I was first introduced to journaling at the age of 41, by a business associate and it has changed my life. It was something I was never taught or told. It was something which is the simplest thing to do but gives so much clarification to the aims of the things you want to achieve.

A simple way to think of journaling is to imagine if you were playing football, but you weren’t told the rules of the game and there was no goal to aim for.

How would you know how to play the game? How do you know what to do with the ball? How would you know if you had won?

Journaling can be done for personal or professional reasons.

The goal can be big or small. If you are unsure of how to start Journaling, think of something you want to achieve in the next 3 months. For example, you want to lose 12lbs in weight, or you want to learn a new trade.

Log in your end goal and work backwards on what you need to achieve per week to achieve the desired result.

12lb weight loss in 1lb per week. To lose 1lb per week your food intake needs to be 500 calories less than your maintenance calories for your daily needs. This adds up to a 3500 calorie deficit per week leading to the 1lb weight loss a week, leading to the 12lb loss in the 12 weeks.

What I tell my students is to imagine when you have learned a new skill you want to be better at it by the end of the year.

So if each time you practiced the skill you got 1% better, therefore it would take 100 tries to get 100% better than where you are today. So in theory, if you practiced the new skill twice a week this will lead to getting 100% better by the end of the year!

Another thing I understood is that we need to make the steps small enough so we don’t get overwhelmed with them, steps so small that we don’t feel them but in the big picture they lead to mastery. A good read is Atomic Habits by James Clear https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits.

Something else which is a great idea is to set small daily goals, they could be as simple as 1000 steps per day, or 10 minutes of meditation. What you will notice is as you achieve the small goals and put a tick next to them to say you have achieved them, you will feel a sense of satisfaction and want to do it again. A good habit is to set aside 15 minutes daily to journal and set your daily goals. This can be done in the morning or even at the end of the day to set goals for the next day. When you repeat the habit for a total of 66 days it will become second nature.

What you don’t want to do is feel bad when you can’t tick every box at the set times, just pick up where you left off, remember life happens, and sometimes we overestimate what we can do in a day but underestimate what we can do in a week.

It amazes me now how many people are goalless in life, when I ask others what their goals are, and they look at me in wonderment it amazes me that up until a few months ago, I was the same. Some people say they have goals and when I ask them exactly what the goal is and how long do they think it will take them to achieve it, again I get the same bewilderment as if I had asked what is the number PHI or the Fibonacci Sequence.

What do you hope to achieve in life? What is the meaning of life? What do we wake up for? What dreams and aspirations do we have? These are all questions I have asked myself this past year, and the answers I am receiving are actually mind-blowing.

Try asking yourself some questions and also ask the Universe. You might be surprised at the answers you receive.

I hope this helps you to set and achieve some goals in life, but be them small or great, remember that ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’.

Yours Truly Naz.