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So, you want to live a more intentional life? Your first baby step is to journal. Journaling can be a powerful tool for self-reflection. Setting aside dedicated time to ponder a question and write out your answer can lead to some fascinating discoveries. If you already have a journaling habit, you know that your answer to a prompt can really surprise you! I crafted the self-reflection journal prompts below to address questions we all need to ask, but most of us avoid.
I’ve written before about the importance of sorting your top priorities from lower-value activities you spend time and energy on. That sounds simple, but it’s no easy task. Many of your “fluff” activities are valuable and enjoyable in their own ways. It’s nonetheless vital to define for yourself what is most important to you. Because the fact is you don’t have time or energy for everything you want to do. An unintentional life is characterized by juggling tons of activities, relationships, and habits without questioning their value. There are things others have told you to value, activities you’ve been “voluntold” for, and other things that have just kind of crept into your life while you weren’t paying attention.
No one else can tell you what’s important to you. It’s an answer you have to come up with on your own. The self-reflection journal prompts below will guide you to pinpoint what you value most. And that’s the first step to living a more intentional and authentic life.
10 Self-Reflection Journal Prompts for a More Intentional Life
1. First, write down everything you would consider a goal for yourself this year.
The best place to start is by making a list of every goal you are actively working towards this year. You may have written an actual list at the new year. Or you may just need to look at how you spend your time and work backwards from there.
Now that you’ve written them out, how do you feel about them? Have you been making progress towards all of them? Which ones have fallen to the wayside?
I suggest this first on the list of self-reflection journal prompts because it’s common to have too many goals. Most of us vastly overestimate how much time and energy we have to commit to various pursuits. The result of this unfocused energy expenditure, as Greg McKeown explains in his book, Essentialism, is making very small spurts of progress in many directions. But no significant progress on any.
2. If you could only make progress towards one goal this year, what would it be? What would really move the needle on your happiness?
Now that you’ve listed your goals and reflected on your progress thus far, you’ll likely notice some modest progress on some goals – maybe even all of them. But consider this: How much more progress could you make if you chose just one major goal for the year? Imagine what would happen if most of your spare time and energy went in one direction instead of many. Chances are, it would life-changing.
When selecting this one goal, it’s important to think about what would really make a difference in your life. Here’s an example. Say you’re miserable at your job but haven’t found the time to look for a new one. And let’s say you have a goal to run a marathon because it’s something you’ve always aspired to do. You’ll spend hours every week running to condition your body for the marathon. And hopefully, you’ll achieve your goal. But in the meantime, you’ll still be spending the majority of your waking hours at a job you hate. You’ll continue to feel dissatisfied and unfulfilled. The marathon, as noble a goal as it is, is a distraction in this case. Your time would be better spent researching and applying to jobs.
It’s common to have these kinds of “distraction” goals because many of our bigger goals are, frankly, intimidating. Maybe changing your work would require going back to school and doing a full career shift. You may feel lost considering how to do that. Whereas the preparation for a marathon, while also difficult, is actually very straightforward.
So, look at your goals and be ruthless. What is the one that has the potential to improve your life?
3. How will your life be different when you achieve that one goal? Paint a picture of a typical day.
I’ve done the exercise in #2, and I can tell you it feels impossible to narrow your aspirations down to one goal. And how do you know you chose the right one? This is one of the best self-reflection journal prompts to help you with that.
Here, you’re going to imagine what your life will look like when you achieve your selected goal. How will it be different from your life now? How will it be better? Imagine a typical day in your life once you’ve achieved it and write it out.
This exercise can help you sort out the high-priority goals from the ones that are tempting but don’t hold much value. For example, many of us set goals at the new year like “lose 15 pounds.” If you imagine a typical day in your life after achieving this goal, you may find that…it looks pretty much indistinguishable from your life now. Or you may aspire to win an award or meet a particular milestone. But will your day-to-day life actually look different once you’ve reached it?
You may be surprised by which goals meet the “life changer” criteria and which are ultimately not very important.
4. Write your “bucket list” of things you’d like to achieve or experience in your life. Then cross out everything but the top 5 most important.
In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman tells a story attributed to Warren Buffett (although possibly apocryphal) about his personal pilot asking him for advice on setting priorities:
[Buffett] tells the man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organizes his time. But contrary to what the pilot might have been expecting to hear, the remaining twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when he gets his chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones he should actively avoid at all costs – because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most.
It’s uncomfortable to face the fact that you won’t have time for every achievement or experience that sounds interesting to you. But facing that truth awards you freedom and focus. Once you’re unburdened by all the “fluff” items on your bucket list, you can focus your energy on what matters most. And once you do that, you have a very high chance of achieving it.
In the past year, what has made you feel genuinely excited?
As adults, we may not feel a sense of pure enthusiasm and anticipation all that often. You know, that kind of giddy excitement we felt before our birthdays as kids. It’s helpful to reflect on when that feeling has come up for you. Think about the past year or so. When did you feel that way? What caused that excitement?
When I made up this prompt for myself a few years ago, journaling my answer was a huge eye-opener. Most of my answers centered on one type of experience related to my job. And that gave me some big hints about what kinds of work I should be looking for in the future. Yours may or may not be related to work, but regardless, it will show you what kinds of experiences to make more time for in your life.
6. What areas of your life are going really well right now? What are you doing to make that happen?
Many of us tend to fixate on what’s going wrong in our lives. We ruminate on how our health or fitness isn’t as good as it could be, our finances are disappointing, or our relationships aren’t panning out. And if we’re self-aware, we’ll also consider all the actions we’re taking or not taking to create those situations.
But that this kind of rumination is never productive. When we beat ourselves up about what we’re doing wrong, the result is somehow rarely for us to turn things around and behave differently.
That’s because it’s more empowering to consider what’s going right in your life. We often take things that are going well for granted. Instead, make a list of things that are going well. And beyond feeling gratitude for those, write out what you’re doing to make that happen. This will bring your attention to what kinds of behaviors and habits work well for you. And you can focus on applying those to other areas of your life.
7. What area of your life is not going well? What’s the impact?
I just wrote above that it’s rarely productive to fixate on what’s going wrong in your life. But I recommend this prompt for a different purpose. Instead of harping on what you’re doing wrong in these areas, focus your journaling on what the impact is on your life overall. The purpose here is to help you further refine what deserves your attention and what is of low importance.
I’ll explain with some examples. Let’s say it’s something with a huge impact, like your long-term partnership isn’t going well. In that case, your primary goal for the year may be related to improving that situation. Or, it could be something that’s of relatively low importance to you. Maybe you’re not as physically “fit” as you used to be, although not in bad health. In that case, you can consciously label this a low-level non-priority and let it go. Recognizing that it has minimal impact on your life and your happiness will allow you to “declutter” it from your mind and free up time and energy for bigger things.
8. What do you do regularly that feels inauthentic? What feels authentic?
All of us do things that feel inauthentic for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s as simple as, “I disagree with my boss, but I value my paycheck, so I’ll choose to be quiet.”
In The Enchanted Life, Sharon Blackie describes how she created a whole career around being a hard-nosed PhD scientist and skeptic. This was despite the fact that she privately had a much more magical view of life.
Throughout it all, I lived a curiously double life: in my spare time I read and studied, just as I had always done, everything I could find about myths and fairy tales, and immersed myself in books and novels imbued with that sense of enchantment which was now sorely lacking in my own working life. I wouldn’t, of course, have admitted to it under torture; the persona I presented to the world was always wonderfully…rigorous. I was a very successful neuroscientist.
Hers is an extreme example, but there are almost certainly ways you behave inauthentically in your own life. And it may not feel harmful day to day, but it slowly takes its toll. Identifying where this is happening and making adjustments to live more authentically is an important step for a more intentional life. It can lift a huge burden from you, unleashing your natural energy and enthusiasm for the things you truly value.
9. Which of your daily habits are making your life better?
In many ways, little daily habits matter even more than big life goals. These are things we do repetitively day in and day out, and over time their consequences add up. We tend to pay more attention to our bad habits, even when we don’t take action to change them. But reflecting on habits that benefit you (an exercise routine, sticking to a bedtime, a meditation practice, regular get-togethers with friends) can help you recognize what you should make more time for. Building up good habits can even gradually crowd out and replace the bad ones without as much effort as trying to kick the bad habits would require.
I’ve also had a situation where I routinely did something I thought was beneficial, but when I really reflected on it, it wasn’t making much of a difference to my life. It’s helpful to note that too. If you aren’t sure, you can try what McKeown calls a “reverse pilot”: try not doing that thing for a couple of weeks and see what the result is. If there are no detrimental effects, you can let that habit go and focus on those that provide more benefit.
10. In what area of life is fear holding you back? If you could take one fearless step in that direction, what would it be?
Noticing where fear is holding you back in life is a powerful form of self-reflection. Often, we make a lot of excuses for why we can’t do something we know would be good for us. We don’t directly admit that it’s really fear holding us back. So, consider any high-priority goals you haven’t made progress on. If you’re honest with yourself, is there something about them that scares you? Fear of failure is a big one, but many of us often fear success as well.
Then take this a bit further to consider one step you could take in the direction of that goal, if you weren’t afraid. Are you willing to do it? Realistically, when could you do it? Is there a way to break into baby steps? Could you even take one baby step today?
Addressing this self-reflection journal prompt always makes me sweat a bit. It’s really uncomfortable. But as with all these questions, when you feel that discomfort come up, that’s when you know you’re onto something important.
What Do You Think?
Have you tried any of these self-reflection journal prompts? What did you learn from it? Did it help you live more intentionally? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
