Journaling for Insight

From Waking Up app. Mark Matousek. These are direct quotes from his talk on the app.

Various exercises in journaling

• The roles you play: Examining our many personas can help us inhabit them with more freedom and skill. List all the personas you inhabit
• Your childhood story: The narratives around our early relationships are unreliable and open to revision. Exercise. How were you seen as a child? “Compliment over and over you’ve done better athletic or intellectually gifted impact yourself being labeled over sensitive empathy, for example or being smart either fostering confidence or perfectionism. These are just examples but they give you an idea how to proceed.”
• Self-labeling: The more aware we become of the labels we use, the less power they have to define us. “I want to compose a brief self portrait as possible. You’ve never met and don’t care about impressing simple declarative”
• Keeping secrets: space we can see the last pics of our lives, not only from others, but also from ourselves “What would the people closest to you most surprised to learn about you if you stop keeping secrets be specific as possible”
• How do you see: our perspective colors are experience of reality. Awareness can help us clarify it. “Describe your immediate surroundings in as much detail as possible”
• Your non-negotiable parts: our code treats make us unique, exploding them help us cope with adversity. “Aspects of your own identity that are non-negotiable. While of your unique features, if lost, fracture you sense of identity?”
• Near enemies some bad habits resemble good ones. Telling them apart is often crucial. “like you to write about the following prompt, are there destructive tendencies in your life that you sometimes mistake for virtuous ones for example do you pride yourself on your independence but struggle to ask for help when you really need it”
• Childhood virtues: the claiming the playful qualities of your you can enrich yourself your life as an adult. ‘I’d like to write about which qualities you had as a child you’d like to reclaim or emphasize in your life today’
• Selective disclosure: Fibs and euphemisms can protect our relationships. They also shape our own reality. “I want you to examine your own approach to selective disclosure. What half truths do you live with on a regular basis and how do they help or hurt your well-being? When do you allow yourself to tell lies and how do you justify this dishonest state are you aware that the stories you tell yourself may not be quite true?”
• Seeking attention: Examining how and when we want other others to think of us can help clarify our values. “I’d like you to explore what kind of attention you desire from others and what sorts of attention you definitely don’t want. How would you like to be appreciated? When do you withdraw or shrink your potential?”
• Nothing to prove: when we seek approval, we risk losing sight of who we are beneath our achievements. “I’d like you to explore the following question if you were free of the need to perform achieve or prove yourself how might that impact your life? How would you choose to spend your time if nobody else was looking and how might that affect self-esteem? Enjoy the practice”
• Questioning time: to reduce destruction and prioritize meaning is to turn the clock from phone to friend. “in today’s exercise, I’d like you to explore your relationship to time begin by asking yourself whether you see time as an enemy do you habitually race against the clock feeling you have more to do than you can comfortably handle are you troubled by the fear of missing out”
• Alone with yourself: clarifying your relationship to solitude can alleviate the stress of self avoidance. “I’d like you to write about solitude and how you feel about being alone with yourself are you at ease with stillness and self reflection does a aloneness enrich your quality of life”
• Becoming the other: reframing or challenges as someone else’s can ease reactivity and widen perspective. “I’d like you to examine a current life challenge as if it were happening to someone else using the third person he, she or they”.
• The myth of forgiveness: it’s not about excusing others of their faults, but freeing ourselves of our past. Ava Egger: Forgiveness is a selfish act to free yourself of the past. “Who or what you need to forgive in order to move forward in your life ask yourself what stopping you from forgiving now including any beliefs you might have about why carrying a grudge and remaining stuck in the past is somehow the right thing to do”