Relationships are one of the most critical aspects of our lives. We need people!
But not just any relationship will do; we need healthy, strong, and positive relationships to feel loved, supported, and happy.
Unfortunately, many people don’t take the time to work on themselves or their relationships with others. Instead, they assume that things will just magically get better over time.
This type of thinking is delusional. As the saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Relationships need work, care, attention, and love, just like anything else in life that you want to see grow and blossom.
One of the best ways to work on your relationships is to keep a journal. This can be a personal relationship journal or a professional one.
In this blog post, I’ll discuss how journaling can help improve your relationships and provide you with 10 relationship journal prompts to get you started.
- How To Build a Healthy Relationship
- How Relationship Journaling Can Improve Your Relationships
- Keep a Personal and Professional Relationship Journal
- 10 Relationship Journal Prompts To Get You Started
- Journaling for Stronger Relationships
- Questions You May Have
How To Build a Healthy Relationship
A lot of people are under the illusion that relationships just happen. They’re either good or bad, and there’s nothing they can do about it.
They believe that they’ll find the person they want to be with, get married, and live happily ever after without doing anything. Or they’ll find the perfect business partner, make loads of money, and retire early without putting in any effort. But that’s just in fairytales, the Disney version, to be specific.
The truth is relationships have to be tended like a plant. If you want them to grow, you must water them, give them sunlight, and feed them. You can’t just ignore them and hope they’ll get better on their own.
This concept applies to relationships with your family, friends, co-workers, and anybody else you interact with.
If you’re not willing to put in the work to keep it alive, it will wither away and die.
Luckily, journaling is an easy and effective way to water your relationships. It allows you to take a step back, assess the situation, and come up with a plan to improve things.
Think of it as Relationship Maintenance 101.
How Relationship Journaling Can Improve Your Relationships
Journaling provides a different perspective to view your relationships.
When you’re in the thick of things, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the emotion of it all and lose sight of what’s really happening.
Writing things down will help you see things more clearly and find solutions you may not have thought of before.
Journaling also:
– Identify Relationship Patterns: We all have both good and bad relationship patterns. Unfortunately, many of us are unaware of the patterns we’ve developed over the years, so things that shouldn’t be accepted become the norm.
– Evaluate Past Relationships: In order to have a healthy relationship, you first need to know what one looks like. Oftentimes, we accept relationships that are less than ideal because we don’t know any better. Evaluating your past relationships can serve as a guide for what you should and shouldn’t accept in the future.
– Set Relationship Goals: Without goals, measuring progress or success is hard. In your journal, you can brainstorm what you want out of your relationships and what steps you need to take to get there. There’s always something else to learn and explore in relationships, so don’t be afraid to set goals that challenge you.
– Monitor Relationship Growth: This is probably one of the most essential benefits of journaling. It allows you to track your progress over time to see how far your relationships have grown and what areas need improvement. If your relationship isn’t elevating, that’s an issue.
Keep a Personal and Professional Relationship Journal
A good friend is like pocket money. That’s a phrase I’ve grown up hearing all my life, but I’ve never heard how to improve your relationship when you’ve found a great friend, partner, co-worker, or just a great family member.
The emphasis is placed more on the commonly accepted belief that the relationship will work itself out. I think this way of thinking was embraced with so much vigor because most people don’t know the first step to improving their professional and close relationships.
It also has a lot to do with trust issues as well. People feel hurt when their idea of a person becomes shattered, which is another topic for another day.
I think the biggest difficulty you may face when it comes to relationships is that you may not have good communication skills.
You don’t know how to start a conversation about significant things that affect all your relationships, so you censor yourself and end up feeling disconnected.
This is where journaling comes in. It allows you to have a one-sided conversation without the fear of judgment or feeling like you’re being a burden.
You can say whatever you want, whenever you want, and however you want. It’s a practice run to help build your confidence to approach any situation without negative emotions.
Journaling provides a safe space to vent your mind about your romantic or professional relationships. It allows you to see your innermost thoughts without the filter of your anxiety muddying every word.
Starting a journal for your personal and professional relationships can help you pay more attention to the person you’re trying to build with instead of interjecting your feelings and your past hurtful experiences onto them.
It allows you to build a deeper connection with that person because you become genuinely interested in them for who they are instead of what they can do for you or what they want to swindle away from you.
Think about it, if your co-worker likes to talk to you about what’s bothering her at work, there’s a reason why she chose you. Maybe she’s just a chatty Cathy and vents to everyone, or perhaps she trusts you.
If it’s the latter, paying attention when she speaks will help you to dig deeper into why something bothers her so much. Most of the time, what bothers people has nothing to do with what’s really bothering them. If you can get to the root of the problem, you can help your co-worker feel better and maybe even provide a solution.
The same goes for romantic relationships. If your partner is having difficulty communicating what’s wrong, try to understand where they’re coming from instead of getting impatient.
Journaling helps you to do all that and more. It allows you to grow as a compassionate individual and pay attention to the relationships you build.
If you’ve never journaled before and don’t know where to start, I’ve written past blog posts about how to get started with journaling, the benefits of journaling, and how to journal daily. They will help you get started on your journaling journey.
10 Relationship Journal Prompts To Get You Started
Here are 10 relationship journal prompts to help you improve your relationships:
- List all the attributes of a good relationship.
- What can I do to improve my relationship if the attributes that I just listed are missing?
- Would my effort be appreciated or dismissed? Explain in depth.
- What consequences would I face (besides the relationship ending) if I didn’t improve my relationship? List everything that comes to mind.
- How will things change for the better if I put in the effort to improve my relationship?
- Do I really want to put in the work to improve this relationship, or should I just let it go? Why?
- What is my reason for not wanting to improve this relationship if that’s my choice?
- What characteristics in a relationship have I learned to identify as red flags?
- What red flags does my current relationship have? List all the names of the relationships to evaluate and the red flags for each.
- What can I do to address a situation if I see small signs of a red flag building? What can I do to prevent a future red flag from happening? List everything that comes to mind, no matter how small.
Journaling for Stronger Relationships
These journaling prompts are just a guide to help you get started. Feel free to add your own or use them as is. The most important thing is that you start journaling about your relationships to improve them.
The true benefits of journaling are that it triggers personal growth, helps boost your mental health, and allows you to reflect on your life choices.
When you utilize journal prompts to help you dig deeper into your psyche, you’re building yourself to be a better person, and when you grow into a better version of yourself, you’ll begin to realize that everyone is on the same journey.
Some people may not know it yet, so they lie, cheat, and steal to get what they want in life, but the reality of that is that they’re only hurting themselves and delaying their personal growth journey.
Building better relationships start with building a deeper connection with yourself first. When you understand your purpose in life, you’ll know what your deal breakers are.
I hope these journal prompts help you improve all your relationships.
Happy Journaling!
What techniques do you use to improve your relationships? Leave a comment below, I would love to hear from you.
Questions You May Have
Will journaling help my relationship?
If you’re journaling about your relationship and working on ways to improve it, then the answer is yes, journaling will help your relationship. However, if you’re not doing anything with the information from your journal session, then the insight you gain is probably not going to help much.
How do you journal your relationship?
The most important thing is that you’re honest with yourself about the state of your relationship and what you can and cannot do to improve it.
Writing about how your relationships make you feel, how they challenge you mentally and how connected you feel with them are all important things to journal about. Write about the goals you have for your relationship and what you think is a healthy balance for you both.
How does journaling your feelings help?
When you journal about your feelings, it’s like giving yourself a pep talk. You can see your situation from a different perspective and offer yourself some words of encouragement. It also allows you to understand and get rid of any pent-up anger or resentment you may be feeling so that you can approach your relationship with a clear, positive mind.
Does journaling help with expressing emotions?
Journaling definitely helps with expressing emotions. It’s a great way to get all of your feelings out without worrying about offending anyone, looking like a crazy person, or being judged. You can be as honest and unfiltered as you want in your journal, and no one will judge you for it.
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