Admit it, do you spend a lot of time celebrating your successes? I won’t even ask about mistakes. As a rule, people endlessly berate themselves for their blunders, while perceiving success as something to be taken for granted.
The human mind is wired in such a way that we focus more on the negative than the positive. We tend to criticize ourselves more than we praise ourselves.
And it’s unclear how to understand how far you’ve progressed in your development, or whether there have even been any shifts at all. The practice of keeping a success journal can help with this.
In this article, I will describe 3 reasons why it is absolutely necessary to keep a success journal. Especially for those who love self-criticism and don’t notice positive changes in themselves.
Success Journal — A Simple Way to Track Your Progress
If you are engaged in spiritual development, you should have some kind of starting point, a reason why you began practicing self-development. And there should also be a destination — the result you want to achieve.
In other words — why are you doing this?
This is important, otherwise you can spend your whole life developing, reading books, attending trainings, but never see results. Always define your goal and track any of your changes.
For this, I suggest keeping an observation journal.
Keep your success journal every day, re-read it after a month, and you will notice results.
Make it a rule for yourself: if you start mastering a skill, go to a personal growth training, or implement a useful habit, write down your current state and capabilities.
Similarly, write down your state after working on yourself after a week, a month, how you react, and whether there are any changes.
Sum up your results: every month, 3 months, six months, a year. And, of course, review your state from 3, 5, or 10 years ago compared to now.
Alena Starovoitova has her own point of view on why you need to keep a success journal. Watch the video:
Find out what stage of spiritual development you are at.
3 Reasons to Start Keeping a Success Journal
1. Journaling Helps Define the Result
Often, when a person sets a goal for themselves, they forget to define what will be the symbol of its achievement. They keep taking action even when the goal has already been reached.
It’s important to determine where your finish line is, what event will mean that your goal has been achieved.
For example, you want to get less irritated with your loved ones.
You can work on mastering your emotions for a long time. But you must decide what exactly will be the indicator for you that you have achieved your goal.
This will help you focus on your successes, rather than on temporary setbacks.
For example, it could be the appearance of understanding from your family in specific surveys, a decrease in the intensity of arguments, or a reduction in their frequency.
Tracking progress and breaking a big goal down into small steps allows you to not lose motivation. You see results, even if they are small, and you understand that there is forward movement, and this motivates you to keep going.
Some people start trying to lose weight but forget to define the goal. They say: “I want to lose weight,” but don’t specify exactly how many kilograms to shed.
And losing weight gradually becomes a habit. The person doesn’t know when to stop; they have already achieved everything, but they don’t notice the progress.
Recording the smallest changes and summing up intermediate results helps to notice this progress.
2. Keeping an achievement journal helps you focus on changes and move away from comparing yourself to others
I think everyone already knows that you shouldn’t compare yourself to others. If you still do it, understand that comparing yourself to other people will often not be in your favor.
If you are also dreaming of developing a certain quality and have chosen a person who already has it as your standard, you can fall into depression from such a comparison.
A person can only be an example; you absorb their thinking and repeat their actions that led them to the desired state.
But under no circumstances should you compare yourself to them. Perhaps you will master the desired skills faster or more deeply. After all, each of us has our own set of qualities and a completely unique potential.
Most people forget to compare themselves to who they were yesterday.
If you get into the habit of recording your achievements, you will start to spend more time on yourself, pay attention to yourself, and forget about other people.
New behavior integrates into life gradually, and sometimes changes are not immediately noticeable. This is exactly why constant comparisons of yourself now with your past self are needed.
See also How to Find Your Uniqueness — A Simple Way
3. Keeping an achievement journal boosts your self-esteem and sense of self-worth
Development follows the principle of 2-3 steps forward, one step back. When a rise is followed by a small setback, the mind most often fixates on the failure, while the achievements fade into the background.
But if you look at the overall dynamic, there is always an upward trend. This is why a progress journal is needed, so that in a moment of self-doubt you can open it and see that positive changes are happening.
See also Why Setbacks Follow Breakthroughs
Write down everything you’ve learned. Re-read it after some time, and you’ll start to feel proud of yourself. Yesterday you didn’t know how to, say, edit photos, and now you do it with ease.
This tip isn’t for the lazy — write a mini-plan every day of what you want to do, what skill you want to master, what you want to try.
And at the end of the day, note what you managed to accomplish in that direction. That way, your personal progress will be visible right away.
For those who find it important to learn to value themselves, this exercise will be beneficial.
Many people stop writing down their achievements after a while because they don’t see the point in it and consider it a routine task.
This happens because they aren’t doing anything new. What’s the point of writing down the same thing day after day, like “I didn’t yell at my child,” if you’re not doing anything to build mutual understanding with them?
Along with any tiny achievements that help you recognize your own worth and importance, do something else you haven’t done before. Take a small step out of your comfort zone and move forward.
Your growth happens when you first learn to find value in your usual actions, notice it, and then go further by adding new ones to them.
Find out which 7 reasons are holding back your self-realization.
This is the kind of benefit you can get from keeping a journal, and whether you choose to use this practice or not is up to you.
But you’ll agree, it’s nice to open a notebook, your notes, or your social media posts with your thoughts from a month or a year ago and see that what you were working on back then has already settled into your life.
It motivates you to keep making breakthroughs.