Journaling to Evaluate Yourself Can Help Choose Your Direction

Journaling to learn, journaling to grow, and journaling to evaluate.
Journaling has a way of bringing out the whole of a matter, whether good or bad. When the pen hits the paper, our minds begin to transform our experiences into a tangible record of thoughts, emotions, and actions. That record has a way of telling the truth when it is read, and that truth can often be very convicting.

Even so, that tangible representation can be a person's greatest tool when it comes to self-evaluation and planning for self-development. Journaling helps us to document the heart of the matters around us. Sometimes we simply won't make any movement one way or another until the truth of our experiences is staring us plainly in the face, yelling at us or praising us for the way we handled our situations.

In this way, our evaluation of how we handle our lives can direct us to change. When we finally see through our journaling that our actions have been affecting one of our co-workers negatively, or that our bad attitude is actually what is causing us to be miserable, we can finally make strides to fix it. Every one of us has blind spots: negative things that we do that cause damage to our relationships, or sabotage our success, or that are simply an annoyance. Genuine assessment of what negative events happen in our lives and how we handle those can give us the opportunity to see those events for what they are.

This is also true of the positive actions and attitudes we take. Being able to see our high moments right alongside our low moments affords the chance to contrast them, and to look at them from all angles. Dissecting the anatomy of our successes through journaling can be a great springboard for even greater success in all areas of life.

One suggestion for an activity you can do during your journaling time is to create a list or write a few paragraphs from time to time to evaluate major events in your experience. When you finally have that breakthrough with the person at work you have been trying for months to get along with, try to figure out what was different. Did you find common ground? Were you finally accepting? Did something happen to change her perception of you, or vice versa? All of these types of questions in your journaling can go a long way to helping you really draw conclusions and create action points for you to move forward into a better success in all that you do.

Tips for journaling to evaluate yourself better:

See the whole picture. One of the biggest mistakes a person can make in his day to day interactions is to always assume that he is right in the ways that he is going about anything. If we take a step back and evaluate other people's reactions, the atmosphere of an event, our own reactions, and every other factor, we are more likely to see to the heart of what caused the event to transpire the way it did, or to see what we could do better in the future. Use your journaling to get a grasp of all the angles to the major events in your life.

Celebrate the good. It is very easy in any kind of evaluation to focus in on the things that didn't work as planned and forget that while one thing went wrong, a hundred went right. It is important to learn from our mistakes, but also to hone our successes. If we don't take time to celebrate the good things that happen, we will become miserable pursuing an ever-elusive perfection, and eventually even lose sight of what works as we try to fix minor issues that are not worth the fret. Try journaling to celebrate the happy mistakes and successes of your life. Trust me, it will be very encouraging to look on later and see through your journaling the places where God has worked in you.

Make plans for the bad. After having taken stock of what works, and celebrating our successes, it is important to identify what did not work, or what areas of our lives are causing problems, so that we can begin the process of improving. A failure is only ever really a failure if one does not learn from it. When an attitude of learning is applied our failures, we find that our failures are only really a stepping stone to getting it right. Use your journaling to list out your failures in a healthy way and make plans for future success.

Don't fall into the self-pity trap. Self-evaluation always brings with it the danger of self-pity. As you take stock of your life, be careful that you balance introspection with a healthy understanding that you are not alone, and that everyone around you has issues to overcome that are just as big as yours. If anything, the very act of self-evaluation puts you one step further, allowing you to begin to fix whatever is causing your ship to sail crooked. Continue to grow and develop yourself, and see your live clearly in perspective.

As you grow in your journaling habits, you will find that all of these things become much easier than when first attempted, and eventually you will see the great spiritual profit to be had from it.

For more of this series, please read:

• Journaling 101: A Tangible Evidence of What God Is Doing in Your Life
• Journaling 101: A Record of Where We've Come From
• Journaling 101: A Place to Process Life, God, People, and the World
• Journaling 101: An Outlet For Prayer

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