August 2019 - Ron Kness Writing

Journaling to Help Combat Loneliness

It really doesn’t matter what your issue is; if you want to overcome it, you can find a way to use journaling to help. You can set up a particular type of journal like a gratitude journal to help yourself become more thankful for what you do have, and you can also keep a bullet journal and set goals to overcome the loneliness you’re experiencing if more social connections will do it. The possibilities are truly endless.

Let’s look in more detail at how journaling can help combat loneliness.

Allows You to Explore Your Thoughts and Feelings

Journaling can help to simply focus on writing expressively your thoughts and feelings surrounding the loneliness that you are feeling. If you can write about each part of your feelings, and when you first noticed them, you may identify the core cause of the feelings. When you do that, you can develop a plan to solve the problem.

Gives You a Way to Express Your Thoughts and Feelings

Writing is a time-honored way of expressing thoughts and feelings safely. You never have to let anyone read it. You can write it down in the form of letters to people, or to yourself, or even to someone you don’t know that you keep for yourself when you’re done but completed to get it out in the light to study by you.

Provides a Way to Understand Your Thoughts and Feelings

Sometimes you may not even know what you are feeling. It can be hard to understand and express what we feel even to ourselves. But when you focus on writing it down, it can help you understand everything in a new way from a new direction that you may not have considered.

Helps Foster Social Connections

It might seem like a strange notion to consider, but writing can even help you foster social connections. The main reason is that as you read through what you’ve written, you’re going to discover ways to overcome your situation to find the healthy social connections you need.

Helps You See the Big Picture More Easily

Looking back at the things you’ve written over time about any topic can provide insight into the situation that you never saw coming. That’s because having the journal to look back on provides a way to see the bigger picture. You may feel super-lonely today, but it’s still less than yesterday, which lets you know it’s going to get even better from here.

Provides a Means to Understand and Organize Your Thoughts

Writing things down, especially when you choose a particular method like the bullet journal, will help you get your thoughts down in an organized and useful way. When your thoughts are a jumble, you might not see the real point but when they’re organized, it makes all the difference. For example, in writing it all down, you may realize that your loneliness is really due to being with the wrong partner who does not value you.

You’ll Sharpen Your Observation Skills

Once you start writing regularly and it’s become a habit, something amazing will happen. Your observation skills will be sharper, and you’ll have an easier time coming up with descriptive and expressive words to use in your journal. This is going to lead to even more breakthroughs due to having more clarity.

Focuses Your Gratitude Skills

Something funny happens when writing in a journal, even if it’s not specifically a gratitude journal per se. What happens is that as you’re writing (even if you’re upset), you’ll become calmer – especially when you read it back. You’ll become grateful for what you do have that is positive in your life, even if it’s simply the ability to breathe in and out today.

If you want to combat loneliness, consider writing about and exploring why you feel lonely. You also should remember to read the definition of “loneliness” to ensure that this is what you are really experiencing. No one ever needs to be lonely, even when they are alone, if they know how to work through their thoughts and feelings. Journaling can help with that.

Travel Journal Ideas and Tips

An excellent way to remember everything you’ve done is to keep a travel journal. This is a journal which is usually devoted to one trip at a time. You’ll write and add mementos and memories into the journal so that you can look back on it with pride and happiness. Plus, you can share your journey with others.

Start with the Planning Phase

The journal should begin the moment you start planning your trip. You can use the journal to plan by writing the things you need to do and then checking off what you completed for the trip. Ask yourself what you want to accomplish on the trip. What do you want to experience, what do you want to learn, and when will you do each activity?

Write Daily during Your Trip

Once you’re on the trip, don’t miss out writing on any day. Try to find time to write in your journal when the experience is vivid in your mind. You might want to consider taking a recording device with you so you can record your initial thoughts while you’re doing it.

Add Physical Mementos to the Journal

Don’t just add text to your journal – also add color, images, and mementos. For example, save your tickets, a napkin from a restaurant, or other little things you touched during your trip. You don’t even have to buy anything extra to do this part.

Remember to Write the Good and the Bad

You don’t want to look back on the trip and see that it’s not written realistically. It’s perfectly okay to talk about what was good and bad about the trip. When you do that, you can plan differently next time. Maybe you learned that you need new shoes if you’re going to walk that much? It’s a good thing to write down.

Write What You’d Do Differently

If you ever go back to that travel destination, what would you do now that you’ve done it once? Would you change what you chose to do to something else?

Mention What Disappointed You and What Thrilled You

Talk about the things that were disappointments. Were the people nice or rude? Did the train smell like excrement? That might seem like a strange thing to write, but it will help you remember even more. Also, did something unexpected happen that thrilled you and excited you?

State What You Learned from Each Day

Add some facts that you are learning about your destination, the people you met, the people you traveled with, and yourself. For example, did you learn that you love people watching when you didn’t know you did? Did you discover a historical fact previously unknown?

When It’s Over, Finish by Writing a Last Reflective Entry

After the trip is over, take the time to write one last entry where you reflect finally again on everything you learned about the trip. Take about what it was like, what you learned, what surprised you, and so forth. Name the thing you’d do again and the thing you’d not do again, plus something you’d do next time.

A travel journal will improve your memory of the event. You’ll retain more information and – believe it or not – it’ll help you make the next trip even better. Use these tips if you want to get the most out of your travel journaling now and in the future.

Journaling to Help with Stress

Stress affects almost everyone at some time in their lives. For some people, it’s more of a problem with their genetics and for some, it’s due to their situation. Whatever reason you are stressed, congratulations for recognizing it and wanting to do something about it. Here are some good ways to journal to combat your stress.

Write Daily for 5 to 15 Minutes

The thing about journaling that is important is you need to do it daily long term for it to really work. It takes a lot of writing and insight to figure out why you’re dealing with stress and how to overcome it.

Write about Your Worries

Go straight to the problem and write about your worries. Describe them from every single angle you can come up with. The more descriptive, the better. Go back to the first time you felt this feeling regarding this topic so that you can get to the bottom of it.

Describe What’s Happening Now

Put out of your mind what you did, what someone else did, or what can be done – right now write about precisely what is happening right now and where you stand with the issue causing your stress. If it’s generalized stress, try to make a list of things that might be contributing.

Document the Worst That Can Happen

As you look at the situation, one thing that often causes stress is the unknown, or the “worst thing” that you think can happen. Describe this worst thing but make it realistic. For example, don’t make up something like an airplane falling on your wedding party. That isn’t realistic. However, bad weather, rude in-laws, and other issues may be.

Document the Best That Can Happen

Let’s get serious by thinking about and writing about the very best (realistic) outcome of the situation you’re stressing about. Include potential steps and tactics to achieve this best-case scenario so that you can see it to fruition if you so choose.

Document What Is Really Happening

As you are writing, be very careful to be realistic and honest above all else. Other than when you imagine the best and worst, ensure that you are also documenting the reality of what is happening to you right now. That way, you can narrow down identifying the stress-inducing situation.

Write a Counter-Argument to Yourself

A really good way to overcome some stress about a situation is to argue with yourself. First, tell your story as a letter to yourself about what is happening. Then write a letter back to yourself in answer, arguing all the negativity and turning it into positivity. If your best friend wrote that, what would you say back?

It’s surprising that writing can accomplish so much, but if you go into journaling to help with stress under the right attitude and with a goal in mind, you can achieve a lot. The important thing is that you need to be honest with yourself so that you can find out the true causes of your stress. In this way, the actions you take to overcome it really are effective.

5 Surprising Benefits of Journaling

There are many ways to keep a journal. You can record the events of your days, plan a vacation, analyze your dreams or use a bullet journal to organize your life. Journals can help you capture your thoughts or plot out your career.

As well as decluttering your mind, keeping a journal can have some surprising benefits.

1. Journaling helps reduce stress
The act of putting your feelings on paper helps you to manage your stress levels better. All those anxieties and worries stop going in circles inside your head, allowing you to step back and get a deeper perspective on the things that are troubling you. It can even help with problem-solving!

2. Journaling can improve your mental health
Journaling is often recommended by psychologists and therapists. Journaling helps you to work through the issues that come up in your therapy sessions, complementing and supporting the process of healing. It can be a powerful tool in removing psychological blockages.

3. Journaling improves your cognitive skills
Developing a journaling habit helps your brain to function more efficiently. Studies have shown that the act of writing strengthens the learning process and stores facts and concepts more firmly in your memory. Writing helps to develop new neural pathways in your brain, connecting new information with data already stored in your memory.

4. Journaling helps you meet your goals
Studies have found that you are 42% more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down! Journaling gives you the space to work through ideas, setting out the details and the possibilities. Writing about the process helps you to track progress, so you can see how close you’re getting to achieving your goal or where you may have gone off track.

The habit of keeping a journal gives you a physical and mental discipline and focus that will influence other areas of your life. Writing down your goals and aspirations gives you a strong motivation to achieve them!

5. Journaling inspires creativity
Keeping a journal allows you to write down whatever ideas come into your head. The brilliant thoughts that you have in the shower can be lost forever – or kept safe if you write them down.

Journaling is a private, safe space for you to explore ideas that might not have a home in your professional or everyday life. And once let off the leash, there’s no telling what sort of magic your creative mind will come up with!

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Why You Should Start a Dream Journal

Dreams are more than just your brain’s reruns from the day or for swapping weird dream stories with your friends and colleagues.

Dreams can be powerful messages about problems or stresses in your life. If you have regular dreams about the same situation over and over, being trapped or running late or being shamed in public, maybe your subconscious is trying to tell you something.

It can be hard to remember your dreams for more than a few minutes. Keeping a dream journal can help you keep a record of those messages from your subconscious. There are other benefits too.

1. Improve your problem solving
Once you start keeping a dream journal, you’ll see how your dreams reflect what’s going on in your waking life. Taking the time to note down and analyze your dreams sends a signal to your subconscious that you’re listening. And as you listen, you get more insight into your problems, and your dreams become easier to understand and solve.

2. Reduce your anxiety
Bad dreams, the ones you wake up glad to escape from, tell you a lot about your deepest fears. They can help you pinpoint areas of your life where you can take steps to avoid the fear that surfaces in your dream. Journaling enables you to process the issue that’s causing anxiety.

3. Connect with your creativity
Some of the world’s greatest thinkers, writers and artists have had inspiration come to them in dreams. Einstein is supposed to have dreamed his theory of relativity and thereby changed the world of physics.

Keeping a journal of your subconscious dream life allows you to tap into your creative mind. The logical part of your mind quietens, while fantasy and imagination take over leading to some of the stranger aspects of dream life. Capturing these images and stories in your dream journal can give you a world of new ideas to explore.

4. You’ll remember more of your dreams
Getting into the habit of writing down your dreams will encourage your conscious mind to access your dream life. Journaling tells your mind that this is important, and your brain’s filters will reset to prioritize capturing your dreams. It puts dreams on your radar!

As your dream journaling becomes part of your routine, your dream recall will improve, and you’ll find you remember more of your dreams and more and more details. You might even find you start to have lucid dreams where you become aware that you’re dreaming and can alter the narrative of your dream.

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How Journaling Helps Reduce and Manage Stress

Modern life and stress go together, right? Constant stress from juggling demands and obligations has become a regular part of our lives. Some level of stress is okay; it keeps you motivated and growing as a person. But sometimes pressure can tip over into anxiety and lead to all sorts of problems, and you need to work out how best to deal with it. Journaling is an increasingly popular and effective way of managing your day-to-day stress levels. Here’s how it works.

1. Journaling takes you away from the digital world
Journaling with pen and paper is soothing and grounding in a way a screen and keyboard can’t compete with. You can’t rush writing with a pen or pencil.

Journaling in a real notebook helps you to step aside from scrolling or jumping from one thing to another. You can only have one tab open in a notebook! The physical act of writing or sketching uses your whole body to make marks; it’s grounding.

2. Journaling helps you change your mindset
Journaling is a naturally reflective process. Keeping note of all the good things in your life helps to keep negativity at bay and to rest your attitude to positive. When you’re feeling down, you can leaf back through your journal and remember the good things in your life.

3. Journaling is instant stress relief
Writing down your frustrations, hopes, and fears can give you immediate emotional release. Instead of stewing about how other people have treated you, your journal gives you a safe space to download all your anger, hurt and frustration. And having poured your feelings onto the page, you feel better. You might even get a different perspective on the situation. At the very least, the problems will not be swirling around in your head anymore. Journaling can be a great antidote to brooding!

4. Journaling can help you find the source of your stress
The act of writing in your journal can unleash a flood of unacknowledged feelings. Maybe the thing that’s stressing you out today is your unreasonable boss or nagging co-worker. But perhaps you’re reacting this way because they are triggering memories of people who have mistreated you in the past?

Does your partner do something that reminds you of a past relationship? Are you behaving in a self-destructive way because of a past failure that you fear repeating?

Journaling can help you find the real source for your bad feelings and provide a way forward.

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5 Ways You Can Use a Journal for Professional Development

Journals are not just for recording your innermost thoughts, your dreams or the events of the day. Using a journal can be a powerful way to ignite your professional development. You probably already have a work notebook for things like task lists or meeting notes. Consider using journaling as part of your everyday work life for professional development as well. Here are some suggestions to get you started.

1. Self-evaluation
You can use your work journal as a way of assessing your performance. Take regular pulse checks of your achievements, the times you hit your targets or brought on new clients. Make a note of any feedback you receive. Reflect on how projects went, what went well, what you would change. By the time your annual performance review comes around, you’ll be well prepared.

2. Analyze your current job
Sometimes jobs can evolve. It can be a useful exercise to sit down with your position description and see how the current reality matches up. Are you doing things that aren’t listed? Are there things you should be doing but aren’t? If your position has grown beyond its official description, maybe it’s time to ask for a re-evaluation of your job.

3. Do some blue sky thinking
You are more than your current job. Use your journal to scope your future career options. What motivates you? Are you satisfied with where you are going? Where do you want to be in five years? In ten years? Is this an industry where you want to get to the top, or would you like a change? Are you motivated by money or by wanting to do good in the world? Maybe you would prefer a better life/work balance, or you want to travel.

4. Build a strategy
Once you’ve worked out where you want to go, you can use your journal to help plot a future that’s right for you. This can form your career map, strategic plan, and Gantt chart. Think of all the steps you need to take to achieve your goal, from scoping the corporate ladder for opportunities to researching your chosen sector.

5. Do a skills audit to see what you need to learn. What other resources do you need? You might need a savings or investment plan to back your idea. Consider searching out appropriate mentors. Have a look at what you can start to do right now to kick start you on your journey.

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5 Ways A Journal Can Jumpstart Your Creativity

Keeping a journal is not just recording the events of your life or how you’re feeling. It can be a way of supporting your creative life. It’s a low risk, private as you want, way of writing down your ideas, your dreams and your resolves. It can be very instructive to read the journals of writers, artist, and actors and get an insight into how they used journaling to grow and develop in their field.

Here are five ways keeping a journal can enhance your creativity.

1. It provides a safe space
Between the pages of your journal, you can keep safe all those ideas that are just starting to form, that are not quite ready to be explored on canvas or turned into a short story, book or article.

2. It quiets your inner critic
Journaling can help shush your inner critic, that little voice that polices all your thoughts and ideas. Research has shown that when you write without expectation, the part of your mind that acts as a censor steps aside and lets you get on with it. Journaling, free writing or morning pages allow you to write for the sake of it, no editing, no agonizing. And that frees up your creative flow!

3. You can develop your voice
Journaling is freeform, messy writing. No one is going to read it, so you can be free to test out and build your voice. It’s a time to experiment, explore styles and not worry if it doesn’t work.

4. Journaling can allow ideas to form
As you get into the creative flow of journaling, you free up your mind to start spawning new ideas. The process makes space for ideas to well up, ideas you may not have had if you were trying too hard. And there’s no commitment to take any of them further unless you want to, and it feels right.

5. You can write about what matters to you
Your journal is yours and yours alone. You can write down your secret fears; you can write your truth. Once it’s down on paper, then you can decide if you want to do anything with it. You can take aspects of your truth and turn them into a poem or a painting. Journaling gives you practice in acknowledging and embracing your truth. And your art will sing more authentically because of it.

Be sure to download our free report on how to jumpstart your creativity with journaling!

5 Easy Steps to Starting A Dream Journal

Do you sometimes have vivid dreams or dreams that seem to be full of messages you can’t quite decipher? Maybe you’ve had good ideas or answers to problems in your dreams.

The problem is that often you forget your dreams, or the essential details stay just out of reach. Maybe a dream journal is the answer? Keeping a dream journal will allow you to capture the essence of your dreams and maybe see patterns in the messages coming from your subconscious. Here are five easy steps you can take to start keeping a record of your dreams.

1. Be prepared to write down your dreams
You need to be able to write down your dreams before you even get out of bed. Before you go to sleep, set the conscious intention to journal your dreams, send the message to your brain that you want to remember as much as you can.

Keep a pen and notebook on your nightstand so you can reach out and grab them without having to search around. You can also jot down notes in your smartphone. The important thing is to get it in writing!

2. Journal before you do anything else
Even before you’re properly awake, you can capture as many dream details as possible before full consciousness sweeps them away. Even checking the time can be enough of a distraction to allow your dreams to seep away.

Write without critiquing and try to get down the things that feel important to you.

3. Write down the essentials
It doesn’t matter if you can’t remember every detail of your dreams. Sometimes you might wake up and not be sure whether you dreamed or not. Write down whatever you’re feeling or what emotions you wake up with. Just focus on getting into the habit of writing every morning.

4. Make connections between your dreams
After a while, you’ll be able to see patterns in your dreams. Do you dream about the same person or the same situation? Are you in the same place? Analyzing your dreams for common threads and images can help you read your dreams and understanding what they’re trying to tell you.

5. Use your dreams to improve your life
Once you can see how your experiences, your worries, your hopes, and fears are reflected in your dreams, you can use that information to make changes in your waking life. As you address the anxieties that surface in your dreams, you’ll start to live a calmer, less stressed life and even sleep better.

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4 Journal Prompts to Help You Discover Your True Self

Keeping a journal can be one of the most powerful tools for working through issues, unburdening your problems and connecting with your inner self. It can give you a quiet space to find your voice in a noisy world. It’s easy to feel undermined by social media or your Inner Critic telling you what you ‘should’ be doing, how you’ll never get there and generally that you’re not good enough. Journaling can help quell those loud outsiders and focus on what’s important. You.

Here are some prompts to help you get started.

1. What do I write about?
The famous ‘tyranny of the blank page’ can be off-putting. But accept that feeling and commit to writing whatever comes into your head for ten or fifteen minutes. Set a time and write whatever comes into your head. It doesn’t matter if it’s not Pulitzer Prize-winning prose, it’s about getting into the writing flow. It’s okay to start by writing “I don’t know what to write about,” or even “I don’t want to write about my job.” By getting that reluctance out of your head and on the page, you’ve already cleared the way to start to resolve the issue.

2. What feels good right now?
Journaling about the good things in your life can help reset your focus on the positives around you. It’s easy to get stuck on the things you don’t like, but how often do you take time to write down what is good? Think of the last thing that made you smile, or the highlight of your last vacation, write down the big stuff and the small. Start a list you can come back to when you’re not feeling so good.

3. List your good qualities
Most people tend to focus on the things they don’t like about themselves. Forgetting that everyone is a mix of talents and flaws. Write down ten things that are great about you. What makes you special? Do you have you a green thumb? Do you make great slide presentations? Do dogs and little kids gravitate towards you? Are you funny, helpful, insightful, compassionate? Make a list that will make you smile when you go back to it.

4. Talk with your older self
Imagine yourself as a wise, experienced older person. Someone who has seen good times and bad, who has weathered the ebbs and flows of life. Project into the future and ask future-you for advice on how to live your best life. What should you concentrate on? What should you avoid?

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