Future-self journaling is a great way to harness your creativity to your advantage. Writing about your goals and plans for self-improvement helps you actually achieve them.
Future-self journaling is all about visualizing the best version of yourself. It can be focused on a wide variety of things, but all future-self journaling is made up of goals, ideas, and plans for the future. Depending on what kind of self-growth you are looking for, your journaling will be personal to you and the person you want to become.
Future-self journaling is a powerful tool that can affect your decision-making and your memory, helping you retrain your brain. In doing so, you push your brain to focus on growth and change. All it takes is a few minutes of journaling each day to help achieve your dreams.
Benefits of Future-Self Journaling
- Helps You Envision Your Future: writing down your plans for the future makes it much easier to imagine them clearly. Whether you are focused on relationships, your career, finances, fitness or something else, future-self journaling helps toward having a vivid image of where you want to be in the future.
- Increases Self-Awareness: future-self journaling focuses on changes and advancements you wish to see in your life. This makes it easier to understand where you are in relation to where you want to be. Becoming conscious of your current behaviors and beliefs will then help you make decisions that are more aligned with your goals.
- Gets You Motivated: journaling about your future is a great way to get excited and motivated for the next steps. This means you’ll stay focused and keep your eyes on the prize as well.
- Decreased Stress: having a plan for the future makes it easier to stay calm and unstressed about how you will get there.
- More Likely to Succeed: research shows that putting your goals, plans and ideas down on paper helps to picture them which actually makes it more likely that you will accomplish them.
- Memories: having a future-self journal provides a great memento to look back on when you’ve reached what you were aiming for. Having a journal to read through as evidence of your growth provides a nice reminder of how far you’ve come, and may help you stay on track for your next goals.
How to Start Future-Self Journaling
You can start by journaling for ten minutes per day. Choose three to five of the following prompts and continue reusing them for several months. After a while, you will be able to look back at your answers and see how they have evolved. If you feel your growth has become stagnant or you’re becoming uninspired by the prompts, pick a few others.
- What habits do you want to either break or instill in your life? How will this impact your future self?
- What are your short-term and long-term goals? What are some steps you can take today to help meet those goals?
- Why have you set your goals?
- What challenges might prevent you from reaching your goals, and what can you do about this?
- What are you grateful for today? What do you wish to be grateful for in the future?
- How will your future-self feel when you accomplish your goals?
- What do you want your future-self to experience more of?
- What are you proud of yourself for today?
- How can you focus on self-care today?
Along with answering a few of these questions, you should also write affirmative statements to help manifest your future. These should be statements focused on how you will reach your goals. Some examples include “I will practice meditation and mindfulness today,” “I will remain focused on my work this week” or “I love myself and accept myself.”
Your affirmations must be personal to you. Keep writing them down even if you don’t fully believe them. Soon, you will be exactly where you want.
Read more:
- How to Write a Journal and Make it a Habit: Benefits of Journal Writing
- How to Bullet Journal: Optimize Your Planning
- Self-Improvement: Why We All Need a Break from Self-Optimization
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