CBP S1E6: How Journaling Helps with Self-Awareness

There are four pillars of emotional intelligence – self-awareness, self-management, relationship management, and social awareness. While journaling won’t necessarily help you with all of that, journaling and self-awareness are linked. When you journal, you are documenting the ups and downs of your day, tracking things you care about, and hopefully doing some self-reflecting. By investigating your brain and being curious about yourself, and by documenting your hopes, beliefs, habits, and other information about yourself, you can get to know yourself better. Tune into this week’s episode to hear more!

Please note that there are links in this post that will give me a commission if you use them to purchase something, at no extra cost to you. Please rest assured that I will never recommend anything that I don’t trust and believe will be of value to you. See my affiliates page for more details.

Referenced in this episode:

• Dr. Tchiki Davis | Psychology Today: What is Self-Awareness and How Do You Get It?
• Emotional Intelligence 2.0 | Travis Bradberry, Jean Graves [affiliate link]
• Our Pinterest Journaling Board

Related:

• Why You Should Journal…Daily

New!

• Watch the video that goes along with this podcast on YouTube!
• Follow the Coffee Break podcast on Spotify!

Transcript

On the blog right now, we’re focusing on journaling. A key component of journaling is the self-reflection that you go through when you’re taking the time every day to sit down, and go over your day and think about what happened, and maybe plan for the following day, or something like that. I wanted this episode to tie self-awareness and self-reflection in to journaling, to help kind of reinforce why journaling is a really important part, and can be a really essential tool, to your own self-development.

When you think about emotional intelligence, there’s four main pillars to that. The first is, self awareness. Second, self management. Relationship management, and social awareness. Journaling doesn’t necessarily help with all of that, but, for self-awareness, and self-management maybe, there’s a pretty clear – in my mind – a pretty clear correlation between those two things. 

There’s a great book about emotional intelligence, and it’s called Emotional Intelligence 2.0 [affiliate link]. When you think about self-awareness, it’s really being aware of and monitoring everything that’s going on inside of you – your thoughts, beliefs, habits. All those things that motivate you, that move you, and that you’re passionate about. And there’s a doctor – I don’t know if I’m pronouncing this right – but Dr. Tchiki Davis says in Psychology Today that self-awareness is one of the major mechanisms influencing personal development. So a self-aware person is able to judge opportunities better, to understand what are that person’s triggers, what do they think about things. They’re able to predict how they’re going to react to certain situations and understand what reactions certain situations bring out in them. So, they might know that, in a certain case, when someone says or does something like this, that they’re going to react that way. And they’re able to control those reactions better.

Journaling helps play a role in that, by giving you a mechanism to write down the things that are happening to you. It’s a place where you can record all these things that are happening in your life. You can start to see patterns, you can start to see how all these things tie together to make you who you are. And then, to look at the places, in a non-judgemental way, that you may need to work on. You can’t know what you need to work on, without knowing yourself really well. And that’s where self-awareness is super important when it comes to personal development, and journaling can help you get there. 

There’s a number of different types of journaling. I’ve wanted to start a paper journal for a while, and so I think I’m going to do that as part of the upcoming journaling theme on Coffee, Grit, and Inspiration. Right now, I keep my journal in electronic format. So I use a program called GoodNotes, and it works best with my Apple pen and my iPad, but there’s a number of different ways you can do it. You can use OneNote, you can use EverNote, you can keep it in a pen and paper, we’re going to look at a lot of that in the upcoming weeks. 

The thing with a journal is that it’s sort of a daily planner, a diary, and a self-awareness tool all wrapped up into one. When you look at some of the original posts on bullet journaling, it’s really a very simple, “here’s what I gotta get done in my year, here’s what I gotta get done this month, here’s what I gotta get done this week, here’s some ideas and thoughts that I have”, all put together. And people have taken that concept – and I’m kind of on the fence about how crazy some people get with it. But the reality is that a journal is whatever you want it to be.

As long as you’re using it regularly, and you’re using it as a way to really get to know yourself, and to write down all those things that are happening in your life, and to start looking at patterns, and to really track things that you are interested in knowing about yourself. Then it really doesn’t matter what format you’re using, or whether you’re super creative or whether you’re not, whether you want to do it really artistically, or whether it’s something just super simple, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that activity of – and that engagement with your journal, on a regular basis, to help you understand more about who you are. 

A bullet journal will typically have a spot where you can plan out your year, and we’ll get into a lot of this in some upcoming posts on Coffee, Grit, and Inspiration, but a bullet journal will usually have a place where you can record what’s coming up in your year. You can take that information and bring it down to your month, and then use that to plan out your week, and all of that kind of stuff. But what’s really cool about it, is it’s got this concept of collections, which is where you can take and track just about anything you can imagine. Your sleeping habits, your emotions, your feelings, any health problems that you’re having, books you want to watch movies – sorry, books you want to read and movies you want to watch – it’s like, basically it’s like a list-maker’s dream.

A side benefit to having these journals, aside from the therapeutic feeling that you get in writing and kind of dumping your heart out into them, is that when you look back on them, you have a way of really looking at your life, day to day. And you can look at patterns, you can see that certain things happen when this happens. For example, I have a complicated relationship with sleep. I love to sleep! But I don’t always sleep well, and I don’t always sleep enough. And so, when I track my moods or track my weight loss, as related to sleep, I can see certain patterns that come out when I don’t get enough sleep, or when I do get enough sleep, and those are things I probably would never know about myself if I wasn’t tracking it in some way. 

I think something that I, that I would really encourage people to do, especially if self-reflection comes hard to you, or you’re not really the type to kind of dig down into your own psyche, is to be curious about yourself. Try to get to know yourself like you’d try to get to know somebody new. Ask yourself questions! Give yourself prompts, think about ways that you can share information about yourself in a way that might even surprise you. Where you can draw out some of that stuff in a way that maybe you didn’t realize you had all that stuff in you. You never know what might be under the covers until you pull them back and really start to look. And so I would really – just be curious. Just be curious about yourself, and that’s one of the first ways that you can start developing self-awareness. 

What’s also really cool about journaling is that it doesn’t have to be looked at and examined by anybody but you. So you can be yourself. You can be as true and honest, and up front, and embarrassing, and it doesn’t matter, because it’s only every going to be seen by you. Unless you choose to show it to somebody, but, uh, you probably don’t want to do that. The point being, is that it’s a safe space. You can put whatever you want in those pages. No one’s going to judge you, other than yourself. And hopefully, you develop the ability to look at all of those things that you’re pouring out of your heart and pouring out of your mind and on to your paper, in a non-judgemental way, so that you can start to really look at yourself objectively. 

A lot of times, when we think about ourselves, we tend to either focus on our failures, or inflate our own self-importance to where we think that we are greater than we are. It can go either way. 

A journal kind of puts that stuff down, if you really make an effort to engage with it every day, do a little self-reflection every day, you’re going to end up seeing things about yourself that you didn’t realize. Whether you thought you failed, and you realize that it wasn’t as bad as you thought, or the thing that is just blowing your mind up today is really not that important three months from now, three years from now. Or that, in all the ways that you think you’re wonderful, which you probably are, but, maybe there’s still some ways in those areas where you can be better, or you can be a little bit more humble, or maybe you can find something else that you can focus on and make great as well! 

In the upcoming weeks, there will be more to come on the Coffee, Grit, and Inspiration site. We’re going to do a free email course for how to start your first bullet journal, if you’ve never started one before and you want a little inspiration, or you don’t really know what the best journal is, or what supplies are, whatever. It doesn’t take much, but we’re going to do a little bit of some recommended supplies for that, kind of show you how to organize your journal, how to get started, maybe some prompts, things like that. And that’s going to be a free email course, and that’s coming in the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can check out the Emotional Intelligence 2.0 book that I mentioned earlier on in this episode, I’ll put the link in the description.

On Pinterest, we have a journaling board that you can check out, I’ll put the link for that in the description as well.

You can always sign up for our mailing list at www.coffeegritandinspiration.com/subscription. I hope you guys have a wonderful, wonderful week, and I will talk to you soon. Bye now!