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How you can use journaling to advance your career

There is a lot of information about journaling and why it can be beneficial. It can help you work through issues, reduce stress and give your mind clarity. If you journal over a long period of time you might also start to look back over your writing and identify patterns that can help you understand more about yourself.

I suggest that whether you are someone who journals for your personal development or not, you need to be journaling for your professional development.

What is professional journaling?

Professional journaling is quite different from personal journaling. What you need to cover in your professional journal is different from writing about your feelings, issues, stress etc that you might write about if you are journaling from a personal perspective.

Your professional journal should record the following:

  1. Your wins

You need to be recording in your journal the successes that you have had. It might be a marketing campaign that performed well above expectations. It might be a great working relationship that you have developed. It could be the way you have aligned to your KPIs. It might even be how you helped another staff member with a project.

Wins can be tied to figures (income you delivered for your business, acquisition of new customers, retention rates) or they can be softer measures (mentoring a junior team member, developing positive working relationships, taking on additional responsibilities during a busy time).

Keep a record of all these types of successes. Be really specific about exactly what it is that you achieved, and include the figures to support this if you have them.

Why do this?

At annual performance review time, most people and their managers only really talk to the last 2 or 3 months of activity. It can be really hard to remember some of the details from things you did 9 or 10 months ago!

But if you have a written record of all your successes over the last year, that can be very powerful — especially if you have the supporting figures to go with them.

I guarantee that almost none of your colleagues will be keeping a full 12 months of records to bring to their performance review discussions. You might just find that this is the difference between getting a pay rise or not, or even being considered for a promotion!

2. Things that didn’t go so well

While it is important to record what you did well in your job to help you with discussions with your manager about your career progression, it is just as important to record what you didn’t do so well.

In fact I would suggest it is even more important to take a note of when you made a mistake, had an activity that didn’t go to plan or even a tense working relationship.

Because here is where you can identify patterns, work on your behaviour or actions and be able to show how you have improved. To be able to show real growth is one of the best things you can do for your career progression.

My own experience

I was working with a colleague that I didn’t get along with. We were both at the same seniority level. We both managed big teams. Our functions were separate but definitely needed to work well alongside each other and often together on projects.

But as I said, we really didn’t get along. I found her to be very negative about a lot of ideas and I didn’t feel she was very good at her job. Equally, she felt that I was too focused on delivering the team objectives and didn’t work hard enough to make our two teams feel connected.

So I used my professional journaling to help me. So, I took notes on:

  • where we clashed, what challenges we had working together and why this might be the case, and even if there were things that we agreed on or did well together
  • an action plan I could implement to try and improve things
  • what things I did from the plan, when I did them, what the outcome was and if I thought it helped
  • Then I created a new action plan every few months and tracked that.

Did our working relationship improve? It did — we weren’t best friends but we did have a much better working relationship and our teams and marketing strategy benefitted.

But the real success here was at my annual performance review. I was able to bring to that meeting a detailed record of the issues and all the steps I had taken to try to make things better. My colleague was of course able to also share that things were better, but she had no ongoing written record and certainly no action plan to support her own personal development.

Following this, I was offered a position at a more senior level thanks to my ability to show 12 months of self development, self improvement and what this meant for my team.

How to start

The best part about this is you can start today! Right now!

The way to get the best out of your journaling from a career development perspective is to just take a few notes a few days a week. Use an existing platform — I use OneNote, but you can also use Evernote or any other notetaking platform that you like. You might try something as simple as Google Docs.

I really want to encourage you to start this in your own career and really see where it can take you.