Honesty is The Best Policy

Last week’s post covered how journaling during the goal-setting process can help you properly track your progress, be mindful of obstacles, and keep you committed on the way to your achievement. This week, we’ll talk about a second, perhaps an even more powerful portion of journaling. Keeping a journal presents an opportunity for personal growth that comes with comprehensively keeping track of your goals. Here are some things to write about in your Goals.com journal so you can gain a sense of the significance of your journey.

Be completely transparent

At one point in our lives, all of us have spun something in a positive light to others when talking about something ongoing that isn’t going the way we want it. It could be a lack of progress in our goals, it could be about a job we don’t like, or about how we gave up on something that we once were passionate about and spoke of at great lengths.

When you keep a journal, you give yourself the opportunity to become completely honest with yourself. If you can’t properly express yourself to anyone about your ambitions, taking the time to grasp how you’re feeling and writing them down is therapeutic and helps establish further clarity.

Whether attempting goal is making you incredibly happy or deeply frustrated, it’s best to express yourself in a journal because it can easily be confided in, even if it can’t respond to you. If you don’t disclose more emotional feelings to anyone else, it’s enough to acknowledge your feelings in a journal. Once your genuine feelings are written down, you don’t deny or sugarcoat anything to the person who matters most, yourself. This is how you remain grounded when striving for your goals.

Write about what scares you

If we acknowledge our frustrations, it’s also very important to write about your fears on the path to your goals. Many of our goals involve genuine risk, but we do them because the fulfillment that comes from achievement ultimately outweighs the fear. The fear is still very present, you just have to learn to work through it. When you acknowledge your fear, you must also allow thought process to take place so you conquer what scares you. Not only that, but you get that sense of satisfaction when the words in your journal transform into positive action.

Write about setbacks

If goals were always easy to accomplish, then we wouldn’t find the deeper purpose behind them. Goals aren’t easy, and the reason they’re abandoned so much is that we face setbacks while attempting to turn our dreams into reality. While we acknowledge them, we shouldn’t let setbacks wither away the efforts we made or the excitement we’ve generated.

Write about momentum

Sometimes it’s hard to decipher what feels better; actual progress or the feeling you get from making the progress. If you make any progress towards your goal, say, if you wanted to become a lawyer, it deserves to be acknowledged and celebrated. If you’re overwhelmed with happiness by the strides you’ve made, make those feelings clear in your journal. Give yourself the affirmation of your capabilities and use it to aim higher and higher.

Embracing your feelings in a journal and acknowledging every peak and valley will help you realize just how capable you are in the face of adversity, and help you realize how great of a resolution you have. For each goal you achieve, you’ll recognize the familiar feeling of the struggle, and that desire to throw in the towel, but you’ll remember how you pressed on in spite of it all.

Not only that but with a journal, you have a written record of both your good bad days, the building of your momentum when challenged and an entry of when you reached your goal. When facing that feeling of recurring struggle while approaching a new, increasingly ambitious goal, you can look back on your past successes to help accomplish the goal in front of you.