What to do when you don’t know what to do.

Not knowing what to do can be extremely frustrating. Likewise, it can be frustrating if you know what you want to do, but you don’t know how to get there If gaining clarity is the best way to move forward and accomplish big things, how do you gain clarity? How do you gain clarity when your destination is unknown?

Let go of the lack of clarity

In my journey to understand and gain clarity, I have started to re-frame how I think about the uncertain steps and destinations. I used to get frustrated when I felt a lack of clarity, because I wanted more clarity than I currently had. I focused on the lack of clarity.  

I’m not saying that I never get frustrated or that I always know what to do and where to go next. Clarity is a process. I am still growing clarity in my own life. However, it’s not as frustrating as it once was.

A yearly process of reflection and goal setting has enabled me to re-frame and let go of the lack of clarity. Each year that I’ve gone through the reflection and goal setting process, I set better goals. I set better goals, because each year I gain more clarity by going through the process.

This has led me to re-frame thoughts about clarity that were previously focused on lacking to thoughts that focus on growth.

“It’s not a lack of clarity. It’s a growing clarity.” – Mary Blacklock 

Clarity will grow when you do the work to grow it.

3 ways to gain clarity

Growing in clarity has been a huge relief for me and I want to share what I’m learning. In upcoming posts on clarity I will write in light of the following 3 topics.

Grow your clarity in these 3 ways:

1. Reflection

Articles will share information about intentional reflection processes that will help grow clarity. They will look at ways to reflect and evaluate so that clarity comes with each reflection.

2. Action

It’s that “Do the work.” thing again. Doing the work for growing your clarity means taking actions that aid in your reflection, such as brainstorming. Articles will focus on how we can take action to grow our clarity.

3. Knowing Where You Are (Self-awareness)

This one is the most important of the 3. If you know yourself you are better able to reflect and take action in a meaningful way. There are many emotions and states of being that affect our ability to know ourselves. Articles will focus on learning how different states of being and emotions affect our clarity.

The 3 ways that I highlight here will be the focus of my posts on clarity in the coming year. I am excited to bring you monthly posts that dig into the issue of gaining and growing clarity.

Knowing how to gain more clarity comes from knowing how to grow your clarity.

Be sure to check back at the beginning of each month for posts on clarity. You can also subscribe to my mailing list so you don’t miss a post.

Behavior Challenge: Instead of focusing on how much you lack in knowing what to do, focus on how much you are closing the lack of knowledge gap.

Read these top posts on clarity:

3 Tips to Jump Start Your Personal Reflection Habit

How to Move Forward in Life

Why is Behavior Change Important for Personal Growth?

Negativity Affected My Ability to Gain Clarity

2 Ways to Cope When You Don’t Know the End Goal

There are only a few days left in the year!  Some scramble to finish goals strong and others wish that they hadn’t given up on a goal. Can you relate? Maybe you are someone that didn’t set goals for the past year. Maybe you are wondering how to make the coming year a more meaningful and focused year.  Journaling is a helpful tool for gathering your end of the year thoughts. Read below for journal prompts for the end of the year.

Did you try the holiday journal prompts?

Before we get to the end of the year journal prompts, did you try any of the holiday journal prompts for the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas? The prompt I had the most success with was the one that encouraged going back through the day to identify where others helped you and where you were helped by others.

If you tried any of the holiday journal prompts, I would love your thoughts on them. Leave me a comment on this page.

End of the Year Journal Prompts on Celebrations

If you missed my post on celebrating your successes you can read it now. It’s important to celebrate your wins from the year. One way to acknowledge your wins and reflect on them is to journal about it.

1. What is one success that I celebrated well?
2. Were there any successes that I could have celebrated better? If so, name them. Is there a win that I haven’t celebrated?
3. How can I improve my process for coming up with ways to celebrate and following through with those celebrations?

End of the Year Journal Prompts on Attitude

1. What was the most helpful attitude that I embraced this year? (What helped me grow?)
2. What was the least helpful attitude that I embraced this year? (What held me back?)
3. How can I begin to change the least helpful attitude?

End of the Year Journal Prompts on Clarity

1. Am I resisting setting a goal in a particular area or not acting on a desire to change?
2. If so, am I resisting the goal, or not acting on the desire to change, because I am afraid of either success or failure? Name the fear specifically.
3. What area in my life causes me the most pain and struggle right now? (There’s so much room to grow!)

Try the journal prompts for the end of the year!

Journaling can seem intimidating, especially if it’s not a habit. However, it is a great tool for processing and gathering thoughts. I hope that the above journal prompts will get the wheels turning for you. Grab a pen, or pencil if you like, and let’s start writing! Write with the intention of reflecting on what went well this year and what needs improvement, so that next year will be even better!

Behavior Challenge: Pick one of the three categories of celebrations, attitude, and clarity to journal about each day of the remaining days of the year.

How do you reflect on your year?

Is there an area of focus that I didn’t mention that you journal about at the end of the year?

For more reading on attitudes that will help you grow:

Develop a Grateful Mind

What is a Limiting Belief and Why Should We Care? 

For more reading on clarity:

2 Ways to Cope When You Don’t Know the End Goal

3 Tips to Jump-Start Your Personal Reflection Habit

Thanksgiving and Christmas without our loved ones can be difficult. I’ve gathered grief resources for the holidays. In this post I highlight 3 strategies to deal with grief. I also look at why it’s important to grieve and how we can meet people in their space of mourning. 

3 Strategies to Deal with Grief

I chose these 3 strategies because they emphasize the importance of being where you are, remembering your loved ones, and reaching out to others. They are also a few of the ways that I have seen my friends handle grief.

These strategies are from an article by Amy Morin, a psychotherapist turned author. She lists nine strategies and of those nine, I want to highlight three.

3 Strategies to Deal with Grief:

1. Allow Yourself to Feel a Range of Emotions

The range of emotions that Amy mentions are joy, guilt, and sadness. Amy encourages feeling whatever emotion you are experiencing without telling yourself you should be feeling differently. This might mean letting yourself enjoy something that makes you happy without feeling like you should be feeling sad instead. However, it can go the other way as well. If you aren’t up for the cheery event, it’s okay to feel sad. It is important to be gentle with yourself.

2. Find a Way to Honor Your Memories

Amy lists commemoration as a strategy because it reminds us that our loved ones are still with us. We might write a short remembrance of them or light a candle. Or maybe there is an object that they made or that was passed onto you that you can set close to you. However we honor their memories, we do it so that it can bring us comfort amidst the grief. When we honor the memory of our loved ones we are remembering how things were in the past, but also bringing the memory into our present.

3. Do Something Kind for Others

According to Amy Morin, doing something kind for others might remind you that despite your grief you still have things to give. If you journal, these might be things that you can write about later. Losing someone might make it difficult for you to embrace the love, joy, and peace of Christmas that I suggest as a journal prompt. However, if you seek out ways to be kind to others, you might add things into your day that help you embrace that love, joy, and peace of Christmas. It could also be that the love, joy, and peace that you write about are focused on memories of you and your loved one during the holidays. It might even be about how in your day you were able to embrace all the emotions that you had-the happy ones and the sad ones.

There are other ways to deal with grief, but the above three ways seem especially important to remember. They don’t ignore the emotions that you are feeling and they don’t rush you to move on. If you want more strategies for handling grief during the holidays, read Amy Morin’s full article here.

More grief resources for the holidays, and in general, include understanding why we need to grieve and knowing what we might be able to say to someone that is grieving.

Why it’s Important to Grieve

Amy Morin’s article begins by stating that the process of healing is to experience the pain of grief. It’s not in avoiding our feelings that we move on. We move on through healing and we heal by experiencing the pain.

I turned to my faith for more words of wisdom on the importance of grieving.

Here’s what Abbot Tryphon says about grief and losing a loved one:

“We need to mourn…We need to embrace the grief, and honor the bereavement process. Grief is confirmation that our loved one was a person of value, a beloved son or daughter, a cherished brother or sister, a treasured friend. Grief is how we honor a well-lived life, for the death is grief-worthy. In grieving, we do their memory justice, and follow in the example of Jesus, who wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus.”-Abbot Tryphon

This is strategy 1 and 2 that I mentioned above. Letting yourself grieve and feel both the sadness and happiness (or whatever emotions you feel) is the beginning of the healing process. It’s in the midst of that, and even through that, that we honor our loved ones.

I encourage you to read the rest of Abott Tryohon’s article on mourning our loved ones and embracing grief. He writes about how death doesn’t separate us from our loved ones.

Meeting People in Their Grief

People have a variety of ways to deal with grief. For someone that is observing, it might be difficult to know what to say. We might be a little fearful or uncertain of what to do if we are witnessing a way that someone expresses grief that we are not familiar with.

In my own journey, I’ve realized that it’s not the words that matter. Show up. Offer hugs. Do something to lighten the load of everything else that needs to get done.

If you want a best and worst list, I’ve got one of those for you too.

If someone you know is grieving here is a helpful article on the best and worst things to say to someone in grief:

10 Best and Worst Things To Say to Someone in Grief:

Grief Resources for the Holidays

I hope this article was helpful in offering ways to deal with grief. I also hope it helped show how important the grief process is and how we can be there for people that are grieving.

For more tips on dealing with grief during the holidays read grief.com’s article Grief and the Holidays. There are tips for other holidays besides Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Remember Your Loved Ones

I encourage you, if you are missing someone you love, to remember them with gratitude.

Think of the loved one(s) that you no longer with you this holiday season. List 3 things that you would want to tell them that you think they would be proud of about you. Or, list 3 things that you remember about them, that even though they are gone it brings you joy to remember.

I find that writing things down is especially helpful when I want to process or remember something. If you are open to journaling about it, write it down.

Behavior Challenge: Be kind to others. This gives us something to reflect about at the end of the day, or helps us engage with the world around us even while we are grieving. It does more than that though. It also helps us become better people.

As we prepare for Thanksgiving and Christmas we are surrounded by the actions of thanking, giving, and receiving. All of these actions provide a starting point for journaling. Writing down what you did today is only the beginning. Here are 5 holiday journal prompts for adults that want to dig deeper into their journaling or start journaling today.

Journaling: Why

I journal because journaling helps me reflect and reflection helps me better know myself. When I am confident in myself I am more able to choose appropriate and relevant goals.

If you need more convincing on the benefits of journaling check out this Psychology Today article, Journaling Clears Out the Bad, Builds Up the Good. Also, read my 3 Tips to Jump Start Your Personal Reflection Habit.

Journaling: How

Growing up I was really into free style journaling. There are various ways to journal. Some like to free style it and others like a set template. I’ve journaled both ways. Others may prefer to vary their writing prompts based on the time of year or circumstances.

When I journaled free style, I wrote pages and pages. It helped me process my thoughts and feelings. However, it took a lot of time. Over time my journaling decreased until one day I found that I had stopped it entirely.

It took a while to realize that my not journaling was more than a loss of some memories that I didn’t write down. It was a loss of an opportunity to process, understand, and learn from my life and experiences.

However, I realized that I had some resistance to getting back into journaling. I didn’t want to spend as much unfocused time on my journaling as I did in the past. To overcome this and get back into the journaling habit I started small and used a template. I am back into journaling and try to do it every day.

What I did to reboot my journaling habit

I began using the 5 Minute Journal. It has 3 writing prompts for the morning and 2 for the evening. This got me back into my daily journaling habit. After almost 2 years using the 5 Minute Journal I began to want to expand on my day and to write a bit more. Yet, I still wanted the focus of a template.

As a result, for the last quarter of 2018, I have been using Michael Hyatt’s Full Focus Journal. Michael’s journal has 8 questions. The journal asks questions that help to record and process the past, present, and future.

Due to my rebooted journaling habit, I wanted to share some writing prompts I have come up with that are specific to this time of year. I am adding them into my evening journaling template for the holidays and I invite you to consider these or to create your own.

5 Holiday Journal Prompts

Journal prompts for Thanksgiving:

 1) What am I thankful for…

at work?

in my education or hobbies?

at home or in relationships?

2) What can I do to continue to focus on gratitude and thankfulness after Thanksgiving is over?

3) How will this focus on gratitude impact my spirit of gift giving and receiving, time with my family, or those that I encounter in my day? Is there another area it will impact?

Journal Prompts for the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas:

4) What did I do today that embraced the love, joy, and peace of Christmas?

This could be attending a church service, making a donation to a charity, or giving a gift to a friend or coworker. Maybe it’s decorating, spending time with friends at a holiday party, or baking goodies to share. Knitting a hat for someone or going to a holiday concert or event are also possible ways to embrace the love, joy, and peace of Christmas. Whatever you do, record it along with who else was involved. That will help you stay connected to the memory and to the people you shared it with.

5) How did I help someone in need? How did someone help me?

This can be more than a donation to a charity or a person on the street. It could be looking for ways that you help someone in your work day or at home. Don’t overlook the small ways that you help people throughout the day. Likewise, look for ways that others helped you throughout the day.

Why Holiday Journaling?

Thanksgiving is a time to remember our history and treat others with respect and kindness. It’s also a great time to focus on all that we have and reflect on it in writing.

The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a time of preparation. We ready the house for visitors. Parties are planned and attended. We buy and wrap presents to give (and hopefully mail them on time).  Maybe you are also in a time of spiritual preparation. This is a great time to process and focus our thoughts with journaling.

I’m excited to add these prompts to my journaling from now till Christmas. I hope you will try one or all of the holiday writing prompts with me.

For more on gratitude, read Develop a Grateful Mind.

What holiday journaling prompts to you like to use?

Behavior Challenge: Pick at least 1 of the 5 holiday journal prompts and start writing.