On Keeping a Money Journal - Easy Way to Manage Your Money

Having a tough time keeping track of your money? Keeping a journal is an easy way to follow your spending and make changes to your spending habits. Learn how to efficiently use a money journal to better
organize your finances.

On Keeping an Achievement Journal

Why So Many People Fail - By: Keith Shaw

One life strategy that I recommend and reinforce, with my clients and the readers of my world-wide newsletter, is to have a written list of well-designed objectives and goals for everything and anything that they want to achieve in their life.

It may be their health goal, such as to lose weight. Or, their goal may be to stop smoking cigarettes to improve the quality of their life and save a ton of money as a result.

It may be a communication / relationship objective, such as better dialogue and increased positive, quality time with their spouse and children. Or for some it may be to mend a broken relationship. Or they might have a desire to undertake a humanitarian purpose such as helping and teaching others. In fact, in How To Get What You Want, When You Want It, I teach and show you this success strategy of how to develop your clearly defined goals, step by step.

There are numerous studies that prove the value of journaling to write down and keep track of your thoughts and goals. A research study sponsored by the Ford Foundation discovered that:

The Art of Keeping a Journal

Journal keeping is basically without rules. It is an uncensored invitation to cut & paste, sketch & chart, and to visualize and unravel every great and small thought. At its most basic it is a decision that your life has value.

Just listing your experiences and endeavors can reveal incredible things and encourage you to work for the nearly impossible, the rigorous, and the unseen. Recently, during a course on INQUIRY, I was asked to make a list of one hundred things I didn't know. Here a simple list became a prospect for the unknown and an introduction to something new. As Henry Miller states, "Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery."

17 Tips on Keeping a Journal

1. New to keeping a journal? Start with writing, "Today, I am grateful for.....", and fill in the blank with what you are grateful for.

2. Write in your journal freely. Do not worry about how it looks, or even grammar and spelling errors. Write how you want, what you want, and where you want.

3. Writing a word, sentences, paragraphs or pages, journaling whatever you have to say that day, is just the right amount to write.

4. Set your journal where you will see it everyday, i.e., on your nightstand, at your desk, where you have coffee. This will help to remind you to journal.

Journaling For Personal Growth - The Benefits of Keeping A Journal

Journaling For Personal Growth - The Benefits of Keeping A Journal

Keeping a journal helps to crystallise your thoughts and give you insight. The simple act of writing your thoughts down can help you to understand what you're feeling and why you feel that way. Journaling helps you to know yourself better and can be a vehicle for personal growth.

Why Journaling Works

When you write, your mind automatically slows. Writing your thoughts down helps you to become more aware of what you're thinking and what's important to you.
Journaling helps to change your perspective. When you read and summarise what you've written, it helps you to step back and look at things differently.

Keeping a journal can lead to self discovery because it helps you to identify beliefs that hold you back and dreams that you have put on hold.

Your journal is a safe place to express your thoughts, feelings, ideas and questions about life. It's somewhere you can be totally honest and a safe place to explore your thoughts.

Journaling is an effective, powerful way of venting your feelings. Once the words are out of your head and on paper you'll be able to see more clearly. Expressing your thoughts will give them shape and meaning and help you to identify what you have to work with.

On Keeping a Journal - Where to Begin

The keeping of a personal journal has been a pursuit of human society for many hundreds of years. In times past men and women of learning, studiously kept a record of their days, their achievements and their dreams. We owe a great debt of gratitude to each one of them as we have gleaned much insight into the lives of those in times past from many of those journal entries.

For some people, the keeping of a journal is a natural extension of their everyday lives. How many of us have lifted the family Bible to discover small snippets cut from the newspaper, flowers pressed between the pages, envelopes with letters or pictures tucked away safely for future generations to discover? I certainly have found such treasures in the most 'ordinary' of books on the shelves of secondhand book shops and at garage sales. It always comes as a surprise and delight to discover them and then I feel a certain sadness that somehow these treasures have ended up in the hands of a stranger.

The unexpected gift of these objects has been a richer understanding of our desire to record and keep important memories and items and while tucking these treasures into the pages of a book isn't exactly journaling, it is a component of this amazingly creative and satisfying pass-time.

There are a few basic skills when learning how to journal, some of them are: