“Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.”
– Richard Bach

“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst then be false to any man.”
– William Shakespeare

I believe that the path to true personal greatness can be found through the use of a personal journal. Remember that you will never be as successful as you will be to your own self, and the journal can enlighten you in more ways in this area than you would have ever thought possible. Many great successful men and women have kept personal journals.

As a young salesman, the one thing that kept me hanging on was through writing and reviewing entries in my personal journal. In essence, knowing how far I’ve grown was the fuel that helped me grow further. My journals contain thoughts, feelings, inspirational messages, and all sorts of information about myself as well as about the people around me.

This book, for instance, is the result of years of journal-keeping. You can use your journal to reflect on, develop, and prioritize your personal set of values. Better still, you should use one to develop and integrate the GOAL system you will learn later in this book.

You can use your journal to help associate feelings to thoughts and thoughts to feelings. And most important, a journal can help you to discover the motives that motivate you.

Never underestimate the power of keeping a journal. In fact, look at it as your personal bible; it contains the commandments and the prophecies you want your life to take, respect, and adhere to. Make your journal your personal gospel.

Use it to capture ideas, flashes of inspiration, new skills, different strategies, situations you are facing, questions about yourself, and answers you come up with. You may think you know yourself well but this is rarely if ever true. You only know yourself to the degree that you learn about yourself. And the journal can positively and profoundly impact this important learning process.

Moreover, the journal can help you in developing your intuition. Recently, psychologists have discovered that we do not operate at a single level but at three. In other words, we don’t have just one mind but three distinct minds.

For example, beyond the conscious and subconscious minds, we also have an all-powerful, all-knowing super-conscious mind. Some people call it the “infinite intelligence.” Some people call it “soul” or “spirit.” But if you remember, I prefer to call it the conscience. Your intuition. It is the place from which all flows.

In other words, your mind is like a computer. For example, the random-access memory (RAM) is your conscious mind in which you sort, calculate, and process data. The subconscious mind is the read-only memory or hard drive (ROM) where information is stored, coded, and retrieved. However, the super-conscious mind is the programmer on which the other two depend, since the computer can not operate without it being programmed in the first place.

Thus, your super-conscious mind, being perfect and all-knowing, can help you along your journey and maybe more than you think. As such, your personal journal can become a great tool for tapping into the source that lies within you.

Additionally, it is of paramount importance for you to be able to keep records and refer back to them. References can help you to become more resilient and flexible in times of challenges. In other words, if you had a bad experience and overcame it in the past, the journal can help to remind you of your successes or of the learning experiences when another confronts you.

The best way to do this is to use the “best-better” technique. Look at what is the best thing you can pull from or liked about a given situation, and then look at how you would do better next time or how you can better yourself from the experience. Don’t write what you hate about an event or how terrible you were in dealing with it. And don’t justify it by saying, “I have to know what I did wrong so I won’t do it again.”

Finding out what’s wrong about any situation is in fact emphasizing it as well as reinforcing it. Instead of what you did wrong, write down what is the best thing you can pull from what happened or what you liked best about your experience. And look at what will make things better or how you would handle the situation better next time.

Understand that you must first work on your strong points instead of your weak points. Often, people work on their deficiencies and, as a result, unconsciously lower their self-esteem. However, if they had focused on their strengths, many of their weaknesses would have been self-corrected in the process.

Nevertheless, building your strengths will increase your self-esteem, which is the key to understanding your weaknesses and how to correct them. And the journal can be a wonderful tool for helping you do exactly that.

About the Author

Michel Fortin is a direct response copywriter, author, speaker, consultant, and CEO of The Success Doctor, Inc. Visit his blog and signup free to get tested conversion strategies and response-boosting tips by email, along with blog updates, news, and more! Go now to http://www.michelfortin.com.

Last 5 Posts by Michel Fortin

• Feel Like Giving Up? Go Out On a Limb… Or None
• This Eye-Opening Video is, Well, Golden!
• Review of Robert Plank’s SpeedCopySecrets.com
• This Little Tool Quadrupled My Signups
• Computer Geek Discovers Speed Copy Secrets?

Share This Post

Share this post with a friend by clicking "share this" below. You may freely reprint or redistribute this article, provided the content and links are left intact, and the "about the author" section is included. Get notified of new posts by RSS or email, below.

Other Related Posts

• Natural Laws (0)
• Drop Your Goals (1)
• Your Self-esteem (0)
• Your Life’s Foundation (0)
• You are a “You” Potentiality (0)