One of the major obstacles to maximizing your success and happiness is a lack of self-awareness. You know your friends’ flaws better than they do. It’s human nature to not have an accurate view of yourself. It is not possible to 100% aware of yourself, because we all have blind spots. 

Sometimes we’d rather stick our heads in the sand and remain oblivious to our shortcomings. We’d prefer to believe that we’re unlucky rather than taking the wrong approach.

This presents a huge challenge, because if you can’t see yourself and your behaviors accurately, how can you grow and evolve optimally?

If you’re brave enough to develop a keen sense of self-awareness, you’ll be more likely to have a successful and rewarding life.

Try these techniques to learn more about yourself:

1. List your values. Taking an hour to identify and prioritize your values will tell you a lot about yourself. You’re bound to find a few surprises if you take the time to do this exercise.
   
   
2. Write down your goals. Defining what you’d like to have, do, and experience in your lifetime is also very revealing. Most of us are too busy surviving from one day to the next to consider our goals. Make time to determine the type of life you want to experience, and you’ll become more self-aware.
   
   
3. Keep a journal. There are entire books written about journaling. Read one of them and develop your own journaling process. Writing is different from the incessant chatter happening between your ears all day long. Self-awareness is only a notebook and a pen away.
   
   
4. Have a heart-to-heart with a close friend. Your friends and family know more about you than you know about yourself. They can see your flaws and strengths quite clearly. Be brave and ask them to tell you about yourself.
   
   
5. Meditate. If you want to understand your mind, meditate. You’ll be shocked by what you find. Meditation is great for your physical health, emotional health, and self-awareness. Thirty minutes a day will reveal a lot about you.
   
   
6. Use your imagination. Imagine you’re a fly on the wall and visualize how you interact with others. Remember both stressful and happy experiences. How do you think your coworkers, friends, family, neighbors, and others view you? How do you come across? How do you think a stranger in the store views you?
   
   
7. Take personality tests. There are many personality and aptitude tests available online, many of them for free. Take these tests and see what they have to say about you. Before dismissing anything that seems way off base, really think about it. Then, ask a close friend if they think the assessment is accurate.
   
   
8. Identify the traits in others that bother you. What do you dislike about others? What does this say about you? Try to be objective and see if you have these same traits. We are often turned off by people that exhibit characteristics we don’t like in ourselves.

How self-aware are you? Do you know how others view you? Do you understand your flaws? What are your greatest strengths? In what type of environment do you thrive? What are your values? What are your goals? How did you contribute to the failure of your past relationships?
If you can’t answer these questions quickly and easily, developing greater self-awareness will benefit you. Until you understand yourself well, your life will appear to be determined by forces beyond your control.

Become more self-aware and regain mastery over your life!

Over the last eight or nine months I have really taken to journaling. It is at a point now that, when I go a while with out writing I can tell the difference in my mood and how I handle things. ​

In our Purposed for a Purpose Facebook Group, I took a poll and asked if people journaled or not and most said they do or at some point have. There were others that did not journal at all. Journaling has been around for a while and most have journaled, especially as a little girl. When we were younger we called it a diary. As we got older, I guess we change the name, but the idea is still the same.

Journaling is great for your mental, physical, and emotional health. In the coming months I will be sharing more about journaling, the benefits, methods and tips to getting starting and making it effective.

Today I want to share with you how I use and you too can use journaling in your quiet time with God. Journaling provides you the opportunity to:

1. Take hold of our thoughts- 2 Corinthians 10:5 tells us to demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. The unaddressed thoughts that float around in our heads have an effect on how we behave and how we think about things. Journaling your thoughts can really help you examine them. Write your thoughts down and assess how they line up against God’s word. Is this a truth, or a lie based on the Word of God? You can take this process a step further and record scriptures to support the truth for later reference. Ask yourself, Is what I am thinking evidence of me being a child of God? How will this thought contribute to me bearing good fruit or bad fruit?  Depending on the thoughts, I would encourage you to ask yourself if your thoughts support your faith in God’s ability or your ability? Philippians 4:8 tells us that we are to “think about things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely and admirable.” Many times, after I write down what I am thinking and go back and read, I find myself thinking, “What were you thinking, girl?” or “Why are you even worried about this situation in the first place?”  Seeing our thoughts on paper is different then having them in our head. After you have record your thoughts and determined that some are not true, noble, right, pure or love, pray and ask God to show you truth—to help you refocus your mind. Ask Him to safeguard your mind if you start to have those thoughts again by helping you to remember His word.  
2. Conversation with God on paper/pour out our heart- I use journaling as a way to talk to God in my quiet time. Sometimes it’s an intentional effort. Other times it starts from me simply writing my thoughts about my devotional or about what’s going on in my life at the time. Either way, I start writing and find that I am pages deep—pouring out my heart to my Heavenly Father and giving him all the things that were bothering me or just sharing how I am feeling. If I am being honest, sometimes this feels easier than the formal way of praying. Now this could be a Janita thing, but we can get in our head about prayer, thinking it has to be or sound a certain way. But this isn’t true—God wants us to come to him in our authentic state, mask off. He wants us to speak to him from our heart. When we write, especially in free flow, we aren’t tuned into the thoughts as much by correcting and making sure they sound right. We just write, flowing from within onto the pages uninhibited.  
3. Prayer: This passage and the previous passage can go hand and hand. As I mentioned before, oftentimes I find that writing what I am feeling leads to a written  prayer. A written prayer is a prayer nonetheless.  What I enjoy about writing out prayers is that you can go back and read them and recollect how God answered them. It serves as written track record and testimony to how faithful God is. When you find yourself in difficult situations or in a time when your faith is wavering, look back and see how God answered and showed up in the past. I know that journals can be private, but let’s say that your prayer journal was one that you openly shared or that your great grandchildren found. It could be a tool that God uses to plant a seed or nurture a seed in their life, drawing them into relationship with him or to a closer relationship with him, because they can see real life evidence of how he worked in your life. Because God does not show favoritism (Romans 2:11), what he will do for one, he will do for another.  
4. Meditate and memorize God’s word--I once heard a saying, God’s word close at hand does mean close at heart. This means that just because we have God’s word close by, accessible, that does not mean it is in our heart. It’s similar to when you are in church or listening to a good podcast and take notes; however, you never go back and read it in order to really digest what was said. Using a journal can help you to meditate on God’s word and memorize it, if we are intentional about it. You have to be intentional about going back and revisiting what you wrote down and going over the scriptures. Many times when I am doing my devotional, there are 1-2 scriptures that really stand out. I don’t always know why, but I write them down and re-read them a few times thinking about their meaning. I am also listening for God to speak to me as it relates to those scriptures and their application to my life. I don’t always hear God speak right in that moment or discern what the scripture means, but over time I get there. When comes to understanding a scripture, I suggest looking at other translations (e.g. Amplified, NLT, etc). Doing this can help you gain better understanding of what you are reading.  Once you write it, meditate on it, ask God for wisdom. Revisit your writing to really let God’s word be ‘close at heart’ too. In memorizing scripture, take a verse of two and write on notecard. Recite it to yourself throughout the day/week to help you memorize God’s word. Place them in places you will see them throughout the day as a reminder. Psalms 1:2-3 tells us that if we meditate on God’s word, we will be like a tree planted by the river and we will bear fruit and not wither. When we meditate on God’s word and memorize it we become more equipped to speak God’s word over ourselves and circumstances. Side note—don’t get so caught up in word for word, paraphrasing is ok as long as the meaning stays the same. We also encourage others, empowering them to embrace who they are. Memorizing God’s word will also help with taking your thought captive, as mentioned in passage one.  
5. Hear God speak - In general, journaling declutters our mind. We have so many thoughts that run through our head on a daily basis and some of them are on repeat, depending on the topic and the “seriousness” of a situation. If we don’t get the thoughts out we can become consumed giving them most of our attention. When we become consumed or focused on the thoughts, it can challenge our ability to hear God speaking to us. He could be giving you instructions, guidance or answers to a prayer, but because of the mental clutter we can't hear him clearly.  Journaling acts as an emotional and mental release. It can help you see the problem clearly by decreasing the distractions because when you “brain dump” it feels like a weight has been lifted. When we aren’t distracted we are more likely to hear God when he speaks.

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Journaling is good for you. It can positively impact the relationships in your life to include the most important one—your relationship with God. You can journal for many reasons, but if you looking for a place to start, I encourage you to try journaling during your quiet time with God. Regardless if you journal or not, incorporating journaling in your quiet time with God will help in developing and strengthen your relationship with God, which is what God desires of his children.

Until Next Time~
​J. Branch 

Bearing fruit is what believers are called to do. It is the outward actions or evidence of the change taking place on the inside. The fruit we produce is the result of our relationship and walk with Christ. 

We often talk about the fruit we bear and our personal walk with Christ. This was the topic I planned to discuss until God placed something else in my spirit. Fruitfulness is something we should desire in all areas of our life. For me, God's focus of emphasis has been fruitfulness within the context of friendship. 

I have always maintained various levels of friendship in my life, and in my current season, God is having me reassess and realign. In many cases, it's been easy, but challenging in others. There have been moments I felt like I was grieving from a "loss"—I can now say perceived loss). The prominent question I ask in assessing a friendship is, "is this friendship fruitful?"

We must have the same level of inspection for the fruitfulness of our friendships as we have for the fruitfulness in our lives. I know it may feel a bit rigid or surgical, but it is necessary. But why is that? Because when you are in a relationship with people, influence is exchanged. Friends influence how you think, behave, and speak. If your friendships don't produce good fruit or lowers the quality of your fruit, then I ask, "Why are you in relationship with them?"

In the most general sense, do your friendships make you better? Do they aid in moving the needle in your personal walk with Christ? Does the relationship support you bearing the fruit God has called you to bear?

If not, what is the purpose of the relationship? Understand that I am not saying everyone in your life needs to offer this to you. Sometimes there are people in our life that we are called to mentor and guide. We are sent to pour into them with no level of reciprocation. I am talking about your inner circle. The ones you spend quality time with, share personal life details with, laugh with, cry together, the ones you take the mask off for.