Journal Consistently Even When Life Gets in the Way

To know what makes us 'tick,' we must first notice the 'ticking.'

Self-reflection is a great way to notice the 'ticking' and it's critical for understanding ourselves. The more we can reflect, the deeper this understanding will become.

This understanding of ourselves can:

All because we take the time to make sense of our thoughts, feelings and emotions. You really can't put a price on truly knowing yourself.

A journaling practice is perfect for this because it allows us to get everything out so our mind can stop racing and we can stop, pause, reflect, and come to truly understand what makes us 'tick.' 

It's a powerful tool, but doing it consistently is hard and what often happens is...

"I start journaling & then it slowly falls off my daily action list....but I want to make it a habit!"

 We'll start strong and then our journaling practice slowly falls to the wayside as life gets in the way. Before we know it, it's been months since the last entry. But here's the thing...

If you're trying to build a long-term, consistent journaling practice, life will ALWAYS find a way to get in the way. At some point, you'll run into:

It will happen. Life will always get in the way, somehow, and it's the death of consistency, but there are many solutions to make sure...

When life gets in the way of your journaling practice, you do it anyway and continue to reap the massive benefits of deeply understanding yourself ,instead of it slowly falling off your daily action list again and again. 

"I saw you've been journaling for over 8 years...what's your secret?"

The secret is I made journaling about every day part of my normal behavior.

There is no longer an internal struggle about if I feel like journaling or not.

I am a person who journals about every day, period.

Getting to this point took many journal entrees, so the key to get there is by making failure harder than succeeding.

Here are my 4 most highly recommended kick-starters to turn daily journaling from a desired behavior into your normal behavior (Tip: the more you implement, the better...)

1) Join a Community & See Others Journaling Everyday

A community can provide support and accountability, but the biggest advantage to joining a community around a habit you're trying to build is constantly being around people doing your desired behavior everyday.

This is one of my favorite "hacks" for creating new habits. 

Community is at the center of being human and there is an innate desire to belong and conform. It's one of the most powerful tools marketers and politicians use to convince us of things, but we can use the same tactic on ourselves to create new habits we want to adopt.

2) Create a Rock-Solid Ritual & Make Journaling Automatic

If you don't have a solid ritual for staying consistent when motivated to journal, you probably don't have one for staying consistent when life gets in the way, either.

All habits follow the same structure: Trigger > Routine > Reward, so another key to building long term habits is identifying powerful triggers and powerful rewards and then inserting the new activity between them.

This will reduce the willpower required to do the activity and it will start happening without you consciously thinking about it.

3) Create Commitment with Incentives & Increase Journaling Motivation

Money and reputation are two of the more powerful incentives I've seen to increase motivation to do something, but with journaling, you can also use an adventure to create commitment.

Ideally, you use as many incentives as possible to help keep yourself going when willpower and motivation are low.

Money and reputation are easy to implement and you can even do them together.

Tell someone close to you you're going to pay them every time you miss a day journaling. It doesn't even have to be a lot of money, a dollar would do. You can of course get more extreme and publicly pledge you'll donate a large sum of money to an organization you hate if you don't journal every day.

Using an adventure is a bit trickier, but looking back, this is what gave me motivation when I started out. I took a trip around the world for a year and I wanted to document it every day with journaling. Knowing I'd want this as a totem for the rest of my life made it easy to take the time every day to journal.

4) "Lower the Board" & Maintain Your Journaling Consistency

Walking across a narrow board suspended 1,000 feet in the air would be intense, but lower the board to ground level and most people will be able to walk across it with ease.

If you want to successfully build a complex habit, build a simpler one first, and then add complexity over time. 

In other words, "lower the board" and start simple so we can focus on consistency instead complexity when we're building our new journaling habit.

Instead of imagining all the things we want our journal to contain, we focus on staying consistent, first, by keeping the process simple.

As we are building the habit of journaling every day life will always get in the way and if a journal entry takes 10 minutes to complete, we are much more likely to find time to fit it in than if our entries take an hour.

Once we have built the habit of consistency, then we can "raise the board" and start adding complexity to our journaling to better fit our needs for the practice.

Soon, consistent journaling changes from a desired behavior to your normal behavior

It's different for everyone, but as you journal consistently, at some point you'll transition from "wanting to make it a habit" to it being a habit.

This is when we can start raising the board and personalizing your journaling to what's important to you. This can allow the exploring of a fuller, richer understanding of yourself and what makes you tick, as you document your experiences and your processing of them along the way. 

The documenting and processing allows the possibility to see what you are becoming and change, if you don't like the direction. 

Further, gaining a deeper understanding of yourself can be a beautiful journey of self-discovery, which can lead to living a more authentic life as you do the work to figure out who you really are.

Finally, consistent journaling becomes true self-reflection—the greatest art of progress.

I'm fascinated with journaling and every time I meet a long-time journaler I love to hear about their process because it's so unique to each person.

However, no matter the process, or the form it takes, journaling is a type of personal reflection and self-analysis. 

It's in these moments of introspection where we change. 

The next thing I like to ask long-time journalers is what their favorite thing about journaling is...

Here's What You Actually Get in Journal Anyway

Journal Anyway is a daily accountability program to help you build a long-term, consistent journaling habit.

What They Say on Journaling

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