journal

5 Journal Prompts I Return to Every Month

Daily journaling makes you self-aware. You identify your strengths, weaknesses, and areas in life where improvements are needed. These are hard to pinpoint without journaling.

Anangsha Alammyan

Mar 7, 2023 • 3 min read

Picture from the author’s Instagram.

And how they can help your self-improvement journey.

Journaling is the single most powerful habit for personal growth📝

Over the past fifteen years, I’ve:

journaled every day,
wrote 10,000+ pages,
used every tool and app

But I always return to a pen, paper, and the five prompts I’m going to discuss in this article.

Before we dive in, it’s important to understand why you should consider incorporating journaling into your daily self-care routine.

There are many scientifically-backed reasons, but the biggest is this: daily journaling makes you self-aware.

You identify your strengths, weaknesses, and areas in life where improvements are needed. These are hard to pinpoint without journaling.

But not everyone can journal daily, especially when you have a busy work schedule.

So if you journal once in a while, these prompts are for you. Use them to pen down your thoughts, or to conduct monthly/yearly reviews. Each question will help you:

Identify bottlenecks
Appreciate your progress
Re-align your present with your long-term vision.

1. Looking back

Prompt #1: What are the biggest challenges of the past week/month/year and how I overcame them?

This prompt helps you:

Understand your strengths.
Identify and eliminate blockers.
Build a strategy to avoid similar challenges.

2. Healthy self-appreciation

Prompt #2: What’s a habit I’m proud I stuck to?

Your answer to this prompt lets you:

Analyze your growth over the past month or year.
Appreciate the consistency you’ve incorporated into your routine.
Appreciate your progress and get the motivation to keep working.

3. Letting bad habits go

Prompt #3: What’s a habit I need to quit?

When you answer this prompt with honesty, you’ll be able to:

Identify areas of improvement.
Visualize life without temptations.
Understand how quitting a few things help in the long run.

4. Giving yourself time to grieve

Prompt #4: What I’m sad about.

Take a moment to yourself for this one.

Often, we push our sadness under the carpet to keep functioning at our highest capacity. While this is great to not break your flow, your emotions are important as well, and they need to be felt before you can truly let them go.

This journal prompt is all about giving yourself the time and space to process your losses and —

Allow sadness to take over, then gently move on.
Shed the burdens you’ve been carrying.
Open up space in your life for new light to enter.

5. Zeroing in on your best traits

Prompt #5: What’s something I’m proud of achieving?

Your answer to this prompt sheds light on:

What you’ve been doing right so far.
Your journey and future plans.
What you can do today to inch one step closer to your goals.
How to accelerate the process of turning your dreams into reality.

5 journal prompts to unlock personal growth: Final words

When you answer the five journal prompts mentioned in this article, you gain clarity over where you’re headed and are one step closer to shaping the life of your dreams.

As the quote goes,

"You have to choose your path. You have to decide what you wish to do. You are the only person that can determine your destiny." - Lailah Gifty Akita

Summing up, here are the five journal prompts you can turn to at any point in your life for increased self-awareness and a productivity boost you didn’t know you needed:

Biggest challenges of the past week/month/year and how I overcame them.
A habit I’m proud I stuck to.
A habit I need to quit.
What I’m sad about.
What I’m proud of achieving.

What journaling prompts have made your journey easier? Leave your insights in the comments.