Raspberry Pi is not edible, even when served with microchips.