How HR Leaders Can Use Journaling for Professional and Personal Growth

As leaders, HR executives juggle complex tasks and challenges for their organizations, so it’s easy for their personal and professional growth to fall through the cracks. One simple but powerful way to re-prioritize self-improvement is by journaling. 

According to a Harvard Business Review study, leaders who engaged in journaling experienced a 22.8% improvement in performance compared to those who didn’t journal. By integrating journaling into your daily routine and finding the methods that work best for you, you can enhance your decision-making skill set.

Here’s how journaling can transform your leadership practice and help you excel.

The Benefits of Journaling 

Journaling helps leaders: 

• Identify Limiting Beliefs: We all hold certain beliefs that don’t serve us. Imposter syndrome, feelings of isolation, chronic dissatisfaction, and “slippage”—letting important things fall through the cracks because of burnout, boredom, and depletion—are common workplace challenges.  

• Restructure Thought Processes: Journaling can help you restructure your thought processes and make important changes for a more engaging, thrilling, and exciting personal and professional life. 

• Track Progress: Regular journaling creates a record of growth, enabling leaders to see how far they’ve come and identify areas for further development. 

• Gain Clarity: When you spend time each day documenting your struggles, challenges, and opportunities on paper, it’s easier to untangle tough workplace situations and gain a better perspective. This applies to personal struggles, too, which are often connected to problems at work. 

• Boost Creativity: Journaling can unlock creative solutions to all sorts of HR challenges, from recruitment strategies to employee retention programs. 

• Improve Time Management: There’s never enough time in the day—or is there? Journaling helps leaders recognize how to save time, such as delegating tasks to colleagues or letting go of less important responsibilities. 

• Ideate Goals: Journaling can help transform abstract concepts, such as company culture and employee engagement, into concrete strategies and measurable goals.

   

Getting Started: Choose a Journaling Technique That Matches Your Business Style 

While there’s no right or wrong way to journal, different journaling techniques can target specific areas of leadership development. Depending on your needs, try the following:

• Keep a Decision Journal: Decision journals give you better clarity around some of the toughest choices you’ll need to make. By recording important decisions, the reasoning behind them, and your expected outcome, you’ll be able to refine your own decision-making process when problems arise.   

• Write a Visionary Journal: Executives can create a visionary journal to answer important, aspirational questions: What does my perfect life look like a year from now? What would an ideal conversation with a leader I admire look like? What would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail?  

• Make a Reflection Journal: Reflecting helps you slow down and notice what’s happening in your life while also helping you assume positive intent in others. Instead of jumping to conclusions, journaling helps leaders see the people in their lives as competent, thoughtful, and willing to pitch in on important business initiatives. 

   

Make Journaling a Daily Practice  

Journaling is most effective when it’s done daily. Even brief, regular entries can yield significant insights over time. As you build the habit, you’ll likely find yourself looking forward to journaling as a way to break up your busy schedule and de-stress on hectic workdays.  

Here are a few simple tactics that can help you start—and commit—to making journaling a part of your daily routine: 

• Start Small: Begin with just 5-10 minutes of journaling at the start or end of your workday. Eventually, you can work up to longer journaling sessions if needed.  

• Use Prompts: Keep a list of thought-provoking questions relevant to your role that you can implement as starting points.  

• Try Digital Options: Utilize an online journaling platform that allows you to jot down thoughts on the go 

• Link to Existing Habits: Tie journaling to a current habit, such as your morning coffee or end-of-day wrap-up, and do them at the same time. 

• Set Reminders: Use calendar alerts to make sure you don’t skip your journaling sessions during hectic periods. 
  
  

Kim Ades is the president and founder of Frame of Mind Coaching and JournalEngine.