Create A Personal Growth Bullet Journal

Many create a planner in their bullet journal, but what if you want to make a personal growth bullet journal? How do you go about it and what do you include? This post is going to be just what you need!

Personal growth bullet journal – Introduction

When we think about it, how we define bullet journal is subjective. Some people believe it means the original bullet journal system invented by Ryder Carroll.

Some think of bullet journal as a planner. It is used to create the planning systems that you want and will use, which if you enjoy planning is a complete thrill.

But, here, we will explore another function of the bullet journal…personal growth. Have you ever made a personal growth bullet journal before? Or you could call it a personal growth planner, or personal development planner. Let me know if you have.

My very first bullet journal was bought for me by my husband and I used that as a personal growth journal.

Creating goals

This is one of the first pages in my first bullet journal.

I wanted to explore my personal potential and what I wanted my self-care to look like.

I divided things up into categories = Spiritual | Physical | Mental | Emotional

I planned to work on these sections, one by one to reach my goals.

Another system I have used is setting a word focus for the month, for example ’PEACE’. After that I would explore that word all month long, do reasearch, try to improve, etc.

There are many options of how we can create personal growth goals.

Please don’t fall into the trap of thinking goals are just about career, money, possessions, relationships, etc.

Setting goals for personal growth has been one of the most rewarding journeys for me, and has been my absolute favorite function of my bullet journal collection pages.

Being realistic

One thing I would have liked to understand before setting out on my ’best version of me’ endeavour, is that we need to be realistic.

Personal growth is more about the journey itself than the destination.

Life is so changeable and unpredictable [i.e. global pandemic] and at the end of the day, we are human. So we are unlikely to get things right all of the time.

A lot of personal growth is about accepting our limitations and not holding unrealistic expectations over ourselves, so be realistic in the journey.

True Self-Care

Another area that we can be realistic is with self-care. For example look at the image here..

Picture of a woman lying down and receiving a face massage

It looks amazing right..true self care?

Well, that’s just it.. we can’t say. True self-care is caring for self.

She is having a lovely spa treatment, but is she running away and trying to escape something she doesn’t want to do?

So what does truly caring for self entail?

It is not just getting our nails done.

One thing that is sadly neglected is caring for our emotional selves. True self-care might be sitting in a quiet room and crying to express our grief, or writing our thought and emotions so that we learn to see ourselves.

So be realistic with personal growth, truly tap into what caring for self means and what true growth is for us.

Tracking and Evaluating

Now we are into the bullet journaling.. what to track? how to track? how to evaluate?

If we want to create a personal growth planner we need to write our goals and plans and then be able to take note of specific improvement.

Here are a few things we could track for our personal growth..

Sleep tracker
Water intake
Breathing exercises
Reading tracker
Fruit and veg intake
Writing with non-dominant hand
Language learning

Journal emotions
Stretching or exercising
Nature time
Act of kindness
No social media time
Hobby tracker

There really are many more options than this, but it gives an idea.

This article might give you further ideas: Bullet Journal Ideas for Personal Growth

It’s a good idea to set time for personal development, it’s not likely to happen by magic. It requires time and effort.

First you will want to create your tracker pages in your personal development planner. Then you will need time and practice to work on what you are working on. This might mean sitting with uncomfortable situations to explore another way of handling them, etc.

Read: How Many Habits Should You Track? Will You Be Surprised?

Every month or so, set some reflection time and figure out if any personal growth has been made. You might be suprised.

Picture of an old fashioned stamp with a book on it. The title says Make a personal growth bullet journal

That’s it! Let me know if you decide to create a personal growth journal and how it goes, I know some of you have already, but I love to hear about your ways of doing it.

I hope you have lots of bullet journaling fun.

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