Why Successful People Keep a Journal?

If you would ask any successful person what’s one of the secrets to their success, half, if not most of them, would likely say they do journaling. While journaling is an activity that’s pretty simple, business success journaling focuses on you as a manager and leader. So the question here is, how can journaling help you succeed?

Let’s find out.

Does Business Success Journaling Help You Become a Better Leader?

For many years, a lot of famous names have adopted business success journaling. Great philosophers of old such as Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius, Plato, and many others all kept journals. In fact, Aristotle once said that an unexamined life is not worth living.

According to a 2010 study by Briana Murnahan from Eastern Michigan University, writing a diary or keeping a journal can actually reduce anxiety. Because of an improvement in mood and mental health, one can become more productive. Being more productive is one of the formulas to succeed in your chosen field.

Aside from that, there are other business success journaling benefits one can get from the activity, as per career psychologist Denise Taylor. Here are a few:

• Retain Ideas

This activity can help us record ideas so that they won’t be forgotten. When you list down your ideas, you won’t forget any of them as you have a record to refer back to.

• Set Goals

You can record your goals so that you won’t lose your direction. You can write down both your short-term and your long-term goals.

• Track Progress

You can also track the progress of your goals through your journal. If you record your progress every day, you know how to evaluate yourself.

• Find Clarity

Lastly, writing in a journal about your feelings can actually make you know more about yourself. This helps you find clarity about your own thoughts.

Three Things to Consider Writing in Your Business Success Journal

We have already debated some of the journaling benefits that can help you grow your business. Now, we have to learn how to incorporate business success journaling accordingly. What exactly can you find in the journals of successful people? While there no clear rules about how to journal, there are a few guidelines that successful people share when they do their own journaling.

Let’s go over some tips or things to consider when starting with business success journaling.

• Goals

One of the things that successful people will always add to their journals is their goals. Successful people, especially entrepreneurs and businessmen, always put heavy emphasis on their goals because they know they need an action plan. By writing down goals, they always know where they’re headed and work on plans on how to get there. They would usually write down their goals for the long run, their goals for the short term, and goals for the day.

• Emotional Baggage

Everyone is bound to have some emotional baggage one way or another since we are human after all. The thing to do when we have emotional baggage is to find a way to cleanse them. Journaling is one of the ways to take away the emotional baggage by releasing them through writing. Successful people would describe emotionally negative events and express themselves through writing.

As mentioned in one of the studies above, doing this can help lessen anxiety and uplift moods. Successful people all know of this, which is why they do it. Doing this will also allow them to get to the root causes of their emotional issues, which are something they need to do in order to find solutions.

• Thoughts and Reflections

Aside from just your negative experiences, it’s good to write down all of your thoughts and reflections. It is very important to reflect and meditate on yourself from time to time as this will give you a new perspective on life. However, the main roadblock to reflection would sometimes be not knowing how one feels. In order to know, one needs to have a higher sense of self-awareness. With self-awareness, one will really see things from a clearer perspective. The way to do that is through writing down your thoughts. With your thoughts in writing, you can also have something to refer back to if you feel confused or lost somehow.

Also, you’ll notice through writing your daily thoughts, whether or not there are some wrong points with your mindset. As the right mindset is one of the most important things to have, it’s important to know if there are aspects that need to be tweaked.

Conclusion

So many successful leaders swear by this activity as one of the key things that have helped in their success. This alone tells us that it is definitely a good activity that should be encouraged. If you want to be successful in whatever field you’re in, you need to do some of the same things that the ones who already achieved success do.

In fact, business success journaling is something that you can do no matter what field you’re in. Journaling is something that will help you achieve better mental health, better productivity, and overall success. To know how to start, check out the three guidelines that we’ve provided above.