Today I'm going to be talking to you about mindful journaling. The reason I'm talking to you about journaling and mindful journaling is that last week I was at a mindfulness course and we did all the usual things practicing mindfulness, did some mindfulness meditation, we learned about mindfulness and the brain.

But the thing that I really loved is the different exercises we did on journaling. They got us to do different activities - some of them were one minute, two minute, three minutes long and I liked that. They timed us and it actually had a really profound effect on me. 

I'm now thinking about what I'm going to be doing in 2020, next year, and I'm a bit clearer about my values about my goals, what I want to work on. And also I'm clear on what I don't want to work on. So this is why I recommend you have a go at doing this as now is a great time of the year to work on such goals. 

I'm going to give you three tips to get to do some mindful journaling.

The first one is to actually practice a little bit of mindfulness.

You can even start with as simple as one mindful breath and this is one of the activities we did. I’m simply encouraging you to take a deep breath in and release a slow, smooth breath out. You can use your nose or your mouth - whatever feels best for you. The goal is just to be really present - even for one full cycle of a breath. It can help you feel a bit more present, a bit more focused, a bit more in the here and now, and a little more reflective.

That's my first tip - do a little short mindful exercise - it could be as short as one mindful breath. 

My second tip is that when you're doing mindful journaling, you need to time yourself.

I loved the fact that they have a little timer and they told me to do two minutes, do three minutes, you can have five minutes. You know you’re gonna have one minute and then at that time you just stop journaling. I like that approach because journaling can actually end up being very open-ended - if you feel you have to journal for 20 minutes each time, you may think ‘I don't have the time I'm too busy’. By having this timer it gives you this sense of security - it's got this frame to it. And within that you do the best you can and then you can go back and read it.

Another little bonus tip is that once you've done that one, two, or three minutes of journaling, you actually go back and underline any key points that you found - any key reflections - that made a difference too and again you can time yourself. So let's say I did 3 minutes of journaling and you have a timer, after that, set another timer for a minute and go back and see which were the key points that you that you want to focus on.

My third tip for today is to actually use journal prompts.

During this course, we started with something quite funny. They started with a prompt which was a little sentence

“what I find annoying is” 

And then you allow yourself to just get it all out of your system and write down whatever you find annoying.

Another nice one is to write down the names of three people that you really respect, three people you really look up to. They could be famous people - people like the Dalai Lama, or it could be someone like an uncle or aunt, brother or sister, my mom or dad, someone you really look up to, someone you respect. 

Using that you can actually start thinking about what your values are. Because the people that we look up to and respect - they give us a bit of a sense of what's really important to us - our values. And then, from our values, it's a nice way to start reflecting on where our goals are and what we're going to work on to achieve them.

These are my three tips for mindful journaling:

1. Use a bit of mindfulness at the beginning

2. Time yourself when you are journaling

3. Use different journal prompts

Think about things like what annoys you, what you enjoy, what your ideal day would be like, what your ideal year would be like, what would you do if you had a magic wand and you could just wave away all your difficulties, challenges, limiting beliefs - what would you do.

And then you can time yourself - one, two or three minutes. Then spend a little bit of time going back and reading it.

So that's my tips for you today - I hope you enjoyed it and I’ll see you again soon!

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