Journaling Therapy

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Following on from last week’s miview sharing Dame Renee Fritchie’s great journaling questions, (read it again here) I am keen to stay on the theme of ‘How Can I Motivate Myself?’ before moving on to the motivation of others

 

To be self motivated, you first must know what motivates you and the best tool I can recommend for this is regular writing and the best place for this is in a journal.

 

I was interested to hear that journaling also gives you many other fantastic benefits that include stress reduction, personal growth, increased creativity and understanding yourself better.

 

Like everything else that works, it’s not new – Andrew Carnegie, Theodore Roosevelt, Captain Cook and Winston Churchill are among a plethora of great men who found journaling invaluable.

 

Health Benefits.

Psychologist James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin suggests that regular journaling greatly benefits our health by strengthening our immune cells. Other research indicates a decrease of the symptoms of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis. Writing about your stressful experiences can act as your own counsellor and helps you come to terms with them, which reduces their impact on your physical health.

 

Stress Reduction

Writing is a left brain activity and while you are keeping that part of your brain busy, it frees up the creative right brain to explore expand and capture your thoughts. Writing reduces the clutter in your head and helps you focus. By enabling you to clear some space, release some of the emotional turmoil and detach from the past, this process creates room for more connected thoughts to emerge and offers a deeper level of learning and reflection.

 

Personal Growth

Your writing can become a fun and humorous activity; the process can move you towards what you really want to do, be and have. This can result in ‘breakthrough thinking’ as you explore dreams and fantasies often leading to a better understanding of yourself. By exploring what you want out of life and writing it down, you will find better focus in your actions that leads you to the results you want.

 

When you understand what motivates you to take action, you give yourself some of the  answers to my initial question, “How can I motivate myself?”

 

You may discover that you are motivated by an article about you and your business in a publication while someone else has a totally different outlook, they may strive to be considered parent of the year by their child.

 

So your attention then becomes focussed on what you want making you more likely to get it. What you want then becomes your reward – and when the reward on offer is something you really want, you will be fired into action. If you don’t really care about something or are not invested in the outcome, then you’ll expend little real effort and probably not get the result you don’t really want in the first place!

 

I will leave you with some words from Clive James who said,

 

“Just be yourself – as long as you have a self to be”

 

Go journaling, become inspired to write and you never know what dreams you will uncover!

 

Until the next time…….

 

Kind Regards,

Jane

P.S. One more thing…..don’t keep us a secret, please share this email, or via facebook or tell your friends. Thank you.

 

Jane Quinn

Director

 

miworld consultancy limited

miworld, miresponsibility

 

È   0783 454 2686

jane@miworldconsultancy.co.uk

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