This is going to be an informative article about how personal development and writing go together. What is it that actually happens when we write? Writing is a direct transfer of our thoughts into a stable medium where they can be read by others, analysed and refined. When we write, we are forced to carefully refine our thinking in order to make sure that the writing we put on paper makes the most sense. How does this relate to personal development? We shall see..

Having been writing down my thoughts in a journal for almost a year and later on this website, I have discovered plenty of benefits of putting my stuff in writing. Most of these benefits are actually personal benefits that really add value to my own life and my own well being – however there are also benefits for other people in the sense that I’m sharing a lot of my experience here on this blog for everyone else to learn from.

I have been keeping a journal since about the start of 2009. At first my journal was very simple with just a few sentences and goals written down in a notebook. Then as time progressed, more and more ideas and goals started popping up in my mind so I started writing them down almost daily. Eventually I had so many little goals to write down that I was almost writing full pages of ideas that I could test and use in my every day life.

For example, one of these ideas was to start a blog back in March 2009 and I did start it – but unfortunately I couldn’t write back then so I couldn’t squeeze out any original content from my brain and into the blog. The idea was back then merely an idea – today it’s more of a reality.  A lot of personal development coaches emphasise the idea of writing down your goals. What’s even better is if you write down all your thoughts and ideas so that you can come back to them later and expand on your findings. Don’t trust your memory – write things down.

When you begin writing down you goals and ideas, your thinking will become increasingly more clear and you will have a far better comprehension of how different concepts fit together. You will also develop a much better sense about what it is that you are supposed to be doing with your life. You will find that your ideas will become more and more elaborate and evolved over time. New ideas will be the combinations of ideas that you have written down previously.

The interesting thing about writing down your goals is that somehow the goal or the idea gets imprinted into your subconscious mind and begins evolving on it’s own. I don’t know how this happens, but whenever we write down what we want in life and what we intend to do – the idea begins growing and evolving inside my mind until I suddenly feel really compelled to take action – and it is this type of motivated action that in turn leads to results. In fact, when you write down a goal or idea, you often wouldn’t know how you will accomplish it – the actions that you need to take in order to accomplish the goal will come to you one by one over a longer period of time.

As your writing gets more and more elaborate, so will your ideas. Remember that the quality of your thinking is directly reflected by the quality of your writing and vice versa. My own writing is not always very elaborate – I do have several areas of my thinking that need a great deal more refinement. For example, after I did my raw food experiment earlier in February, I couldn’t write much about that simply because I didn’t have enough knowledge about the raw diet in order to be able to express myself elaborately on that subject. Perhaps in one year I would be able to write more about it.

It’s very hard to write something unless you have experienced what you are writing about. When you feel that you have hit a block and can’t get anything written, it simply means that you don’t have enough knowledge and experience on the subject in order to write about it. Everything you write will ultimately come from your experience – either personal physical experience, or your experience of reading and analysing someone else’s ideas. This is why it’s hard to write something when you don’t have very much experience. Keep at it though and eventually you will find it a lot easier to write longer articles as you gain more and more experience in life.

This is why writing is such an amazingly useful tool for personal development – it allows you to put down your thoughts into a tangible form where you can clearly see them and then to go through them and debug them one by one while asking “does this really make sense?” Writing your thoughts down is an excellent way to find gaps in your thinking that you need to work on.

Start writing down your ideas, goals, reflections over the day, wisdom nuggets, quotes that you admire, first impressions of people you meet and just simply your thoughts. What are you thinking right now? How do you rationalize your current situation? What can you improve right now? Perhaps take a first step towards some major goal? What can you do today that will feel absolutely in line with your personality and your goals?