Journaling Is a Core Practice for Leadership Development

Here are 5 strategies to help accelerate your growth.

There are many ways to develop as a leader, such as taking courses, reading books, attending seminars, or even hiring leadership coaches like me. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses, playing a unique role in your development. However, there is one practice that is fundamental in every leader's development toolset, and that is journaling.

Journaling allows you to observe and analyze your thinking in a way that no other feedback tool can match. By putting your thoughts on paper, you can see how you approach a situation, frame the context, process the information, and make decisions. This perspective provides us insights and allows us to make connections that are often elusive when thoughts remain in our heads. Furthermore, journaling is something anyone can do with the simplest of tools, which means it's cheap, accessible, and easy to start.

While just about any form of journaling can have benefits, there are a few techniques I use with executives who are looking to improve their leadership skills. While I like good old pen and paper, digital journaling apps can be just as effective and convenient. Learn and use these techniques to focus and structure your journaling for different situations.

1. Mind sweep

This technique is great for getting everything rattling around your head onto paper. Start by writing down all the thoughts, ideas, reminders, and anything else that pops into your mind. I find that after a few minutes, my thinking slows down. I'll take another few minutes to dig deeper to purge everything. Then, once I have a list in front of me, I can start processing things into action items, things to think about more later, and things I'm just going to forget about. Seeing the list allows my mind to let go of these and frees up space to concentrate and do focused work.

2. Decision making

One of the key skills I work on with leaders is decision making. In this journaling practice, we write to our future, more enlightened self. In our journal, we explain the situation as we see it, the information we have and how we analyze it, the options we can see, which option we're choosing and why, and what we expect our outcomes to be.

Later, we can review the entries and compare what we wrote with how things actually turned out. We look for things we missed and errors we made. Maybe we failed to gather some key information, missed an option that could have been better, or were blind to a risk that could have been avoided. Sometimes we find that there was nothing we could have done better. The goal here is to learn what we want to do differently in the future to avoid the same mistakes and to lock in good practices.

3. Envisioning

When striving toward a big goal or embarking on significant changes, the future can seem foggy and confusing. Taking some time and creating a clear and compelling vision of the future state we're working toward can provide motivation and clarity. I do this with individuals and teams to increase desire, uncover risks, and create alignment. The richer the descriptions you can use, the more impactful and valuable the process becomes.

4. Reflecting

Sometimes you need time to sit and recall what happened in a given situation and how you felt about it. Reflecting on an event and writing down specific details about what happened allows you to better see what actually happened. By recalling your emotional reactions, you can map how these things impacted and affected you. The key here is to separate what happened from the meaning you gave it. This practice allows you to see your subconscious at work so you can better prepare and handle these types of situations in the future.

5. Dumping

When you're overwhelmed and your mind is racing, or you just can't let something go and it's nagging you, dumping is a great technique. The focus here is to write anything and everything down that comes to mind as quickly as you can. Generally, I suggest 15-20 minutes to get the full effect. Set a time and just start writing, don't stop, and don't worry about spelling or grammar or even readability. The point here is to empty your mind. Don't overthink it. After the timer goes off, take a minute to relax. If you want, go back and see if there are any nuggets of ideas or action items, but you can just move on as well. The point here is to flush your mind of thoughts, not to process or analyze.

Many executives have made journaling a core personal practice and have written daily and created hundreds, even thousands, of entries, giving them a treasure trove of insights. If you're serious about your improvement and development as a leader, I highly recommend incorporating journaling into your daily routine.