Develop Your Personal Success Journal

I wrote this arti­cle ages ago. And I never pub­lished it on my web­site, but have had it pub­lished in ezines and such. And recently, cer­tain events in my life have made me real­ized how much I do exactly what I taught many years ago, and prob­a­bly even more so now.

And today, with the advent of blogs, I believe this arti­cle about keep­ing jour­nals has even greater mean­ing and power. So I did a lit­tle search and dug it up. Today, I’ve decided to reprint it here for you.

It may sound a lit­tle too wacky or too meta­phys­i­cal for some of you. And I respect that. But the essence of the mes­sage is impor­tant, and more impor­tant than how I chose to deliver that message.

So please read with an open mind, because keep­ing a per­sonal suc­cess jour­nal can be one of the most pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing tools in your arsenal.

Read on, and enjoy…

“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.“
– Polo­nius, in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”

Before we begin, note that this arti­cle may not nec­es­sar­ily deal with spe­cific tac­tics for cre­at­ing wealth online. It may be some­what philo­soph­i­cal, too, and might even be a bit “out there” for some of you.

But this is prob­a­bly one of the most impor­tant strate­gies you will need to imple­ment in your busi­ness, based on my per­sonal belief and expe­ri­ence, that will lead you to true, abun­dant wealth and success.

First, real­ize that the path to true per­sonal great­ness can often 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, deal­ing with the psy­cho­log­i­cal scars of an abused child­hood, the one thing that kept me hang­ing on was through the writ­ing and review­ing of entries in my per­sonal jour­nal. 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 and events around me. In fact, my web­site at Suc​cess​Doc​tor​.com is almost entirely based on, or the result of, entries made in my per­sonal journal.

You can use a phys­i­cal jour­nal, a soft­ware pro­gram (like a blog), or a plain text edi­tor on your com­puter — it really doesn’t mat­ter. But use it to reflect on, develop and pri­or­i­tize your per­sonal set of val­ues, goals and, most impor­tantly, learn­ing experiences.

Bet­ter still, you should use one to develop and inte­grate the “best-​​better” sys­tem you will learn later on in this article.

Never under­es­ti­mate the power of keep­ing a jour­nal. You can use one to help asso­ciate feel­ings to thoughts and thoughts to feel­ings. And most impor­tant, it can help you to dis­cover the motives that moti­vate you. For exam­ple, use it to cap­ture ideas, new skills, dif­fer­ent strate­gies learned, 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 to which you learn about your­self. And the jour­nal can pos­i­tively and pro­foundly impact this impor­tant learn­ing process.

More­over, the jour­nal can help you in devel­op­ing, tap­ping into and exer­cis­ing your most pre­cious resource: Your intu­ition. Recently, psy­chol­o­gists have dis­cov­ered that we do not oper­ate at a sin­gle level but at three.

In other words, we do not have only one mind but three dis­tinct minds. Beyond the con­scious and sub­con­scious minds, we also have an all-​​powerful, all– know­ing, “super-​​conscious” mind (a term orig­i­nally coined by turn-​​of-​​the-​​century Amer­i­can psy­chol­o­gist William James).

Some peo­ple call it the “infi­nite intel­li­gence.” Oth­ers call it the spirit or soul. Sim­ply, it is your intu­ition — this dor­mant, higher intel­li­gence that’s within us all. In essence, it is the place from which all flows.

Look at it this way: Your mind is much like a com­puter. The random-​​access mem­ory (or RAM) is your con­scious mind in which you sort, cal­cu­late and process data. It’s your think­ing brain.

But on the other hand, the sub­con­scious mind is the read-​​only mem­ory (or ROM), where infor­ma­tion is stored, coded and retrieved. It’s your mem­ory or your func­tion­ing brain (which, like a reg­istry, tells your body how to breathe, func­tion, pump blood, etc).

How­ever, the super-​​conscious mind is the pro­gram­mer on which the other two depend, since the com­puter can not oper­ate with­out one in the first place.

There­fore, your super-​​conscious mind, being all-​​knowing and per­fect, can help you along your jour­ney and maybe more than you think.

As such, your jour­nal can become a great tool for tap­ping into the source that lies within you. You can record hunches, flashes of inspi­ra­tion or what­ever your intu­ition is telling you.

You never know: A break­through may be lurk­ing in that mind of yours. In fact, some of the great­est thinkers, entre­pre­neurs and inven­tors of our time, like Edi­son for exam­ple, often used per­sonal journals.

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 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. With any given sit­u­a­tion in your life, look at what is the best thing you can pull from or liked about it, 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 more impor­tant, don’t jus­tify it by say­ing, “I have to know what I did wrong so I won’t do it again.”

This can backfire.

Find­ing out what’s wrong about any sit­u­a­tion is in fact empha­siz­ing it as well as rein­forc­ing it. You become what you focus on. You reap what you sow. As Rene Descartes once said in 1637, “Cog­ito Ergo Sum” (i.e., “I think, there­fore I am”).

So instead of writ­ing down 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. Often­times, peo­ple work on their defi­cien­cies and, as a result, uncon­sciously rein­force them or lower their self-​​esteem in the process. How­ever, if they had focused on their strengths from the onset, many of their weak­nesses would have been dimin­ished or self-​​corrected.

Nev­er­the­less, your self-​​esteem is cru­cial in busi­ness. And build­ing your strengths will increase your self-​​esteem, which is the key to under­stand­ing your weak­nesses and how to cor­rect them.

And your per­sonal suc­cess jour­nal can be a won­der­ful tool for help­ing you do exactly that.

About the Author

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