Do you ever find yourself feeling like you don’t understand your own motives or choices? If you feel this way, you can learn why you do the things you do.
Life can be a whirlwind at times. Maybe you’ve just been too busy lately to spend time thinking about your priorities and goals.
One method to increase self-understanding is journaling your thoughts and feelings.
The idea of keeping a journal may sound strange to you; you might not think of yourself as a writer. Even non-writers keep journals, though. When you open yourself to journaling, you experience a new wealth of self-understanding.
Writing bits and pieces of your life experiences can be an incredible journey. Once you start thinking about something that happened to you in the past, you’ll find yourself remembering another story, then another.
Once you start making an effort to recall experiences from your past, you’ll trigger memories you haven’t thought about in years.
All of the experiences you’ll recall have combined to make you the person you are. To sort back through some of your life stories will help you understand yourself so much more.
6 Steps To Start Journaling Your Life
1. Decide how you’ll write your story. Will you use a spiral notebook and a pen? A computer is the obvious choice if you’re comfortable with it.
2. Don’t worry about starting at the beginning. Interestingly, a lot of people avoid trying to write down stories of their lives because they “can’t remember back that far.” Where you start the story isn’t important. Starting it is.
3. Think of your life as a series of short chapters. To simplify your story, each situation you recall can be a “chapter.” For example, you might remember the time your Uncle Al took you fishing and the canoe tipped over. Go directly to your computer, open up a blank document and start typing.
4. Focus on getting the story down. Things like sentence structure, spelling, grammar, and the like aren’t all that important for now, unless you plan to publish your journal. You can deal with all those things later by going back through and editing the material.
5. The order of your stories is irrelevant. There are two suggested ways to do your stories on the computer:
* Open a new document for each “chapter” and title the document to describe the story.
* Or simply write all your stories in one document. Open that document when you feel like writing a story, and separate the stories by using chapter headings.
* If you feel the need later on, you can copy and paste the stories into whatever order you like.
6. Document what you remember. Get down information about what happened, what you did, what you thought, and how you felt. These details will ultimately lead you to develop a better understanding of how you’ve lived your life as an adult.
Writing your life story is not all that difficult. If you follow some of these journaling methods and keep your focus off of the end result, you’ll find yourself recalling more and more parts of your life. Plus, you’ll learn to understand and even love yourself more than you ever have!
Start now to journal some of the stories from your life. Soon after, you’ll be glad you did!
How to Make a Journal of Your Life Book Review
By Soozie4Him, June 4, 2003 – Indescribably delightful!
This book was SUCH a fun read! Dan Price’s book on keeping a journal is quirky, inspiring, humorous, delightful, and educational! If you haven’t kept a journal before, you will really want to start after reading this book! Actually, I doubt that you could read through the whole thing without beginning.I’ve been journaling pretty steadily for the past 4-5 years or so. One thing I’ve really wanted to include is more doodling and (attempts at) drawing. I consider myself artistically-challenged, and this book really has encouraged me to give drawing in my journals a try.
Some other reviewers have stated that they’ve read this book in one sitting. I daresay that’s POSSIBLE, but I wouldn’t WANT to read it in one sitting. It’s just so packed with stuff and so good that I wanted to savor it!
Scrapbookers would also benefit from reading this book!
Take a look at Amazon’s great “Look inside” feature to look at this book, then order one for yourself and several for gifts – you won’t be sorry!
By christinemm – The Thinking Mother, December 4, 2006 – Inspiring—Motiviating—A Fun Read—-An Easy Read!
This is a small sized book that is entirely handwritten, and those two things make this book inviting. It reads like a journal. Hand drawings and photographs illustrate the author’s method of illustrating his own journals. This is not just a book about how to journal but we read actual journal pages from the author.This book speaks to a person who always felt they should write a journal but were afraid to start.
Price gives encouragement along the way such as using the journal for positive thoughts not just for complaining. Journalists don’t have to be professional novelists before they can begin writing about their own life for their own eyes!
The addition of ephemera from the journalists daily lives is encouraged (ticket stubs, random paper clutter from our lives, etc.).
The end of the book features twenty pages of Price’s journals which were formerly published in 1991 to 1991, as a small independent zine called ‘Moonlight Chronicles’. Later a book by the same title was published (I have not yet read it but want to!)
Previously I thought the only journaling that was done in our modern day was in fancy blank journal books and I assumed they were filled only with text in beautiful script. I have felt inhibited by this in the past, worrying if my handwriting was not perfect, what if I made a spelling error, etc. Other journals with writing prompts with someone else’s ideas of what we should be writing further discouraged me from beginning a journal as they often asked me to write about things I could care less about!
I found this little book just the encouragement I needed to start writing a journal with whatever I wanted to say in it. It is alright for the journal to be imperfect.
Price journals in black pen. The journals are not highly adorned nor does a person need to take art classes in order to journal in this style.
If you like this book and crave more, I also recommend the similar and highly encouraging books by Danny Gregory. Gregory’s own journal was published as “Everyday Matters“. Gregory’s second book “The Creative License” further encourages non-artists to draw with pen and to keep their own journal to record their own lives.