Keeping a personal journal helps organize your thoughts, desires, and needs. Psychologists agree that this is a great way to self-knowledge. But not everyone understands how to keep a personal diary. Some confuse it with the weekly, others consider frivolous children's fun. In fact, it can become a tool in the construction of personality, a place where one can speak, be heard and understood. After all, the most important thing is to learn to understand yourself. There are some simple recommendations on how to make the diary process convenient and easy.
Choose a convenient format
Some people are more accustomed to writing by hand, others will prefer an electronic text editor, while others will be interested in online resources offering free storage of secrets. The format does not play much importance, as long as it is convenient. Many are interested in how beautifully to keep a personal diary. Creative approach is encouraged.
This is the place where you can draw in the margins, use colored pens, paints, and express emotions not only in writing, but also graphically. For example, you can characterize the day with a smiley face (sad, smiling, laughing, in love, etc.), a picture from the Internet, or a real photo taken that day. Next, describe what happened in words.
But it is not necessary to excel too much. Keeping a diary can be reduced exclusively to the verbal format. It is advisable to highlight dates or important events / emotions so that you can easily find them when you need to re-read the records.
To be honest
The main rule is honesty! Why keep a diary if it contains corrupted data? The meaning of a personal diary is to say things that are exciting, point out to yourself the strengths and weaknesses, try to be as unbiased and impartial as possible. You can try to consider the situation from the outside, to assess their behavior.
We must not be afraid to admit bad deeds. Some situations and thoughts will cause when they describe shame, disgust, constraint. But that is why they need to be spoken, to understand where they come from and what causes them. The diary is a secret cache, closed to prying eyes, here you can speak honestly and openly. To make this comfortable, it is enough to take care of data privacy. To do this, you can put a password on the file or safely hide the paper version.
Define the "interlocutor"
People refuse to keep a personal diary, because they can not conduct impersonal communication. If it is difficult to simply describe what happened, you can choose a mental companion. How to keep your personal diary, it's up to you. Someone prefers to refer to the diary, others communicate with God, and still others write to deceased relatives, as a rule, to one of the parents, or friends who have passed away. This creates the impression of real communication. You can turn to yourself, even to the use of your name, as if discussing yourself from the outside. For example: "Masha, today you were at your best, but it upset me how you behaved with your best friend."
Execute can not be pardoned
You can not blame yourself for bad deeds, scare punishment. Everyone has the right to make mistakes. You need to allow yourself to allow them. How to keep a diary so as not to turn it into a conviction? We must once again recall the rule of impartiality and objectivity. If a situation occurred in life in which a person behaved differently than he would like or the behavior caused regret, you need to figure out what motivated him at that moment, why he did it that way. If the situation has led to undesirable consequences, it is necessary to try to level or soften them. Such an approach is more effective than samoedism. Praise also there is a place. Achievements and happy moments will decorate memoirs.
Emotions are more important than events.
Starting to keep a diary, you need to remember that events in life only reflect the inner atmosphere. Describing what happened during the day, it is necessary to give him an emotional coloring, to show his attitude. Impartiality manifests itself during the analysis, but first you need to give an outlet to the feelings. Allowed to get angry, hate, feel sorry for themselves, be weak. This will help to see what kind of life situations and actions cause these emotions and eradicate them.
Do not force yourself to take notes
If there is nothing to talk about or today there is no desire to write, it is not worth forcing it. If there were a set of rules on how to keep a diary, it would stand at the very beginning. Keeping a personal diary is a voluntary confession, when thoughts and emotions cannot be kept in oneself and you want to throw them out. If the need for this is not felt, you can throw revelations for a few days or even weeks.
Form style
Thinking about how to start a personal diary, people believe that they have no talent for writing, which is absolutely not needed here. This is a personal territory, where they do not scold for grammatical and spelling errors, there is allowed slang, fictional words. The more individual the diary, the better.
Comments from the future
If the diary is kept electronically, you can periodically go back a few months or years ago and comment on your entries. This can be done in parentheses, highlighting the statement in a different color. It is important not to correct what has been written, but simply to supplement it, relying on experience. For example, having left a record in May that a person has lost faith in love and will never fall in love again, in July he can add a note with the note “how wrong I was”. This is part of the work on your personality, a visual way of dealing with stereotypes of thinking.
Online blog
You can keep a diary online in blog format. It will be difficult to call it personal, because it will be made public, but other people will be able to comment on the recordings, give advice, and share similar experiences. It is possible that there will be detractors who are ready to condemn.
There are resources on the Internet where you can both start keeping a personal diary with or without publication. That is, it is stored on the server, to which there is always access, but no one will see it except for the author. The advantages of this option in round-the-clock access from any device. Some sites offer additional tools for conveniently maintaining personal records - individual design, text formatting.
Reread diary
How to start keeping a diary is now clear. But it is also important to periodically reread it. This is especially necessary when situations arise in life that have already occurred. Then the records will help avoid the repetition of old mistakes. Sometimes it's just interesting to read the story of your own life. You can analyze your height or, on the contrary, understand when a deviation from the intended course of life has appeared.
Remember that there are no rules on how to keep a personal diary. This is a personal space of a person, his world, in which he is a narrator and a reader at the same time. It should be helpful, soothe, relax, help get rid of the burden, make happy.
