Journaling is more than spontaneously writing down your thoughts. It requires an intentional act. Setting a daily or weekly time to process your thoughts and behaviors is important.
It will negatively affect you if you don’t understand how you behave when certain things are said to you. Trigger points have a hold on you until you decide to react differently.
There are a million different opinions about everything we do in our lives. We need a reflective evaluation of what comes from our hearts without being influenced by others.
- Everyone has subconsciously wondered about their usual behavior.
Our behaviors are intertwined with the way we are raised. This is a universal response that we all can relate to. It’s not something that we do without being coerced by what we see, hear, and tangibly experience within our immediate environments.
- Without taking a practical step to evaluate our behavior we cannot fully understand how we respond to events.
It’s not what happens around you that determines who you are, but what you do about it. For example, the more you see violence around you, there’s something that happens to your behavior without even noticing it. If you resent that behavior and never deal with it, especially when it happens to the people you love, it might be something that makes you violent, ignorant, or angry.
- Awareness happens when we grow to realize what happens around us.
Self-awareness requires a practical stance. Being nonchalant is costly to your mental health. If you do not take a decisive position about what happens around you, you become a victim of your own environment.
Hard situations happen around us and sometimes to us. What makes the difference is how we choose to respond. Sometimes, it is the small realization that you are angry about something that happened a few days or decades ago.
- Engaging with your thoughts helps to facilitate a reflective moment.
Writing regularly about your experiences is the first step to expressing everything in your mind and heart. It helps to initiate the process of constantly reflecting.
The game-changing moment occurs when you start to read what you have written. It requires a deep dive into what you have expressed. The benefits of doing this are that you will see patterns in your behavior, recognize your triggers, and evaluate your responses.
- Real change in behavior starts when we have surpassed the lesson through wisdom.
Forgiveness, peace, and love occur at the stage where we get to know what has happened without being too emotional about the past. The present moment occurs when we are fully aware that the past doesn’t control how we respond.
The narrative changes when we hand over what we cannot change to God. Healing is the process that we proactively step into, it cannot be a passive state of mind.
Meditating on what we choose to do when displeasing events happen is the benefit of being self-aware. When unwarranted behavior occurs, we can select the appropriate behavior to protect ourselves and those around us. Wisdom is gained through reflective observations.
