Background:

This month Jen decided to challenge me to journal everyday about my, what are they called… feelings! While I have written in the past and write in this blog, journaling is an activity I have never included into my life until now. I generally hold a daily “State of the Jack” internal reflection, but these thoughts seldom make it out of my own mind. The idea with this challenge was to externalize my feelings, get them down on paper, and to use the journal as a medium for finding solutions to whatever issues I might have had.

My Journaling Method:

My approach to this challenge was to fill exactly one page of a notebook with whatever thoughts, problems, ideas, feelings, successes, etc… that were on my mind at the time of writing. Every night before I went to bed I would grab my notebook and a pen and just write freely until the page was full. I had no expectations, and I would not go back and re-read what I had written. Instead, I would close the book and go on with my life. My goal was not immediate reflection or problem solving; rather, my plan was to read all of my daily journalings at the end of the month and to do an audit of what was going on in my mind over that time span.

Numbers Don’t Lie:

As my current boss once said to me, “Jack, numbers don’t lie.” While they can be misleading sometimes, haha, it’s always interesting to get hard data on something for the first time. On 01-April-2015, I sat down with my journal and an Excel spreadsheet, took note of every little thing I wrote about over the month and kept track of how many times it came up in those 31 days. While y’all don’t need to know the content, it will suffice to know that I now have overwhelming evidence to suggest that there are two areas in my life which require some added attention and dedicated effort to improve. Coincidentally, each of these two themes came up 22 out of the 31 days in March.

Successful?

Absolutely! I wrote every day without fail and now have some interesting data which I hope to use to become the strongest version of myself possible. Now that I am more conscious of my feelings, the next step is to determine the best course of action from this point moving forward. I’d be curious to repeat this challenge again in the future to compare Past Jack with Future Jack and to see how I will have dealt with my current feelings in the meantime.