Journaling Weekly is Fundamental for your Future Self
What if you could decide who you become?
Imagine you’re 90 years old.
What have you done?
Who have you become?
What did you dedicate your life to?
Have you lived a life of purpose or have you lived in a reactive state to other’s opinions.
These are crucial factors in how you design your optimal life and live in a way that will be satisfactory to your future self.
Journal every week to reflect on your present self, your past and your future self. Read more below to set yourself up for success.
Who are most responsible for your future self?
Having analyzed Jordan Peterson’s SelfAuthoring program, it is perfectly setup for describing your future self.
Further described in his following research paper.
You describe your past self, your most influential past experiences and how this has shaped your present self.
This makes you understand more than you think, who it is you are. Actually, it will help you understand yourself better… Because who knows who they are!
Describing your past, you come to realize who your present self is. What that person has gone through and how this person is created.
You ALSO realize, you’re a BALR:
Having this Baller mindset, you set yourself up for winning even more.
And by shaping this new identity of yourself, you’ll move to your present self’s faults and virtues.
Note down your faults and virtues
Now you can literally focus on anything in yourself you want.
You have nitpicked your past self, and this makes it even more interesting to describe your present self.
You can journal toward an in-depth analysis of some of the negative aspects in your life or so-called faults in your personality.
This helps you also understand where these faults came from and how you came to be the person to hold on to these faults. If you even realized you had them.
On the other hand, this makes it even more interesting to focus on your virtues.
Make yourself understand too…
What are the most positive aspects of my personality?
What are some of my virtues created by me?
What are some of my virtues given to me?
Thinking about this and slowing down your thoughts by journaling will help you give insight into yourself of what your positive and negative sides are.
Take your time and write down your past self and present self, including your faults and virtues to understand where you’re at right now.
Set yourself up for a perfect future self.
How your journal contributes to your future self
Now, after discussing your past and present self. You can focus on your future self.
This mainly entails deciding who you want to be in the future.
Not reaching your full potential mainly has to do with aiming at goals lower than you should and not setting your goals high enough.
This part of your journal consists of stating your goals and writing them out clearly.
Understand your goals and set them as a realistic, but high and ultimate goal. If you’re bored of it too… Use the SMART method in a way that is useful to you.
Being honest, that only comes down to:
- Specify what it is you want.
- Set a deadline by when you have achieved this.
- Determine a measurable value to attach to this goal.
The last point is mainly there to ensure you will actually know when you have achieved your goal.
In the end, it may look like this:
- I will have 10,000 Twitter followers by July, 2022.
- I have helped 50 people find their purpose by the end of next year.
This will help you set a measurable goal with a set deadline so you can’t get around NOT achieving what you said you would!
How to journal and adjust your life path
So… What now?
You know your past self.
You understand your present self more.
You got to know who your future self can potentially be.
Now… it’s time to shape your future self a bit more clearly and define who this is, but also, who it isn’t.
That is the real power of journaling. Reflecting on your current self at the time being and experiencing whether you like who this person is becoming.
This means journaling either daily, bi-weekly or weekly (as said in the title) and taking 30–60 minutes to reflect on who you are, how you feel and how you’ve reacted this week.
You can rate your week and give it a grade out of 10, based on your performance, emotions and habits.
It is really important that you rate your week based on what you find important, not based on what I say or anyone else.
Once realize you’re on the right path, and have the right goals, good on you!
If for some reason you need to adjust something, that’s totally fine.
Determine what it you want to change. Why you want to change it, and how you’re going to go forward from now on.
The most important thing at any point in life: Don’t Wait. Never Wait.
Waiting is standing still and standing still means falling behind. Get moving!
You can’t steer a car in the right direction if it isn’t moving.
Start journaling weekly.
Decide who you will be and dedicate your life to it
Reflecting through journaling will give you insight in your current self but maybe even more importantly, who you were 12 weeks back, or 20 weeks back.
This means: you can see how you progress throughout your life!
This is the biggest contributor to success and happiness, and you have just noted all of it down, your entire process, how perfect.
Every week, decide who it is you are, if this person contributes to who your future self should be, and whether you have gained insight on how you could change your future self for the better.
Then, commit.
Commit to being your best self.
Commit to being a future version of yourself that you’re proud of.
Commit to becoming a person you have created.
Dedicate your life to improvement and focus on yourself. You are the only one that should be happy as a result of your choices.
Let’s see what can happen once you decide who you could be and fully dedicate to becoming this person.
Be flabbergasted by how small your past self has become.