Journal Writing Experience

After getting the hang of writing my reflective journal I decided to experiment with different ways of writing.  I have tried many different ways so far: Making lists, drawing spider diagrams, evaluating the day, questioning myself...in fact after trying a few different styles it was difficult for me to pin point which style I was trying because in the end they all began to merge with one another to create a style personal to me.

The one style which I did not enjoy was drawing. Drawing just doesn’t come very naturally to me, I even have to label stick men so I wasn’t able to relax into what I was thinking about and instead just thought about whether the drawings were understandable or not.

I also enjoyed having a go at writing a short poem or verse about the events of the day although here I couldn’t express everything that I wanted to but I’m not going to give this up after reading some of Adesola’s poems which are very powerful. I’d like to be able to teach myself to think and write as she does. Here is a link to her poems:http://adesolaa.blogspot.com/2010/11/poem-4.html
Although I wasn't writing all my thoughts while creating the poems they did stir up a lot of deeper thoughts about the day so I found the poem an aid in to then writing an evaluation of my thoughts and feelings.

I also found it helpful to make notes or an ongoing list throughout the day if I knew it was going to be a busy day. Sometimes what would be important on a normal day could get forgotten about on a busy day because there is so much going on it doesn’t seem to have had such an impact. But I found that even if I don’t write about something in detail it won’t be forgotten if I have made a few notes about it earlier.

Videos certainly help me to critically reflect as I have found out in the past few days watching myself on the show DVD’s in a rehearsal our dance captain organised and also whilst filming my show reel which I’m putting together at the moment. I discovered that when watching myself back I am only able to see the negative things and things which I can improve on. I am unable to easily say if something looked good or even ok.

Looking back over my reflective journal so far I can see that I write a lot of negative comments. I put myself down a lot and by writing them I believe it even more. I’ve started to write a lot more motivationally and when I am writing negatively I’m trying to pick out positive points and write about them too and where I can, improve on the negatives so hopefully I will start to believe these or at least put myself in a more positive mindset.

I’ve found that the journal has become my unspoken voice of thoughts that if I don’t write down I won’t hear and I’ve realised it is important to address even the most obvious as sometimes there are deeper feelings to these thoughts that can be holding me back.

 An example of this is my show reel.  I have been putting off making it for weeks but after finally booking the stage and arranging a time to have the lights on with the stage manager I HAD to do it. I found myself getting so frustrated and realised that the reason I had been putting off making the show reel was in fact because I knew even if I performed to the best of my ability that in my eyes my work would not be good enough to send to an employer because I can always see what is wrong with what I am doing and not what is right.

If I had written about thinking about making a show reel in my reflective diary then maybe I would have figured out why I was putting it off before it actually came to making it and possibly done something about it like tried to motivate myself into making it and talk about the positive things of myself as a dancer so that maybe I could have seen these when playing back the video, not just the bad things.

A reflective journal is going to help me enormously with my work. It has taken me a long time to realise this but the journal is helping me to learn more about myself and I can see where I’m holding myself back and begin to address this.

I’m looking forwards to carrying on my journal writing throughout the course now and seeing how much I will have learned looking back at the end.