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I’ve written about journaling before. It’s helpful in many different ways.

I’ve used it to journal my gratitude, my physical pain, issues with conflict, and my insights. 

You can read my post about journaling gratitude here: How to Improve Your Life Using a Gratitude Journal.

Journaling can also help you achieve your goals because it will force you to think about them, consider the why and how, and explore deeper into the situation so that you can examine all sides of it.

Writing is a powerful way to capture your ideas and get them into an organized, actionable form.

Eight Ways Journaling Can Help You With Your Goals:

• 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. You can read my post about goal setting here: The Power of Effective Goal Setting.

• 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’s important to know why your goals are important to you. Ask yourself what the purpose of your goal is and how the goal will benefit you. It’s also important to break down your goal into an action plan.

• 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. Using a SWOT Analysis tool can be helpful (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats).

• It Helps Keep Your Goals Top of Mind – When you see it written down, you’ll want to put any action steps you’ve developed in your journal into your calendar for scheduling. You can see my post about using a planner/schedule here: Using a Planner To Be More Productive and Set Priorities.

• It Helps You Improve Goal Setting and Achievement – Each time you intentionally set goals, define action steps to achieve them, and schedule them into your schedule, you are setting yourself up for being able to achieve them. You can read my blog post about setting intentions here: How Setting Daily Intentions Can Get You Better Results.

• 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 writing in it each day, it’ll work great for helping you become more accountable. Keeping the promises you make to yourself is more important than you might think. You can read my post about building new habits here: How to Build New Habits with Six Simple Hacks.

• 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. You can read my post about reviewing your progress here: You Need to Do This to Accomplish Your Goals.

• It May Be Inspirational – Depending on the journal you use, 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 steps from your own success for a project and turn it into a course to inspire someone else.

Conclusion

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.

It can help you spot behavior or decision patterns that you may not otherwise become aware of.

You can download a free journaling workbook below. It includes a daily journaling prompt to help get you started.

Just enter your name and email below.