I still feel that my biggest challenge with I Ho Chuan (IHC) has been my time and organizational skills, trying to balance all my responsibilities and still achieve my goals. How to make Kung Fu a priority while not neglecting other important responsibilities that I have. I knew from the start that journaling was going to play a very big role in my ability to complete the IHC requirements. I’m not just talking about this blog/journal but an actual personal journal.
Over the years I’ve tried different electronic methods of trying to keep track, but due to various issues (system crashes, poor design, etc.) they have never been as successful for me as when I kept a paper one. So this year for IHC I decided to go back to that; well a variation of it anyway.
Keeping this paper version revealed something lately: the month of June is nuts for me! The first journal book I started at the beginning of this year lasted for 5 whole months, but the month of June has taken up one third of my new journal! These journals are the exact same size. I wouldn’t have noticed this if I was still trying to use electronic methods.
The importance of journaling is something that Sifu Brinker is always emphasizing. It is very important! There’s a saying:
“People don’t plan to fail they fail to plan”
~ Mark McCormack*
Journaling is where you set goals and make plans to achieve those goals, and adjust those plans when things go wrong, and as we have certainly seen this year, they will go wrong. It is how you track your progress so that you can make better more effective adjustments in the future. It’s where you keep your goals in focus and in sight at all times as reminders to yourself. It is where you can put your successes so that you can remind yourself of your accomplishments and it is where you can pour out your frustrations where they won’t hurt anyone. The public journal is a great place to share the journey (including frustrations) because you can benefit from the team, show other team members that they are not the only ones having (possibly the same) problems (which benefits the team), share our human-ness, help each other out, and celebrate successes together.
I started relating this journaling of my life and for IHC to the diet journals and symptoms journals that I ask clients to keep. So many people absolutely refuse to do it! Yet it can be so pivotal to finally being able to truly help them resolve the health problem they would like to be rid of. It always makes me think that maybe they aren’t sick enough of being sick, because when people want something badly enough, they’ll do almost anything to achieve it. In light of that, journaling seems like such a simple thing to do. Doesn’t it?
If you’re one of those that, like the clients I mentioned, balks at journaling, a good question to ask yourself might be:
“how much do you REALLY want to accomplish your goal?”
Something else I’ve learned this year from journaling is that I didn’t need to create extra tasks to accomplish for my personal IHC goals, I needed to learn where to remove things, I need to learn when and where it’s appropriate to say “no” and “I don’t have time for that”. In other words, I need to learn where it’s OK to “trim the fat”. I also need to learn to feel OK with it and not get down on myself about all the things I “could” or “should” do.
Thus, I am learning from my journaling.
*quote may also be attributable to John J. Beckley
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