Create the Life You Want through Journaling

I love my life. I have a supportive husband, great kids, and adorable grandkids. I live in my dream home that my husband and I are slowly renovating. I am active in my community and feel connected to a large network of friends.

But lately I've been restless. My business is growing steadily.  We have the time an money to travel and do the things we've always wanted. Still, I sometimes wished for something more fulfilling. I just didn’t know what that might look like.
 

Journal for Personal Growth
 

When I finally voiced this thought on Facebook, a friend told me to begin journaling daily. At first, I struggled to journal. Then I began to describe my restlessness and desire for something with more substance. I journaled about the jobs I've worked over the years, describing which tasks had made me happy and which I avoided.
 

The more I wrote, the more I discovered I wanted something more creative. At the same time, I also noticed the times I was most happy was when I was surrounded by others, learning and teaching. So, I dusted off the old "It Should Be a Dog's World" endeavor and am once again designing merchandise for that ecommerce site. I have also started painting.  No dreams of becoming a great artist!  This is purely for pleasure!  But it satisfies the creative part of my soul. And within a few weeks of starting this process, I knew I'd found the new path I wanted to pursue—bringing women together for growth, development, building relationships and FUN!
.

Journal for Self-Discovery
 

Journaling can improve your life in so many ways. But one of the most important benefits is that it helps you discover yourself. You learn more about what you like and what you don’t. You begin to understand how you’re wired and what you want to create more of in the world.

But that’s not the only thing that journaling is good for. It can also help you set new and exciting goals. Maybe, like me, you’re stuck in a rut and wondering what the next step is. Maybe you feel overwhelmed and want to get clarity before you make your next move.

Journal to Brainstorm Solutions
 

You may already be clear on what you want to create more of in the world or know your goals. But you’ve encountered obstacles when you’ve tried to pursue what you want or you’ve faced a significant setback.
 

Journaling can still be helpful for you. Often, writing out what you’re experiencing can lead to new breakthroughs that you hadn’t considered before. This is because journaling encourages you to see your situation in a new light.
 

Use journaling to chart a different course, adjust your sails, or lean into a new adventure. You just might discover something new about yourself or the world around you!

Practice Makes Perfect - How Brainstorming Improves Creativity

Most people, when they hear or think of creativity, think it's only important to people like musicians, artists, photographers, etc. But that isn't the case. Creativity is essential to each and every one of us. Thinking creatively allows us to find new ways to solve common problems, among many other things. If you want to know how to boost your creativity, one of the best ways is to practice and improve your brainstorming skills.

What do you think of when you think of brainstorming? More than likely the first thought that popped into your brain wasn't anything to do with using it as a technique to hone in on your creativity. Usually brainstorming is associated with business related things. Remember those terrible meetings where everyone shouts out ideas and someone jots them down on a whiteboard only to erase them later for being unusable? Brainstorming doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, it can be a fun way to work on developing your creative side.

Those awful meetings did get one thing right: the first thing you need to do is let go of the self-criticism and self-judgment. Whether that be about creativity (I don't have a creative bone in my body) or brainstorming (I don't know how to brainstorm) or both, you have got to let it go or you're not going to have an open mind to be able to think clearly. Once you've done that you can move into the brainstorming phase.

For your actual brainstorming session, grab a piece of paper and pen and get ready to draw it out. Something like a simple mind map will work. That might mean drawing a big circle in the middle of the page and then connecting smaller circles to that. The big circle is going to be the main focus point (for example a problem you currently have) and then all the little circles connected to that one are going to be the different ideas/solutions as to how to work that problem out.

Not a fan of mind maps? Try just making a big list of ideas. Some people call this a “brain dump” and it works exactly the same way as a mind map. The idea is to get as many ideas out of your head and on to the paper as possible. Don’t think about whether a specific solution will work, just write it down. You’ll go back later and refine them.

One fun thing to experiment with is using a timer. Set your kitchen timer for 5 minutes and aim to get as many thoughts and ideas down on paper as possible. This race against the clock can help you stop criticizing and instead focus on quantity, which isn’t something we do naturally.

Don't spend a lot of time on this process. The idea with brainstorming is that you want to do it fairly quickly and generate as many different ideas (solutions) as you can within that short span of time.  Once you've done the brainstorming picture (mind map - whatever you choose to call it), then you can narrow down all those different solutions you listed until you get down to the top two or three that you think will work best.
 
As you begin to practice brainstorming, you'll find that it gets easier and easier for your creative side to come out and that's the goal. So, set aside some time (it doesn't have to be a large chunk of time, even 10-15 minutes) each day to brainstorm and it will help you develop more of your creativity.