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Purpose of self-reflection. How personal diaries work.

Neelix IO Pty Ltd • Jun 14, 2021
Why to engage in self-reflection practices by meditation and journaling? This blog is written for those who ask about the meaning of diaries and self-reflection. Diaries can be immensely helpful. However, diaries are useful only if two conditions are fulfilled. Firstly, you need to be doing it for reasons of self-reflection (self-reflection is outlined later in this post). The other intention is to explore causality. Life does not change if you just do something mechanically. 

Before discussing self-reflection and what you write into a diary, let us paint an abstract picture about why some of us need a diary more than others.

We are all different. Some have a strong core and an enlightenment of sorts. Such folks ride the waves of life and are instinctively aware of the bigger picture. The other type of people are more of a body surfer type. There is a sense that some progression to the next level is yet to happen. If you are feeling tired from life, and even feel like a ball in a Pinball machine, then you are a body surfer. Waves of challenges probably knocked you around a bit. Unfortunately, it is not possible just to give a floating device to someone. Also, it is not possible to transfer that sense of the bigger picture. Be realistic about the limitations of fads, isms or promises of success sold for money. For some, a compassionate counsellor can certainly be very helpful. However, you will need to do some real work.

When it comes to diaries, write anything into it, provided it is brutally honest - daily experiences, notes about personal or professional relationships, food satisfaction, leisure, addictions, feelings about life, find some examples. Posts can be very short or blog like. It is also useful to complement reflective writing with a picture, humour or a meme - this helps to relay emotional charge. As a combination, these diary posts form a stream of experiences. There is no obligation to make daily or intra-day records. Do it as frequently as it is comfortable for the way your life is organised. Do not get addicted to diary posting either...

Individually, these observations have relatively low value. In order to enable the bigger picture, you need to track impact and link experience categories to your post.

Here is an example of one short diary entry. 
  • Post : “Played tennis with a random stranger today. Wow, it is not as scary to step outside boundaries. There are really nice and interesting people out there to meet.”
  • Linked experience categories : Sport, Social Life, Health (in Neelix you create experience categories for your own context)
  • Impact weight : -5 (it is a soft measure used to relatively compare experience to each other; you choose the scale you like)

These diary posts build into a stream of experiences. Here are few more examples:

 

The point of all this is self-reflection. 


Self-reflection is a process that enables you to decipher truth behind experience connections and truth about the state of yourself. It is common for people to perceive themselves in a better or worse way than what they truly are. Being wrong is part of being human. However, it is not an excuse to be wearing coloured glasses for the rest of your life.


“No legacy is so rich as honesty.” - William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well


Important part about being brutally honest in private and journaling logs, is not to treat them as avenues solely for complaints, sad stories or self-punishment. “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” - Oscar Wilde. Facing one's own demons requires a sufficiently light, innocent and even vulnerable heart. Do use The Skill of Humor as the helper (Andrew Tarvin). Self-reflection enables you to see the bigger picture.


Ability to contemplate and meditate fulfils the second object of keeping a diary - e.g. the intent to explore connections. Self-reflection expedites the acknowledgement of the Achilles heel in your character, and articulates boundaries that may be limiting you.


Please be mindful that the discovery is not going to be immediate. It is not dissimilar to staring at an abstract picture and suddenly being able to see the shape intended by the artist. Whether you think of this picture as a fluke of the universe or an intention of the maker, you still need to make a choice what to do next.


Our mind instinctively tells us to be searching for “yes” answers to many questions. Confirmation bias is all around us. This is like light pollution in big cities that stops us from seeing stars and dreaming of something bigger. 


Armed with self-reflection, you should be searching for the “no” answer. One “no” is worth a thousand of “yeses”. It is unrealistic to change everything in our life. However, changing just one thing can dramatically turn many things around. 


Once you are able to embark on the journey of change, start setting and tracking goals. Make sure you don't become a failed resolutions statistic - read more in this blog. As it is with diary entries, do not shy away from tracking anything meaningful and do pay attention to how one habit may be interacting with some other - for instance coffee consumption vs going to bed early vs achieving some other goals.


Neelix.IO social mission is to enable meaningful self-reflection of personal lives, as well as within family, groups of friends, teams or communities. Try it out today.



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