Journaling.... for personal growth

In teaching Leadership and People Management course, the most common questions asked by the participants are:

• "What is journal?"
• "If not graded why bother doing?" 
• "How should we go about doing it?"

In this post, I make an attempt at addressing those questions.


What is journal?

"Journal is a record of occurrences, experiences, or observations."

(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/journal?s=t)

Why keep a journal?
There are myriad of benefits in keeping a journal.

Writing journal can bring us to our senses.  Journal can aid us when we struggle in making choices. We can weigh the pros and cons before making a decision.  As time goes by and we begin to doubt our decision, we can look back and remind ourselves why we make those decisions in the first place, and feel reassured of pressing on.

Writing journal helps us to focus.  By writing about our feelings and frustrations help us focus on what goes on in our lives, so that we can come up with a solution to our problems.

Journal tracks your overall development.  Many of us are often caught up with our daily routines, we fail to see the progress we make in our lives.  Therefore, writing journals help us see how we've changed over time.  We can see what we did right, and also the wrong choices that we have made as such we can prevent making the same mistake.  Journal also serves as a tool for self-evaluation.

Writing journal holds us accountable.  Seeing in black and white how we have progressed helps us to go on when our motivation hit rock-bottom. 


How to start writing journal?
There are many formats and platform for writing journals.

Blog
 We can use a blog like the one I used here.

Besides the blogger, we can publish our journals online using any one of the following services to name a few.

• wordpress
• blogetery
• tumblr

The advantage of using an online blogging platforms is that were may include videos other than images.  We can allow others to comment our posts if we so wish.

Poster
We can  also present our journal in a poster like the image shown below.

The above poster is a journal of the learner-centred approaches I used in my classes namely think-pair share, speed dating and expert jigsaw.

When look closely, those cards pegged to the green line are feedback provided by the learners.  An enlarge version of the cards will look like the image below.
 

When pull one of the cards inside the socket, we will be able to see the explanation of the activity as shown in the image below.

Keep your creative juice flowing and start experimenting with the different formats.

Sources:

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/how-writing-things-down-can-change-your-life.html
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/10-ways-journaling-can-improve-your-life.html