Have you ever looked back on a personal journey and wished you had somehow recorded the event? In times past, you might have kept a written journal - or even taken a few pictures, perhaps of a successful weight loss journey.
More contemporary ideas would be a scrapbook, slideshow or digital journal. But for ease of use, flair and a uniquely beautiful way to record your journey would be by developing your own digital health journey lookbook.
Journalling your past, present or future, is a great way to see your progress over time. It’s good for the mind and an excellent way to order your experiences, feelings and thoughts.
Decide what your journey should be about. Is it a weight loss project you are about to undertake? Perhaps it’s just one aspect, like a nutritious weekly or monthly menu. You might opt to journal your exercise program or even create your own to share with others.
If you're a photographer, you might develop a recipe lookbook and showcase your meal creations. If you are undertaking a makeup and fashion makeover in order to boost your own sense of development and growth as a person, why not record your journey with a layout of clothing and makeup before and after stories?
The important thing is to try and focus in on one aspect of your overall health and well-being journey. Don’t try and cover everything that goes on in that journey. Decide on a focus and begin to develop your plan.
Once you have decided on the focus of your well being Lookbook, it’s time to gather your tools. Using a magazine-style template from the Flipsnack Digital Lookbook range of customizable flipbook templates, you can decide on how to lay out your well-being journey.
Flipsnack provides a range of free and paid for magazine style templates, each with its own unique layout and options for customization. You can fool around with layout and design and switch templates if you need to.
Set your goals. Perhaps it is to begin a physical fitness regime. You could record your running times, write your choice of running gear or perhaps photograph the routes you are taking.
You are going to want to keep a camera handy. Words and images are the two obvious features of any digital lookbook. Decide on a style for your images and on the software you are going to use to produce your own, original and compelling images.
Canva is great for editing and producing unique images. It’s a free tool that can modify colour, tone and more so that your images are crisp and highly original.
Remember to make the journey personal. Use the Lookbook to tell your story and catalog your milestones. You might later turn the digital diary into a tool that others could use for their own fitness journey.
If you are using a template for your digital lookbook, you can begin to create the milestones of your well-being journey, one page or section at a time.
How you map out your journey is important. You want it to be logical and sequential. But there is a myriad of ways to do that.
Your journey might take the form of photographic before-and-after snapshots, sprinkled with brief diary entries. You may decide to reveal the outcome of your journey upfront - sort of put the conclusion at the beginning and then retrace your steps.
If you are focusing on a superfood or mental gym diet, you might show the evolution of your cooking skills. Show your first, second and third attempts at mastering a particular dish - or a range of healthy snacks.
Add flair to your cooking and memorialize your journey by adding photos of the meals you create to your health journey Lookbook.
I did this when I decided that 2018 would be the year I perfected bread making. I began putting together images of each loaf I made. The goal was not only to make good bread but to provide me with a healthy mental exercise that was separate from my daily working life in front of a computer.
I journalised my well-being project with images and a collection of recipes. Over time I could look back over the images as well as the changes I had made in the recipes I was using in order to produce the perfect sourdough for our family.
Recording it was also therapeutic. Not only was I doing something healthy for my mind and body, but I was also developing new skills. I was able to look back and see the journey - a great reward that only served to boost my well-being even further.
As the project develops, you may discover that your original layout no longer works. Unlike print media, you can switch to a different layout.
As I mentioned above, part of the mental health benefit was being able to look back on the journey I had created using a Lookbook.
Your journey is your story. It is a chance to record your positive affirmations. It can be rewarding, emotive and it can also be enduring. One of the things you can do with a journey mapped this way is to not only memorialize it - but pass it on.
What if you took your newly created recipe collection, fashion lane-change or mental health project and produced it in such a way that you could share it with others.
Digital lookbooks are highly shareable and can quickly become the modern day keepsake of your journey that others can benefit from.
You can share your before-and-after journey with friends, send out your amazing food and recipe collection to family and even use it as part of a broader resume of the things you have done.
Whatever way you use it, creating your well-being journey is actually part of the well-being journey itself.
Like making a piece of furniture, creating some masterpiece of pottery, learning a new skill or modifying an old habit, the record of our journey can be just as strengthening as the journey.
Success Coach, Business Development Consultant, Strategist,Blogger, Traveller, Motivational Writer & Speaker