What shall I blog about this week?

 Hmm... What shall I blog about this week?  What shall I blog about this week? Ah I know.  I have recently come across the Genos app for Journaling: the Mindful Leader Journaling App.

It offers both an introduction to journaling, including the many benefits, and some tips. For example, once you start writing, keep going, even if you don't know what to write: something will come.  (See the start of this blog post, where I took that advice. It worked this time!)

It also invites you to choose between Personal Vision, Self Awareness, and Gratitude as the subject for your journaling, and then to choose a time for the exercise: 3, 5, or 10 minutes, or unlimited. Then it offers you a prompt sentence (or half sentence to be more accurate) to get you started.  For example: 'When I see my ideal future it looks like...' and off you go - and keep your pen on the paper, keep writing, until the timer tells you that your time is up.  If you don't like the prompt you can choose another, of course; it has hundreds in each category. 

The benefits claimed - and referenced - are many, including reducing stress, increasing self awareness and so on. 

It is best done with pen and paper, of course. In fact Genos advocate buying a nice quality Journal to make the whole process more pleasurable.

So now we get to that part of the blog post where I should share my personal experience, evaluate the pros and cons, say what I have learned both through journaling and about journaling, and so on.

And yet, I can't. For the truth is I haven't got started.  There are a few reasons for that. Until yesterday, I had forgotten about the app, and I only downloaded it yesterday afternoon. Also, I am embarrassed about my handwriting, which is lamentable. Further, I am trying to go paperless, so have no ready supply of nice books to write in. And so on. 

So, knowing what I do about myself, and how to turn intention into reality, I hereby commit to you, my readers (both of you) that I will try journaling on a regular, daily basis, using this app, for the next few weeks, and I will then report back to you, my accountability buddies, on my learning.  And if I don't I expect you to be very severe with me.

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With thanks to Eugene Chystiakov and Andrey Zvyagintsev for sharing their photos on Unsplash