Career Journal: Finding Humanity within a Single stroke of a Pen

While many people reflect on their lives by using a personal journal, not many use the same technique to find meaning in their careers. By writing in a journal, you unburden yourself of the heavy thoughts that damage your self-confidence and self-worth.

A career or work journal allows you to focus on the many positive moments that you would otherwise ignore, and it permits you to learn important lessons from negative events that you would rather forget.

Ultimately, a work journal helps you recognize that your mental strength is limitless and that even the smallest actions can represent huge accomplishments.

Memories and Emotions

Offices can become negative environments, where the expectations of the business supersede the personal needs of its employees.

It is a place where we can easily lose our humanity to feelings of discontent and under appreciation.

Use your work journal to escape your negative surroundings and rediscover your passion. Your own words will allow you to rejoice in your accomplishments whenever you feel disillusioned about your performance.

Your personal writing space is a place where you can reflect on who you have become, and find a way to become the person you want to be.

Negativity

There are always going to be down moments in your career, but in order to learn from these events and prepare yourself for the next obstacle, you need to reframe any negative event into a blessing.

It is not about the job you lost, it is about the ability to spend more time with your children or being free to follow your dreams.

Every time you overcome a hurdle, you need to remind yourself that this is an accomplishment. Making any forward movement, no matter how small, demonstrates a commitment to achieve a better life.

Power, is represented in the commitment to make a change in your life, not the outcome. If you try to make a significant change in your life, but fail to make a difference, you need to recognize the effort as an accomplishment in itself. More importantly, if you believe in yourself once, it shows you have the ability to do it again an infinite amount of times.

You might have a bad day at work, and commit yourself to finding another job. Motivated to make a change in your life, you stay up all night and masterfully listing all your accomplishments and successes. Moreover, with a complete resume in hand, you go to sleep, thinking what a great addition you would be to any company.

Even, if you ended up doing nothing with the resume and instead struggle through another year at your current job, you still need to recognize the power of the commitment.

Sometimes, you measure success by the effort rather than the result. A person can spend a lifetime fighting for world peace, but never achieve it in their lifetime. Does the result diminish the effort?

Absolve yourself of shame, forget failure, and celebrate the effort you have made.

Humanity

Corporations may tend to see employees and customers as barcodes, but you can never allow yourself to become so callous that you start to believe this yourself.

Work should be a celebration of humanity. You are more than your employee number, and your clients are more than a number that represents their potential profitability to your company. There will always be people in your company ready and willing to register these types of facts.

Instead of numbers, you need to catalog the happiness and wellbeing you bring into people’s lives, and the good that they bring into yours.

Indeed, your self-worth cannot depend on your ranking as a sales agent, or your ability to quickly process applications. Self-worth comes from doing the right thing for the right reasons.

Do not allow yourself to become unsympathetic to your coworker’s and client’s needs; it only gives people a reason to do the same to you.

People are not an ends to a means; they are the means. The true long-term payment comes from knowing you have changed someone's life.

Although, journals let you come to terms with our true feelings, it also forces us to face issues and events you would rather ignore.

In facing these issues, you come to understand how strong you are and the amazing things you can accomplish, even in the hardest situations.