I can't teach you how to journal or give you advice

I can't teach you how to journaling because journaling cannot be taught.

What you find when you look up "how to journal" advice online is prompts, journaling structures, and general guidance but journaling is way too personal to be plug-and-play.

Journaling is just the process of thinking, reflecting, planning, pondering, and more. There is no playbook on how to be introspective.

Think about how you learned to ride a bike.

The training wheels are there, but what teaches you how to ride the bike is you sitting on, it holding the handles, pedaling, and getting to know the physics. Eventually, you know how to ride a bike on an intuitive level.

Other people may have given you tips, guidance, and tools that are helpful but you are doing the heavy lifting.

- The Principle of Practice

I share my journaling practices on my website.

I feel my posts about my practices are ungratifying because they're not actionable. There is no prompt, there is no fill in the blank, there is no step-by-step. All I give you is just a style to try. That is deliberate, because the last thing I want you to do is to copy what I do.

Why?

Because I feel like journaling is about discovery, it's demonstrating things to yourself, experimentation, evolution, trial and error. If I lay out a framework for you to copy, it takes away your opportunity make journaling your own.

There is no cheat code

I bring this up because I see people going in circles following tip after tip and nothing is working. So I feel it necessary to say directly that journaling isn't one of those things you can learn from a few blog posts and YouTube academy.

There is no quick gratification, no perfect tips, no perfect steps, or tool that's going to make you journal the way you want to you. You're just going to have to do it and tweak it to your liking until it becomes something that works for you.

Sometimes, I want to write about the different barriers to journaling and give solutions but usually when I do, the post feels shallow. It feels unhelpful, and mimicking the stuff that's already out there.

Psychological barriers are a thing and those require mindset shifts

If you don't know what to write about, I could say the solution is just to try a prompt. But, if you don't know what to write about because you have an inner perfectionist eating at you, that prompt isn't going to help. That's just going to slap a Band-Aid over an open wound.

For you to figure out why you're having trouble journaling, you need to be able to know what exactly the barrier is and you can use your journaling to challenge it. Your inner perfectionist doesn't have to make decisions for you, use your journal s a low-stakes way to prove that to yourself.

Remember this. Your journal is just a piece of paper.

Paper doesn't have a purpose, it is whatever we decide it is.

It's place to spit your gum, make a shopping list, doodle because you are bored, study, wipe your mouth with, keep score, make budget, write a note with a gift, house legal agreements and so on.

Paper is nothing until we decide what it is. A journal doesn't have to be daunting. It is literally just paper and it has no meaning until you assign it. It has no purpose, it has no rules, it has no instructions or template for you to fill out, it is just a paper.

That means, whatever barriers you have with it, whatever invisible rules are there, they're being projected by your mind. Nobody told you that you had to journal a certain way or that it had to come out a certain way. Even if somebody did, what are they doing to do about it if you make your own rules?

It is a paper and you're the one holding the pen.

You don't own your journal to anybody, you're not here to impress anybody, this is supposed to be for you. So what rules are you projecting onto the journal and why?

When you think of the reasons why you have trouble journaling, they usually start with "I can't", "I don't" and the likes. So what is it, specifically, that you don't have, can't do, or need? What are you lacking?

Whatever you decide to journal is good enough because that's all you got so it has to be enough.

You journal doesn't decide what's worthy, something is worthy because it landed in your journal.

Better yet, figure out what the perfect journal entry is. Describe it.

Is it an long, profound, grammatically correct, beautiful? Is there art work, dates? Impressive language? Do you see yourself journaling every day with old-timey fountain pens, feeling like a real intellectual?

Take a moment to think about what a perfect journal entry or journaling practice looks like to you. What is your idea of what journaling is supposed to be?

Bonus points if you write it down because that means you are using journaling to work out a problem.

Let's pause here a second and let me tell you about my journals.

I got my first (adult) journal from office max. I chose whatever journal I felt looked decent, couldn't tell you the brand or anything. Then, I grabbed any sort of pens. I eventually ordered colored markers because I like to signal things to myself with color changes. Plus, it's just easier to read and write when things look like their in sections.

I Have ugly hand-writing. I always have. It looks like a mixture of cursive, print, rushing, and scratches. Sometimes my K's look like the the the letter "L" followed by a "C".

I have one word entries, one sentence entries, and entries where I didn't write anything but the date or one huge sentence across the entire page.

I have doodles of ice-cream cones, cookies, planets, the sun, smiley faces, and word art of my name.

Most of my entries do not fill the page and all of my journals have blank pages.

Sometimes I journaled multiple times a day, other times I journaled once in a month. I had no pattern or rhythm whatsoever, I did it whenever I felt like it.

Sometimes I used a digital journal, audio, typed, or handwritten - whichever felt most convenient.

Nothing about my journals would impress anybody. Sentences are short and simple.

The only reason why I was able to journal thsis freely is because I never had any arbitrary rules for journaling. I never saw journaling a a thing to do right, I just saw it as a way to help me stay afloat emotionally. I never assigned weight to it or cared about it beyond what I was using it for.

I see it as a tool, a thing, not a project do "right".

It's just thinking on paper and unless you're going to tell me your thoughts are inherently wrong and unworthy, you are more than equipped to do this and giving yourself permission is the only advice you need.