365

There are 365 days in a year and every year those days seem to pass even faster, in more of a blur. How would you feel if you were looking at a diary that included 365 positive memories ranging from a child learning to walk, the tax return being completed on time and with lower bills, landing that new job, winning a massive contract or getting married?

When we look back through old diaries it is amazing the memories and the emotions that they generate. Consider looking through old photo albums at your parents’ house and the emotions and feelings that those generate. Of course not all of those memories are guaranteed to be positive but there are far more great things trapped and stored within a photo album than bad.

Look at the clothes you wore, the hair do you had – really did you go out looking like that? Can you honestly say this doesn’t bring a smile to your face? Human behaviour is driven by emotional stimuli, things that we move towards or away from, that make us feel good or we deliberately avoid because we know they will make us feel worse.

Your parent’s old photo albums are like a diary to your past and your childhood. The dates might not be clear – it was sometime around 1990 ish – that doesn’t matter, it is a window into your memory bank. A colleague of mine, Steve Houghton-Burnett, has gratitude jars where he literally provides you with a jar and notes so that you can record and store your gratitudes in a jar for prosperity. A simple but seriously good idea.

I have written before about when I first started positive journaling, I planned to begin on 1st January but found in the build up to the end of the year I was discovering so many positive things I wanted to note down that I started early.

Why the 365?  When my mother-in-law passed away several years ago my wife made a specific effort to write down one positive thing in her diary every day for the 365 days that followed her departure. This meant that on the anniversary of her mother’s passing she had 365 positive recollections of the year, even when it was tough some days to even find something positive. By coincidence that anniversary also happened to be one of our daughter’s birthdays so it was very important to make sure there were plenty of positive memories attached to such a date.

The hard part is starting; the next hard bit is keeping going for the whole year. How would you feel in a year’s time to be able to look back on a diary filled with 365 positives? There is no rule that says they have to be written, you choose how you want to record the positives, just make it real for you. For fun go and pull out some of those old photo albums and have a laugh – you will be seriously shocked and thrilled with what you find.