The Edge Coaching

Some people keep them, others don’t. I believe they are an important tool to anyone interested in their own personal development and learning. I have used a journal, or diary or scrapbook - whatever you want to call it - in many ways over the past years; sometimes on a daily basis, sometimes less regularly. These days the material in my journal provides an important source of ideas, themes, quotes and pictures that feed into my own writing, my coaching sessions with clients or the learning and devlopment programmes I deliver for my clients.

Anyone can write a journal – it isn’t about being a great writer, perfect speller or creative thinker. It’s about you writing in response to life experiences and events. It is important that this Journal is and expression of who you are. To this end I also suggest that you keep your journal to yourself and keep the reading of it to you alone; though feel free to share what you feel is appropriate with trusted others as part of your learning.

You might choose to take a diary approach and commit to writing something each day. I have used this approach over a number of years. Whilst I no longer do this, I wrote a side of A4 everyday for seven years during a key part of my learning journey. This daily reflection on my life and learning contributed to my transition from Arts and Theatre into the arena of personal and people development and still resonates today for me.

You don’t have to approach the Journal in this way, unless you choose to. Another approach might be to collect notes, references, jottings, pictures/drawings, mind maps, cut and paste text from books, newspapers and websites. I use this approach with the participants on the Leadership programme I run up in the North East - they use it to reflect on their learning about themselves and leadership throughout the programme.

How you organise your Journal is up to you. Some people will use dates/times, different coloured ink for different themes and so on. It depends what you want – do you want to be able to go back quickly to particular dates/themes/ etc or are you happy to ‘graze’ through the Journal to find something? If you want the former you need to create a structure to follow. If the latter you can put things in as they come to you without dates etc. Tip – if you are making notes about something you are reading, in both the above cases make sure you include the Title and Author plus the page number of the book (in case you want to go back to the original source).

However you choose to approach it, experiment with a journal, notebook or scrapbook. Use it over a period of time and see what approach works best for you. Above all, enjoy the exploration!