In this series of posts, I’m putting two ideas together—the idea that smart, creative, sensitive individuals are confronted by special challenges and the idea that journaling is a valuable self-help tool—and turning them into a set of journaling prompts designed to lead you on a personal journey of discovery.
I hope that you enjoy these prompts. Here are five more challenges, and four journal prompts to go with each challenge. Engaging with any one of them may well serve you. I hope you find these valuable! And I hope you’ll take a look at Why Smart People Hurt and at my latest journal, Affirmations for Self-Love.
In this post, I want to chat about five related challenges having to do with how we spend our time. Typically, a smart, sensitive, creative person spends his times in the following five ways: doing work for pay, which may or may not interest him; working “on the side” on something that does interest him, like writing a novel or starting his own business; dreaming about but not ever quite getting to that passion project (that novel or start-up); squandering time out of anxiety, an inability to face “more work” or “real work,” or for some other reason; and relaxing, but maybe feeling guilty about relaxing.
Here are those five challenges again, with four writing prompts for each. See which ones speak to you!
- The challenge of paid work.
+ What, if anything apart from a paycheck, interests you about the work-for-pay that you do?
+ What could make it more interesting or palatable?
+ If you decided to choose new work, what criteria would you use to pick that work?
+ Does paid work need to feel meaningful or interesting? Or should we “teach ourselves” to tolerate such work?
2.. The challenge of a passion project.
+ Are you currently working on a passion project “on the side” of your paid work?
+ Are you managing to get to it frequently enough to do it justice?
+ When do you try to get to it? Maybe at the end of a work day, when you’re tired and just want to relax?
+ What are your dreams for your passion project?
3. Having a passion project in mind, but not getting to it.
+ Do you have a secret passion project, like writing a certain novel or creating a certain start-up, that has been on a backburner maybe for years?
+ What happens when you try to turn to that project?
+ Do you sometimes work on it for a little bit and then stop? What causes that stoppage?
+ If you wanted to return to your passion project soon, what sort of pep talk might you give yourself?
4. Squandering time.
+ Does the time that you might use productively for a meaningful project or for one of your life purposes seem to just vanish?
+ Where does it tend to go?
+ If making better or different use of that time is something that you’d like to do, what might you try to make that happen?
+ Do you have a sense of why you are letting that time just vanish?
5. Feeling guilty about relaxing.
+ Life can be hard, taxing, and overwhelming—which means, we need our relaxations. Do you somehow doubt that relaxing is justified or legitimate?
+ Is there a certain amount of relaxing that feels “just right” to you and is the problem perhaps that you exceed that amount—maybe by a lot?
+ If you have trouble relaxing, what might help you to relax better?
+ Picture yourself deeply relaxing. What do you see?
Enjoy your journaling! More to come …
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Promote Healing, Ignite Creativity, and Discover Writing Tips from Two Journaling Experts
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