I have taken a lot of personal development courses in my life, and one thing I know is that all personal development courses help us take a deep dive into our lives so we can get to know ourselves and better understand what we want. There’s something else that does that, too, and it’s called a journal prompt.
What Is A Journal Prompt?
A journal prompt is a question, statement, quote, idea, or word that helps you reflect and write about something.
For instance, ‘favorite restaurant’ could be a journal prompt that gets you writing about a restaurant you love and why you like it so much.
Journal prompts are great to help you zone in on a specific aspect of a topic and start writing.
Most people select a theme for the month and then create daily journal prompts for the entire month to help them dig into that theme.
The theme options are endless. You can focus on anything you want from donuts to the specific goals you have. Relationships, mental health, physical health, specific goals, the past, gratitude, creativity, or anything else could be a theme for the month.
And the journal prompts are just as endless as the themes.
Why Journaling Off Prompts Is Such A Good Idea
By using journal prompts, we get to know ourselves better and start to figure out what we want. With the right prompts, we can really dig down into our lives and find out those answers that we need to find.
A month of daily prompts can give us a lot to reflect on and also give us an appropriate amount of time to start to make changes.
If you are trying to implement a new goal or habit into your life, then writing off daily journal prompts in line with that goal or habit can help solidify why you want to achieve the goal or habit and keep your motivation high as you work towards achieving it.
For example, if you are trying to go vegan, you can create some prompts to help you reflect on why you want to go vegan, how it will benefit you, how you can easily make it happen, how you can overcome pitfalls, and more, and spend a lot of time reinforcing your desire to go vegan.
This is why I love the Mindvalley quest format so much. All of the Mindvalley quests I’ve taken are focused on tackling one course for a specific amount of days. Each day you look at a different aspect of the larger theme, reflect on that aspect, and implement new things into your life if needed. That’s what journal prompts are like.
Each day you reflect on one aspect of something bigger and you can discover new things about yourself or your desires and then implement things into your life if needed.
Where To Find Journal Prompts That Fit Your Needs
You can find plenty of done-for-you journal prompts out there, which can come in handy. When you have ideas each day for journaling, you don’t have so much pressure to think of something. You’re more likely to do your daily journaling because your prompts are already set up in place.
You can find journal prompts all over the internet. Just search for journal prompts, and if you want to focus on something specific, add that in. For instance, journal prompts for relationships.
If you want to be surprised or don’t have something specific you want to focus on, Boho Berry does a journaling challenge each month focused around different themes. This is also great if you want to interact with other people while journaling as Kara has a private Facebook group for you to get on and talk about the journaling prompts.
And, of course, you can find plenty of journal prompt journals on Amazon or in bookstores, like these:
You Can Also Create Your Own Journal Prompts
This is easier than it sounds.
Figure out what theme you want to focus on. Then, go through blogs, talks, and other sources to come up with prompts to help you reflect on that theme.
For instance, if you want to focus on improving your relationship, you can search for articles, talks, and videos about improving relationships. Pull out key points from those sources and form them into prompts.
For example, if one article suggests that communication is important to your relationship, a prompt may be, ‘What are my weaknesses in communication?’ Or, if the article suggests showing your partner respect, your prompt may be, ‘How can I show my partner more respect on a daily basis?’
It’s very easy to come up with 30 prompts (or however many you want) that help you reflect on a specific topic or area of life.
This is what I tend to do. I enjoy researching things and coming up with ideas, and I find that I can easily come up with questions or prompts that help me explore and discover.
For instance, as part of my year-long work on the teachings in The Personal Mastery Quest, I have created relevant prompts to go along with the lesson I’m working on. Right now, it’s ‘Good thing, bad thing, who knows?’ My first week of prompts look like this:
- List 3 bad things that happened in your life that actually turned out to be good.
- Why do I automatically judge some things as bad?
- How can I know for sure things are going work out poorly when I make that assessment?
- How does labeling things as bad affect my life?
- How does labeling things as good affect my life?
- How can I refrain from labeling something as bad or good?
- If everything was perfect, would I really grow?
Even when I don’t feel like sitting down with my journal, these prompts get me going and help me reflect on things relating to the lesson I want to implement into my life.
In the end, journal prompts can help you tackle areas of your life that you want to tackle. They can help you discover new things about yourself – limiting beliefs, what you want, what you don’t want, etc. And, the best part is you are writing this all down in a journal, so you can look back a month or a year from now and actually see your progress in thinking and behavior.
