I’m so excited to teach you how to create a wellness bullet journal. As you know, I’m all about planning when it comes to your wellness. You’ll have a hard time reaching your wellness goals if you don’t have a solid plan in place. My steps to creating wellness goals generally involve:
1. Visualization/Meditation
2. Journaling
3. Getting specific
4. Creating priorities
5. Planning
Number five cannot be skipped because without a detailed plan-of-action, your best intentions will fall by the wayside. There’s way too many distracting obstacles for all of us. Actually, one of the worst is social media. Given the fact that the average time that someone spends on Facebook after quickly “checking in”, is twenty five minutes, we’re sunk! If you check in 4 times a day, that’s 100 minutes per day of being largely distracted away from other things you could be doing to enhance your health and wellness. Now, I LOVE social media. It’s where I get information, entertainment, and all kinds of inspiration, but I have to limit myself, and this daily limit gets factored into my planning for the day.
Bullet Journal
I don’t know if you’ve tried keeping a Bullet Journal yet, but it’s a fun and effective way to both keep on top of your goals, and get creative. It’s not rocket science either. There are tons of great You Tube videos on how to create a bullet journal, but before you go searching for them, let me tell you why a bullet journal works beautifully for wellness goals:
- You get to be really specific about your goals and set them out with daily, weekly, monthly and annual visuals.
- You can get really creative with the visuals – if you’re crafty or an artist, you’ll love this part of it.
- It’s kind of like having a vision board/journal/planner all-in-one small notepad. Flipping through mine now, I get to see the goals that I have for this year, pages devoted to ideas/inspirations/ah-ha moments, and the actual plan-of-action for the days and weeks ahead.
- You get to create your own key codes, which are basically symbols denoting: to-to, done, migrate, idea etc.
- A bullet journal will inspire you to carry on regardless. It’s your own very personal system, which allows for optimum flexibility and creativity.
What You Need To Get Started:
A journal with dotted, numbered pages (not mandatory, but very helpful- you’ll see why the dots are important when you watch the videos).
Thin-tipped colored pens for unleashing your creativity.
I also recommend using regular colored pencils for coloring in
How To Get Started:
If you’ve spent some time visualizing and writing about what your wellness goals are for 2018, you should be ready to go. If not, do spend some time really thinking about what the specifics are. Remember “I want to get healthy” is not specific. “I plan to eliminate refined sugar” is!
So, a recent client I worked with wanted to deal with the fact that she ate baked goods and sugary coffee drinks almost everyday, she felt that her body was weak and flabby, and she was very stressed out. So, I had her visualize a healthy version of herself a year from that day. She came up with a beautiful vision of a strong, energized, calm woman, filling her body with stunning life-giving foods. She pulled images of all the above and created a “Wellness Goals” Pinterest Board. She shared her goals with her besties, and asked them for support. Then we got down to the business of how we were going to achieve these wonderful goals. The plan looked something like this:
3 Big Annual goals: Give up refined sugar and gluten and add beautiful sweet healthy treats to replace the junk with, get physically stronger, meditate everyday.
3 Monthly goals: Try a meditation class, start working through a new healthy cookbook, find some online strength-training videos, and/or find trainer/or trainer at her gym.
3 Daily goals: Get up at 6 am to meditate for 10 minutes, pack almond butter + sliced apple for afternoon snack, 3 x 20 kettle bell swings.
You see how simple and doable this became for her. I then had her add her annual, monthly, and daily goals into her bullet journal. She was good to go!
Other Ideas
The sky is the limit when it comes to creating your bullet journal, but here are some of the things that I include:
- Bucket List
- Inspirations
- Accountability grids for meditation and exercise
- Grocery Store lists
- New Foods I want to try
- Books I want to read
- Career Ideas
- Smoothie recipe
- Places I want to visit
- Self-Care Ideas (hint: Come to one of my retreats this year!!)
Morning/Evening Routine
I also love the idea of getting really detailed in your bullet journal about your morning and evening routine. Some ideas to get you thinking about this:-
Morning
- Lemon Water
- Meditation
- Gratitude List
- Walking the dog
- Reading a spiritual passage
- Laying out your workout clothes at the end of your bed
- Supplements
- Smoothie
- Placing a kettle bell by the door you exit in the morning.
Evening
- Meditate
- Get to bed before 10pm
- Turn off phone at 9pm
- Magnesium tea 30 minutes before bed
- Reading time
- Gratitude List
- Check Bullet Journal
Ultimately, a bullet journal reduces anxiety and the panicky feeling associated with keeping all those crazy do-to lists in your head. You get it all organized on paper, and create solid, doable wellness goals.
Tip: Make sure every goal has a drop dead time line on it. If you write the date by which it needs to be completed, it will get done. These deadlines might be daily, weekly, monthly or annual goals.
Consider a separate Agenda/Planner and a Bullet Journal
I have both because I like a full-focus, jumbo desk agenda, so that I can make all my weekly plans in plain view. You could create a weekly/monthly planner in your bullet journal, but I prefer to keep them separate. My morning ritual is to spend ten minutes looking over both, starting with my agenda so that I make sure I don’t miss any important appointments or deadlines.
Make sure you grab a copy of my FREE starter guide, which you can use alongside your new wellness bullet journal.
