Journal Prompts for Staying on Top of Your Goals
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Journaling is honestly one of the best things I’ve started to do for myself. It’s something that I personally make a priority daily and since doing so, I have seen it make a drastic impact on both my mental and physical health. It has helped me become more connected to my goals, dreams, and ambitions, and ultimately it has helped me gain the confidence I need to go conquer them!
In this episode of Embrace Your Real, I share the exact same journal practice I do daily when I feel like I need some extra accountability for sticking to the goals I want to reach and the dreams I want to make my reality. So take out a pen and paper, because I know you’re going to want to take some notes!
And if you loved this episode, I know you will also love…
Episode 5: 10 Things I Do Every Morning to Win the Day
I believe it’s so important to dedicate time each morning to focus on yourself, your goals, your emotions, your priorities, and your growth. This is the best place to start when working towards embracing your real. Plus, having an established morning routine will lead you into your day with greater clarity, creativity, energy, purpose, focus, and drive. And in this episode, I share the ten things I personally do every single morning to help inspire you to develop your own morning routine.
Download your FREE LIVE BETTER Journal here.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, hey, beautiful human. Can I steal five minutes of your time? I have something super important to share with you, but I promise I'll be really quick. You're listening to my weekly bonus episode of Embrace Your Real with me, Julie Ledbetter. I'm about to give you a quick tip for building your confidence, honoring your body, and unconditionally loving your authentic self. Stay tuned if you're ready to embrace your real. Let's get it. Let's go.
Hello and welcome back to the Embrace Your Real Podcast. You are here for another bonus episode. I am so excited about today's episode because it is all about journaling. I'm going to just give you a quick tip on journaling, a quick little prompt. I've had a lot of you guys reach out to me about journal prompts in my DMs because I've been sharing little boomerangs of my morning. If you've been listening to my podcast for a while, you know that I swear by journaling. I love it. I feel like it has truly helped me change my relationship with myself, but also the outlook on my life, and it's helped me become more connected to my goals, my dreams, my ambition, and actually give me the confidence to go and conquer them instead of just letting them sit in my brain.
Journaling has helped me just feel more connected to everything. And also, it allows me the opportunity to just feel like I can visualize things that I have in my head, put them pen to paper, and it is incredible what happens neurologically when we do that. When we take things and extract them out of our brains and put them on paper so that we can physically see them. Journaling is something I could talk about for hours, so I'm just going to start by sharing my simple nightly check-in journal prompt that I think you will find super beneficial when helping you remain consistent towards your goals, whether it's fitness goals, honoring your body, nourishing your body, or just staying in a healthy mindset.
Before I do, you know I have to share the review of the day. Shelby Turner says, "The best podcast. Julie's podcasts are full of truths, motivation, and compassion. She shares godly truths that all women need to hear. This podcast is more than a podcast and you need to listen to, but it's one you actually learn from. I always look forward to the release of a new episode." Thank you so much for the review. If you haven't already rated and reviewed, it really does mean the world to us. We are over a hundred countries strong, and I have a big, audacious goal of reaching a million women with the Embrace Your Real podcast by the end of this year, so I need your help with that. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to do so.
I'm actually going to share a three-part journal prompt with you that I know will be super easy to incorporate into your nightly routine. Whether you have been journaling for a while, this might give you a good idea of some things that maybe you're not doing, or you're very, very new to journaling, I feel like I love a good go-to boom, boom, boom, to start with something because I can overthink things a lot. But if it's just given to me, then it's super easy for me to incorporate.
Part one. Before going to sleep, honestly rate yourself on a scale from one to five, how you did in the following areas, movement, mindset, and macros. Now, I don't want this to be a time where you judge yourself and you're hard on yourself and you're just going through all of your failures. I want you to just give yourself a general rating of, "How did I overall do today?" Because I think the more that we're honest with ourselves and the more we allow ourselves the opportunity to just express how we're feeling or how we did, it allows ourselves to see the areas that we could focus on better tomorrow.
So, did you honor your body with movement for at least a half an hour? Remember, this is not a workout. This could be a walk, a jog, playing in park, cleaning, whatever it is. Did you honor your body with at least 30 minutes of movement? Did you push yourself in your workout or did you just go through the motions? If you did do a workout, were you distracted or were you intentional? Did you do the best that you could with what you had that day? Do you feel energized or do you feel drained? So ask yourself, energy-wise, do you feel energized? Do you feel drained? And how would you rate your movement for the day overall? Did you enjoy what you did? Was it something that you would do again? In terms of the movement area, those are some questions that you can ask when you're overall just rating yourself on a scale from one to five. Again, no judgment here. This is just an honest evaluation of what you did.
The second area of macros, did you count your macros? You guys know I'm a huge believer in macros. I truly believe that it allows you to eat enough for what your body needs. So ask yourself, did you count your macros? Did you overindulge or did you eat in moderation? Did you count your macros for breakfast and lunch, but skip dinner? Did you hit your protein goal? How would you overall rate your macros for the day? Just, again, being honest with yourself and allowing yourself the opportunity to physically, in the journal prompt, see how you did in terms of eating that day. If you don't count macros, this could just be, "How do I overall feel in the way that I nourish my body? Do I feel like I honored my body with the foods that I am intaking?"
And lastly, your mindset. How is your mindset throughout the day? Did you choose to speak to yourself negatively or did you choose to speak to yourself positively? How do you feel like your overall self-talk was today? Did you hype yourself up or did you talk yourself down? Did you feel motivated or lazy? Just overall rate your mindset.
Keep in mind, this is not judging yourself. It's not making yourself feel bad or making yourself feel like a failure. This is a practice that will help you bring awareness to these areas of your life that maybe need improvement without spending too much time dwelling on them. I think, and I have noticed, the times that I'm very intentional about pinpointing something in my life that might need a little bit of adjusting, is much better to be just straight up forward intentional about identifying it instead of overall being like, "I just feel so lazy and I feel so discouraged," but you're not taking any time to pinpoint what it is. So by looking at these three key areas of your life, I think it's really important and it helps us be honest with ourselves and be more self-aware, especially in the things that we need to approve upon, and this is kind of a great way to do it.
Part two of the journal prompt is I want you to write down three things that made today awesome. Really get specific with them so you can connect the feeling and importance to each one. I truly believe that the more we focus on the positive, the more positivity we will experience in our lives, because our brains are actually wired to automatically focus on the bad things. 100 things go right in our day, but our brain chooses to focus on that one thing that went wrong and then that one tiny little thing that went wrong is now the main focus of your brain. That is the one thing that is blowing up and that's the only thing that you can focus on. We experience on small, bad things, and then we say we had the worst day ever because our brain is just fixating in that one little thing. Journaling about three things that were awesome helps us to rewire our brain to pay more attention to those good things in our life, not just the bad.
Part three. Determine what you need to do tomorrow to improve upon today. This, again, doesn't have to be harsh, but gently remind yourself of what action or actions you could have taken today in order to make tomorrow even better. Make a list of those things that you should do tomorrow. This just ensures that we're not complaining about not having energy, or complaining about that we can't stick to our macros or that we feel like we're not achieving the goals that we want to do, because we are now identifying certain areas of our life that may be holding us back in those specific goals that we have.
So maybe tomorrow you need to be more intentional about drinking water or challenging yourself to do a few more reps or be just more mindful in your workout or meal prep and pack a lunch ahead of time or listen to an uplifting podcast, or take your dogs for a walk or call that friend, or go out for coffee with this person. Really taking control of your life and not just letting every single day slip by, and then you get to the end of the day and you lay your head on the pillow, and you're like, "I feel like my day just happened to me. I feel like everything that I went through just happened to me and you were not in control of it."
I need you to create this list. I want you to be intentional about this journaling and really allow yourself to go through these things judgment free, just being honest with yourself and see what comes from it. Because I have personally found so much effectiveness in doing this. It has not only helped me reach my goals, but it's overall helped me with the happiness in my life and feeling more content and more in control of my life. Because I think it's really easy when we're not intentional about these small things, they become big things. And then we get to the end of a month and we're like, "What happened to August or what happened to 2020?" We get to the end of the year, and we're like, "What happened?" And it was because we were not taking advantage of the little moments.
This journal prompt will take you less than 10 minutes, but I promise you at the end of 30 days, it will completely transform your life. You will get to the end of the 30 days and you'll feel much more present. You'll feel much more in control. You'll feel much more aligned with what you're doing and asking yourself if the actions and the thoughts and things that you're doing throughout the day, if they are aligned to your overall vision for your life. And then it allows you to get on this track where in six months, in a year, in two years, in 10 years, you will look back and be amazed at what has come from the daily practice of less than 10 minutes being intentional with this.
Again, to recap on my three-part nightly journal prompt. Number one, rate yourself on a scale from one to 10, how well you did in the areas of movement, mindset and macros. Number two, write down three things that made your day awesome. And number three, write down what you can do tomorrow to make tomorrow better than today.
Now, if you love this episode, I know you'll also love episode five, 10 Things That I Do Every Morning To Win My Day, so be sure to tune into the episode. I really go in depth of the 10 things that I do every morning to set myself up to win the day, every single day. I know you'll find some value in it and maybe pick one or two or maybe all 10 things to implement into your daily routine.
Thank you so much for tuning in. If you have a friend or two friends or three friends that you feel like could benefit from this nightly journal prompt, I just want to encourage you to share this out with your friends. So post it up on your story, tag me, tag them. You can copy this link, whether you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, you can copy this link share out in a text message and just see what comes from it. Just say, "Hey girl, I'm looking out for you. I want you to feel your best, and I listened to this podcast and I gained some value from it, maybe you can gain some value from it." Just leave it as simple as that and just let them choose if they want to listen to it or not. But at least you did your part in sharing it out. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll talk to you guys in the next episode.
All right sister, that's all I got for you today, but I have two things that I need you to do. First thing, if you're not already following me on the gram, be sure to do so, juliealedbetter. Yes, it's with an a in the middle. For that daily post-workout real talk, healthy tips and tricks and honest accountability to keep your mind and heart in check. The second thing, be sure to subscribe to Apple Podcasts to never miss an episode.
Thank you so much for joining me. It means the absolute world. And I'm going to leave you with one last thought. The most beautiful women that I have met in my life are the ones who are completely confident and secure in being authentically themselves. Remember that beauty goes so much deeper than the surface so go out there and embrace her real because you're worth it.