This article is part of a series on journaling.

In part 1, we explore The Power of Writing Things Down – what are reasons for keeping a journal, what happens when journaling, who are the people who do it and what keeps you back from trying it yourself.

In part 2, we introduce The Journaling Framework & Toolbox – examining the different elements of journaling and possible options to choose from to create your own journaling practice.

In part 3, we put it all into use to Creating Future You. We consider several ways how you can use your journal as a tool for personal development, providing the space for deep reflection and playful creation of Future You.

Now it’s time to put it all into context and develop your own journaling practice. It’s important to note that there is no one best journaling routine that fits all, nor will your own routine stay the same over time. Allow yourself to evolve. Recognize that journaling is a means to an end, a tool that supports your personal development and growth. What met your needs yesterday may no longer be enough to help you overcome a problem today. What is useful today will become irrelevant when you have evolved into your next identity.

This Journaling Playbook is an invitation to experiment. Your journal doesn’t have to be pretty – although it could be – or complete, as long as it helps you achieve your next goals. So don’t take it too seriously while you’re taking it seriously – allow yourself to be messy or sloppy while you’re journaling. Important thoughts can fit in the margins of a newspaper, and there can be valuable books full of beautifully written yet emotionally empty lines.

If you need some inspiration, find some possible strategies below.

The easiest way: Just start writing…

There is a value in the process of writing itself. Wherever you want to start, don’t overthink, just start. Take what you have, sit down and do it. Let your intuition guide you for what you need next. Notice while you write where your thoughts and imagination lead you and follow their guidance. You can change your mind anytime and try something new. You can follow one path today and change course next week.
But beware: Don’t let the imperfection become your excuse for stopping or procrastinating. Accept the messiness and chaos as part of the process. This is about the doing, no judgement allowed. Stop your inner censor.

The function of a journal may evolve around different purposes that kind of oscillate around the timeline. For example, sometimes you may journal for processing a recent experience with a certain person, then dig deeper for root causes by going back further on the timeline and explore deeper emotions from your childhood, then shift to daydreaming in the current moment and later do some intention setting for the next occasion where you will meet this person again. By remembering and synthesizing you can develop a better understanding how this person impacts your emotions and behaviors which allows you to make adjustments to your own contributions to the relationship. You can use the timeline method with other experiences not related to a person, of course.

The approach of iterating between forward planning and backward reflection could be a useful method to achieve goals. To set a goal and anchor it in your subconscious, you might journal about the future state – the future state that you will have arrived at once you have achieved this goal. You could then journal backwards about your steps and plans to achieve this goal, breaking it down to smaller chunks, highlighting not only the actions, but also the behaviors and habits that are required to make progress towards this goal. Then, you could practice a daily reflection about your behaviors and use your insights to do some root cause analysis on why you did or did not follow-through. This could lead you into journaling about the past and give you some hints on what hinders you to do what seems easy but turns out difficult.

If you have habits and behaviors that hinder your growth, like procrastination or self-sabotage, you might want to go back into the past and explore related experiences and memories. You might, for instance, recall a teacher or other authoritative figure who has caused some limiting beliefs by things they said or did – for example causing “art shaming” by criticizing one of your drawings or your singing performance in front of the class, so that you now believe you are “not good at art”.

Although this happened many years ago, those limiting beliefs may keep you from following your passion of making art. You are hiding, doubting that it is worth it.

You could use your journal to go back into the past and deal with the problem at the time when it was created. Now, as an adult, you have the ability to much better deal with obnoxious people than you had as a kid. You can deal with them at eye level. You can visit your teacher as the person you have become, with the self-confidence, strengths and resources you have gained by now, which makes this conversation a fair one. You might notice that just by imagining this moment of face-to-face conversation, the problem might dissolve. You might even experience a major shift of perspective if you realize that this person is meanwhile very old and fragile – maybe even dead – so that you can transform your intimidation into empathy (pity, even).

You might realize that this person becomes insignificant and irrelevant to what you try to achieve in the future, hence freeing your path from emotional clutter. Your journal can become the space in which this transformation happens.

You want to improve your overall mood and mindset and notice that “just doing it” does not work in this case.

You can explore the connections between what you do and how you feel in your journal. You can throw further data into the equation if necessary. If you record data – habits, behaviors, the weather, nutrition – and emotions, mood, and energy over time, you might detect some patterns and connection that might not be immediately apparent.

Then, you can start experimenting – will changing your evening routine improve sleep? Will changing your nutrition lead to a shift in your moods? Whatever it is you want to explore, your journal can become your lab for experimenting and designing your useful behaviors.

You can use this idea at different scale on the timeline. The above version describes a narrow scope, linking behaviors from the near past with current outcomes. You can also apply this concept to the further past, and the near and further future. You can play on the timeline prompted by the following questions:

What did I do as a child, and how did I feel?
What can I do today in order to recreate this effect?

How do I want to feel in the future, and what do I need to do to achieve this?
What do I need to do today so that I can get there?

Your journal can be the place to generate the future. In your journal, you can explore versions of Future You as you wish. You can be everything and everybody in your journal.

Very often, we fall into the Have-Do-Be trap, a consumption bias that lures us into thinking that if only we HAD something, then we could DO something, so that we finally can BE somebody.

In your journal, you can dissolve this bias and turn this sequence around. BE the somebody you want to become first, then reverse-engineer how you became this person. You might make some interesting discoveries.

Version one, you gain a better understanding of what the BEING means. A good parent. A caring daughter. A good boss. A creator. An artist. You take on the future identity you want to develop and start with BEING who you want to become. From there, you can explore how this translates into DOING. Is it really necessary to bake a picture-perfect, instagram’able birthday cake for your 4-year-old son to be a good parent? With all the bells and whistles, the decorations, the 7-color rainbow icing on top – and the heavy workload of doing all this yourself? A mother of three once said to me: “The kids are absolutely happy with lemon muffins I make from a cake mix. Saves me a full day which I can then spend with them, actually celebrating.” You might realize that it is not time that is missing from the BEING, but a sense of pragmatism and simplicity.

Version two, you might understand that it is not the “not HAVING” that keeps you from becoming Future You, but it is the “not DOING”. Something keeps you back from doing the things you need to do, and it is not having time, money, or other external resource. Ernest Hemingway said: “There is nothing to writing. All you have to do is sit at a typewriter and bleed.” Your journal might help you to discover and let go of limiting beliefs by looking backwards from the place you want to go. Writers write. Runners run. Good bosses do listen to their people. It’s not HAVING the title that is missing, it is DOING the leading.

Version three, you might actually discover that you actually dislike the DOING that is necessary to become or BE imagined Future You. Training for a marathon really sucks. Even dream jobs come with some kind of grind or the other, and you better find out that the corner office is full of duties you hate DOING before you lean your ladder to the wrong wall and become a person whos life you don’t want to HAVE.

Do you sometimes wonder what you could have been if <some conditions that were not met> would have been met?
Is there a “what-if” simmering in the back of your mind?

What if I hadn’t grown up in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere where I did not have access to a music teacher – would I have learned to play the piano and be a professional musician by now?

What if I had gone to a different school – would I be <insert dream profession here> by now?

What if I had met <name of recently met colleague> earlier in life – would I have married him instead of <insert name of current husband>?

What if I had decided to <insert decision not taken> – would I have achieved <insert life-long dream that has not been fulfilled>?

What if I decided for <option A> and against <option B> – would I regret it?

Sometimes we wish we had chosen a different path, had made different decisions. Or that our circumstances had been different, or other people had taken different decisions which impacted how our life has unfolded.

Or – maybe even more confusing – we want to be too many things at once, resist to let go of options we cannot all pursue in parallel. Our identities are conflicting or competing, cluttering our mind and leading to distraction and procrastination.

We are caught in a “what-if” game, which occupies our mind and blocks creative energy.

You can use your journal to play around with different identities with the aim of making peace with the past and circumstance and free your mental and emotional resources for constructive use in the present and in the future.

Let’s explore some ways of how you could do this.

First, allow yourself to explore the different options of “possible lives” by thinking about them not so much in terms of circumstance, but identities. Put yourself in the center of your writing, the person you could have become, if your life had taken some other path than the one it took. Try to put a label to that identity. Explore in your journal who you are in each of the different options and put a label on this. Find a noun describing this identity – e.g., the musician, the doctor, the wife.

Explore this identity further – write about what attracts you in this identity. What is the driving force behind your wish of becoming, let’s say, a professional musician? Is it the beauty of the music? Is it the act of playing the piano, the process of making music? Is it the awe it inspires, the emotional connection to the piece? Or is it the live performance – the connection to the audience, enabling others to feel it, too? Is it the applause – the recognition, maybe the fame you wish to receive in return?

Deconstruct what it means to you to be that person. Maybe rather than just a musician, you see yourself as a performer in the first place.

Now you know the essence, the core of what you are grieving.

Explore how you could add this essence to your current life. How can you integrate the essence of the musician – e.g., the performance – into your current identity?

Even if it might be too late to go pro with your piano playing, how can you still strengthen this core aspect of performing into your current profession and do what you had done, if only <insert different circumstance>?
As a math teacher? As a team lead in a software development context? As an HR manager who organizes recruiting events at universities?

In all those real lives, there is some room to perform.

In your journal, you can also think ahead (remember, you can do what you want in your journal) and explore how you can do and have more of what you value in other, shelved or parked identities, in your future.

How can you re-frame your life in a way that you become more of who you earlier wanted to become but opted against, while staying who you are now?

What does being a math teacher mean to you today, and how could you integrate “performing” into your own definition of this identity?  How would your identity look like if you could upgrade it to contain some new features that you take over from some other dormant identity?

In your journal, you can reinvent yourself in any way you wish.

What is stopping you from moving into an alternative identity? You can journal about a radical shift into a new path and try on a different identity. From a career in finance to becoming a monk, from being an actress to becoming a mountain guide – people have done all sorts of re-invention.

For some careers it might be too late, but there are plenty of options out there that are still realistic.

Write about what it takes.

But beware – you might actually find out that it is a hell lot of work. But you might also find out that it is absolutely worth it.

This exploration might also lead you to some ideas about a portfolio career, breaking out of the 9-to-5 and mixing and matching your own combination of who you are and what you do for a living.

There is another side of the coin. Maybe you conclude that there is no way you can catch up with an old dream. At some point in life, professional ballet dancing is an option available to very few only, and very likely not to you.

If you are still clinging, having a hard time to let go of a dream identity from the past, you can use your journal to deal with the downsides of this identity.

What is it you don’t like our wouldn’t like in being a professional musician? If the core attraction of this identity is the emotion you would put into your playing, but the performance as such is not your primary interest, that might be useful to acknowledge. There is a lot of stress involved, the inconvenience of traveling, the need to perform despite feeling otherwise.

You can make peace with not having the upsides by realizing that you are saved from the downsides of an old dream.
You might find out that your life is pretty good as it is.

There might be aspects of your current life that bother you, still. You could use your journal to explore what it is that feels wrong.

You might be completely happy in your identity as a consultant, but there is this one very difficult client you need to work with. You like the work with his team, but you dread the meetings with him as he is acting in very negative ways, no matter how you try to prepare.

You could use your journal to try on different mindsets and write about possible outcomes. You could then re-frame your role, for example from being a consultant to this client to becoming a coach to his team who enables them to better deal with their difficult boss.

You upgrade your identity and integrate elements of coaching into your identity as a consultant.

Thus, you can create your own identity toolbox to support your current path of life and achieve higher levels of maturity and serenity with the identity you have chosen to explore next.

Everything is possible in your journal. It creates options for your real life.

Let us conclude with another view on our Journaling Framework.

We have explored how you can use the inner circle – between the near future and the recent past to support your planning and reflection – in order to achieve goals or work on behavior change. Sometimes, this narrow timeframe is not enough, though.

You might need to cross over to the outer circle of the further past in order to reframe old narratives that keep you stuck in old beliefs and mindsets.

Or you might want to explore the far future to create an attractive pull towards the next identity you want to develop.

You can consider journaling as just another task you need to squeeze into your busy day. Or you can consider it a tool for personal development that unlocks important insights and enables inner processes that help overcome obstacles and resistance.

What I like most about journaling is the creative potential, the platform it provides for limitless exploration, the playground where ideas can mingle.

Let me know how you use it and what journaling does for you.