Write your goals

• Journaling can be used to sort through turbulent emotions and to discover hidden lessons from your experience.
• Art journaling: using mixed media can help you express yourself in refreshing and unusual ways.
• Journals can help you reflect. Journaling is a method of allowing the light of understanding and compassion to shine on your past.

• Start writing about where you are in your life at this moment. Describe your living situation, your work, and your relationships.
• Don’t edit your thoughts or feelings and don’t correct your grammar. Don’t censor your thoughts.
• If there’s something you are struggling with or an event that’s disturbing you, write about it in the third person.

While many people recommend journaling in a physical notebook to give your brain a break from screens, if you’re having a hard time keeping up that practice, you can try using an app that you can whip out when you have an extra moment in the day.

Feel free to have your journal as disjointed as you want.

Leo Babatua of ZenHabits says he only writes his journal in bullet points; just three to six per day. By making it this easy, he says it’s much more attainable for him to keep it up.

Journaling eliminates intrusive thoughts about negative events and improves working memory. This leads to more energy for other mental activities, better stress, anxiety, and depression management.

Eliminating unnecessary thoughts, fears and concerns helps to reduce stress, boost self-esteem and free up mental space.

Let go of all the negative thoughts and emotions that make you feel bogged down. Monitor your thoughts regularly and try to replace your negative thoughts with positive ones.

• Internal: they overthink the things that don't go their way and are unable to put their focus onto something else.
• External: they yell, scream, or snap back at people when something isn't exactly how they want it.

This way, you can learn to be more in control of your reactions:

• Identify the things that bother you the most (rejection, criticism, or even something that has nothing to do with you).
• Think about basic contributing factors like lack of sleep, being hungry or thirsty, or being overworked.

• When you keep a journal, you can look back on important life events to read about how you felt at the time. You may also be able to learn from these past experiences.
• Writing about traumatic events results in physical and psychological health benefits. Journaling focuses on understanding traumatic events and makes people see these events with an extra level of clarity.

Start your daily journal off on the right foot by scheduling your writing for a set time every day.

• If you find your mind is most active in the morning, wake up 15 to 20 minutes earlier and jot down your thoughts then.
• If you prefer to record everything after the day is over, then make it an evening activity before you go to bed.

Is our tendency to overestimate the odds of our own success compared to other people's. 

Overly optimistic predictions can be dangerous, leading us to waste time and resources pursuing unrealistic goals. In the real world of business, things don't always work out for the best, and it serves us well to know when conditions are not on our side.

• Be skeptical of your own rosy expectations for your work. 
• Assume projects will be more difficult and more expensive than you initially think they will. 
• Don't trust your good ideas to manifest through positive thinking - be ready to fight for them.
• Trust the numbers. Numbers are firm but fair, and getting intimate with your business's cash flow can help you make more rational decisions.

You can start a bullet journal in pretty much any empty notebook that you have lying around. That’s all you need. A journal and a pen. 

However, it is much more likely to use a bullet journal every day when getting some joy from the materials you're using. That means that a nicer journal and some bright, funky pens are also a great way to get started and enjoy the process a bit more. 

A page where you can write down any future appointments or dates for a month you haven’t set up yet. 

That way you can easily reference it to see if there’s a dentist appointment coming up or a deadline sneaking up on you.

• We get upset when someone doesn't fulfill a promise. However, if they do more than promised, we're not grateful enough for it.
• People learn more and faster from punishment and reward. If you have to pick one, negative feedback stimulates learning faster than positive feedback.

Do not do unto others what you do not want to be done unto you.

It is about focusing on eliminating the negative more than encouraging the positive. Because there’s abundant evidence from multiple sources that relationships are far more strongly affected by negative things than positive things.

For example, when you don’t get a job you want, you think, “People don’t like me, I’m going to die alone.”

Whenever you disqualify the positive, you’re wrongly reinforcing negative beliefs about yourself and your world.