LifeJournal has jumped into the social media world. We have a Facebook page: www.tinyurl.com/FBLifeJournal. Come visit and become a fan!
Also, follow me on Twitter. My name there is life_journal. Go to http://www.twitter.com
and see what all the twittering is about! For those of you who are new
to the social media/Web 2.0 world, let me simply explain that these
venues are another way to get to know and stay in touch with people who
have interests that overlap with yours.
Three new webinars are coming up! FYI, if you must miss a webinar
session, we now have a service where we can easily send you the
recording. So don't worry if you have to miss a session, you can still
sign up!
1. Starting next week, Invest in Yourself
is a four-session webinar with longtime certified journal therapist Sue
Meyn, about how to leverage your inner resources. Writing in your
journal is one way to help overcome the stresses (A NY Times
article calls it "recession anxiety") many of us are feeling Journal writing can help!
2. Writer’s Workshop Webinar:
Spend an hour and a quarter per week for four weeks listening and
responding to classmates’ writing-in-progress and hearing responses to
your own. Sheila Bender, LifeJournal for Writers content partner and
writing teacher/coach will lead the discussion. Come make more progress
on essays, poems, and stories than you may have believed possible.
3. LifeJournal for WritersWebinar:
This is a webinar to Integrate LifeJournal for Writers into Your
Writing Life. Sheila Bender, LJW content partner and writing coach and
Ruth Folit, creator of LifeJournal, will show you how to use LJW to
improve your writing, to increase your writing productivity, and more.
Looking forward to seeing you at a webinar!
Two articles in this month’s newsletter: One is an article that reviews
the research about how keeping a journal can increase your ability to
concentrate. (I imagine that we would all welcome that!) The second
article is a tip learned from the Writing for Emotional Balance webinar.
.
Happy Spring! Bring your laptop outside when the weather is nice and write!
I’ve written previously about James Pennebaker, PhD,
a well-known psychologist in the journal writing world. Researchers
who have built on his work have shown that expressive writing—a term in
the research literature that means writing in depth about stressful and
traumatic events in one’s life-- improves health, learning, getting a
job, problem solving, and more. Kitty Klein and Adriel Boals have done
research that builds on Pennebaker’s work, researching whether
expressive writing affects the capacity of working memory.
A fundamental cognitive process, working memory is critical for
successful complex thinking like comprehending, reasoning, planning and
problem solving. Working memory involves both short-term memory
storage and the processing of information simultaneously. And, as we
probably all have experienced, working memory has a limited capacity. READ MORE>>www.lifejournal.com/working_memory
A Tip from the Writing for Emotional Balance Webinar
Beth Jacobs, author of the book Writing for Emotional Balance
and facilitator of the eponymous four-session webinar, offered plenty
of information and exercises to explore this complex issue during the
webinar sessions. I learned about how general brain physiology impacts
my everyday emotional life as well as how to use writing as a part of
the emotional balancing strategy.
