Using Daily Check-Ins To Create a Journaling Habit

I must confess I thought I knew so much about journaling but I didn’t know about daily check-ins.

Journaling is one of my favorite things to do. I’ve written in a journal on and off since I was 13 years old and have even kept most of them too. I never knew there was a whole world of journaling out there. I was missing so much.

Turns out, there is so much more in the world of journaling to learn.

It’s always come easy to me – journaling my thoughts. I’ve never been intimidated by the blank page. Once I put pen to paper, words seemed to flow out of me. At least most of the time.

The type of journaling that I do and have done is called free-writing. It’s easy to do. You simply put your pen down on a blank piece of paper and write. Beautiful words, and mostly not so beautiful words, come out on the paper.

However, this is the exception.

For most people journaling isn’t easy and is intimidating. Even knowing that journaling could benefit them, it takes too much effort.

One of my goals in life is to show people that journaling doesn’t have to be horrible. Even if you aren’t a “writer” you can still journal.

New Learning

Through taking a class about journaling, I’ve been teaching a Write to Heal class through my day job and have been learning a lot about journaling. More than I ever thought possible. I’ve discovered things that I only knew by instinct.

One of the things that I have recently learned is about daily check-ins. Normally I am a morning pages person, which means that anything that comes out, is what comes out.

But check-in pages are different. Basically, daily check-ins are sentence starters that you answer each and every day. It doesn’t matter if you do these in the morning or evening. I’ve been experimenting with my days to see which works for me and this is a night thing.

The other thing about a daily check-in – it only takes a few minutes. Literally, writing out a few sentence stems each day takes 2-3 minutes and is normally less than 5. And I am often surprised by my answers as I write mine out.

Journaling is a uniquely personal thing!

Before I give you the questions I want you to keep in mind a couple of things.

1. Journaling is your very own practice. There are no right or wrong answers.
2. Let the template I give you be suggestions. If you are working on a specific goal – add that in. If the questions don’t work for you, change them. Make it personal.

Here are the daily check-ins sentence starters:

-Tomorrow…
-I feel vulnerable about…
-I feel grateful about…
-I feel pride regarding…
-I aspire to someday…
-Achieving my goals would be easier if I…

That’s it. Six sentence starters that can help you make positive changes in your world.

If you aren’t someone who journals, I would encourage you to find a simple journal and begin with these sentence starters. Since they only take a couple of minutes, there is nothing to hold you back from starting a journal.

Let me know if you try this journaling technique. I would love to hear from you. Please leave a comment below.

Until next time,
Angela