In this post: Have you ever thought about how you can crush your goals with your journal? If you’ve ever felt the stirring desire to crush your goals, redefine your ambitions, and sculpt the life you have in mind, then you’re in the right place. Transform your ideal dreams into tangible plans and track your journey as you grow and progress.
There are so many different ways to use your journal. One of the best options is to use it for creating and sticking to your goals.
Just keeping your goals in your mind can seem like a far-off dream, and in fact intangible. it’s hard to see if you are making any headway and difficult to keep you motivated.
That’s where your journal steps in as a trusted ally, a space where intention meets action. When you write about them in your journal, you give yourself the opportunity to make those goals your focal point and help you to see a clearer picture. Your journal is the compass that will keep you on course.
Benefits Of Writing Your Goals In A Journal
1. One of the benefits of writing your goals in your journal is that it makes them more concrete. When you set goals in your head, it can be hard to see them as real and attainable.
2. When you start with a specific goal, you can use your journal to help assess how long it will take, and what steps you need to take to achieve this end goal.
3. When you write your goals in your journal, thoughts or limiting beliefs you didn’t know you had can surface.
4. If you have more complex or chaotic goals, they can definitely get lost among your other thoughts. Writing them down in your journal can be very beneficial.
5. It can help you to get to the bottom of where your main focus should be providing clarity on the specific areas you need to concentrate on.
How Journaling Can Help with Achieving Your Goals
1. Journaling can help you achieve your goals because it will force you to think about them. It will help you to consider the why and how and dig deeper into them so that you can examine it from all sides.
2. When you start a journal, it basically drives you to record your goals. It really doesn’t matter what tool you use. Once they’re written, you are now ready to focus on them.
3. When you are focused on crushing your goal with your journal, you’ll also explore the advantages and risks you will encounter with your goals. It helps you to prepare for and prevent possible obstacles.
4. Once you see it written down on your journal, you’ll have no choice but to make note of and pull out any steps you’ve developed for success based on your goals.
5. Each time you intentionally set goals, define steps to achieve the goals, and perform them, you are setting yourself up to improve your skills. This is why it will help you to improve goal setting and achievement.
6. Even if no one else is reading your journal, a private journal can help you become accountable to yourself. If you develop the habit of writing something in it each day towards achieving your goal, it’ll work great for helping you become more responsible.
7. Your journal provides sound documentation of the things you’ve done in your life, whether it’s personal or work. Nobody has a perfect memory, so you’ll maintain the lessons learned and strategies used to crush your goal better with the record to look back at.
8. Depending on the journal, you might even be able to take the information you have written over time and compile it into a book for others to read. This may inspire them. Or, you might also take from it steps for your success for a project and turn it into a course to inspire someone else.
9. Journaling is an excellent way to work toward achieving all your goals. It will even help you make better goals because the process of entering facts in your journal will cause you to see them in a more logical way that is more useful.
Use your Journal as a Brain Dump for your goals
When it comes to your goals, we all have a lot going on, swirling around in our brains. This can really get overwhelming because there’s so much to keep up with.
Your goals can get lost in your sea of thoughts, plans, and responsibilities. But, your goals are more than just a collection of thoughts on paper; it’s a safe haven for your aspirations, fears, and the raw, unfiltered musings of your mind.
“Why should you do a brain dump ?” you might ask. A brain dump is nothing more than flushing out your ideas. Getting all of those thoughts that are in your head out onto paper.
Using your journal as a brain dump for your goals is like unlocking a secret passage to your innermost thoughts. It’s the space where you can release the jumble of ideas swirling in your mind and let them spill onto the pages, get them in one place, and then lay them all out in front of you.
Once you’ve done this, you’re able to look through and try to make sense of them. Then you’ll be able to see all the tasks you need to get done more clearly and in the specific order.
The good thing is, whatever your goals are, once you write everything down you can be sure that the deadlines will help to hold you accountable as well as keep you motivated throughout.
Choose 2-3 Of Your Biggest Goals
It’s not unusual for a lot of people to have a lot of goals in mind. A common mistake people tend to make is that they have too many goals on their minds.
This can take the focus away from the most important tasks. Because of this, you are unable to zoom in on those tasks.
Narrow down your goals to no more than two to three (2-3) but one (1) is preferred.
Having a long list of goals doesn’t mean that they all need your immediate attention. Some of these could very well be future goals.
Or maybe some other smaller goals have to be completed first before you can tackle the long-term future goals. This is why it helps when you to narrow them down.
What do you find that is immediate and MOST important right now? Where is your main focus?
For instance, if your biggest long-term goal is to be healthier and get fit. Maybe a smaller goal to focus on first is to start tweaking and changing the way you eat in order to achieve that bigger goal.
Start With Just One Goal – Break it Down Into Tasks
Choose one big goal. Then list all the small goals that will help you to achieve that big goal. Look at the big picture then break it down into bite-sized goals.
Now pick the most important goal from your small list, and begin listing tasks you would need to do in order to accomplish that goal.
If you are looking to get healthier and incorporating fitness. What foods are you going to include? Where and when will you purchase your food items? Are you going to include intermittent fasting? If so, what feeding window suits you?
Are you going to get a gym membership or are you disciplined enough to start exercising at home? How many days do you want to assign to exercising? What equipment, if any do you plan on purchasing?
Use Your Journal to Track Your Progress
Your journal comes is very valuable at this juncture. This is because you will not only have a source of documentation for your goal setting and tasks, but you can track your progress with it as well.
Start writing down your lists of tasks and check them off as soon as they’re completed. Then you can have different pages with smaller goals that progress toward that bigger goal. This you will record as you get closer.
This is an excellent motivation to keep crushing those goals.
It can be extremely tempting to give up on a goal when you’ve hit bumps in the road or when you think you’ll never get to the final stage.
The good thing is, a journal is a perfect tool to help you keep track of your progress. You can assign a page solely meant for tracking specific benchmarks of your goal.
Then, check them off each time you complete one. It’s also quite helpful and validating to re-read pages of your journal.
When you look back, you’re able to recall the feelings you had as you progressed toward your goal and the wins you’ve had along the way.
This step will give you an incredible perspective on just how much you’ve accomplished. It can be a real boost to your self-esteem to see your past successes and an excellent motivation to keep crushing your goals.
Formulate Plans
The writing process will give you a great vantage point and clarity. You begin to see patterns and are able to better formulate future actions when you have the steps written down.
Use your accountability journal entries to look forward as to what direction you should take. Here’s why. It will empower you to get there with more efficiency and keep you on track.
Stay on Task
Finally, your journal forces you to stay on task. When everything is laid out, gaping holes will become more noticeable to you.
You can see where you need to take steps. Also, you’re able to hold yourself accountable if you don’t take care of the necessary tasks.
If there’s a goal you’ve been delaying, now is a great time to start writing about it. Make your goal clear and specific. Then see to it that you develop the steps you’ll need to take to make it happen.
Journal each step along the way, and don’t forget to look back on your progress when you come across challenges. You can do this!
Eliminate Goals No Longer Serving You
At any given point in time, you might find that some goals no longer line up with what you want for your life.
And that is perfectly okay. Just Take the focus away from those and find new goals that will better suit your needs.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with changing direction or shifting your attention to another area that is more urgent.
Conclusion
Maybe your life is great right now, but no doubt there are still goals you want to achieve.
It might be something small, like increasing your inner circle, or something bigger like starting your own business.
Is there something that you want more of in your life? Big goals are just as important as small goals and are worth exploring and achieving with your journal.
Do you use a journal? How has it helped you to crush your goals?
