Keeping a logbook can prove useful in many ways for the practice of ethics. It provides precious help in the process of self-knowledge.

Fighting against forgetfulness and developing self-knowledge

The first reason why putting down experiences is useful is obvious: in addition to helping us fight against forgetfulness, it helps us focus on our daily experiences, encouraging us to analyse them and to set up plans of action for the next day, so that we may correct our mistakes.

Example: I am playing with my 5-year-old daughter and my 8-year-old son. We split into teams, my son on one side, my daughter and I on the other. Slowly but surely I get carried away and I forget that my opponent is an 8-year-old child. I win hands down, as my daughter watches with admiration, and I don’t even give my son the chance to score the couple of points that would have allowed him to save face. Only at the end of the game do I suddenly realise the negative emotion that has invaded me—it looks a lot like pride. Too late. My son is humiliated, he doesn’t feel like playing anymore and will refuse to play this game from now on.

Observation, reflection and action

At night, as I write down the experiences I have had during the day in my logbook, I analyse the incident. I am ashamed of my behaviour towards my son. Instead of making him happy, I humiliated him! Upon reflection, I realise that the negative emotion I had tagged as pride was actually some kind of need to show off. I feel terrible.

Pushing my reflection further, I realise that similar situations have happened before. Just a day ago while skiing with my son, when I started picking up speed to make my turns tighter and tighter, focusing on my style above anything else, my intention was clearly not to teach him how to ski better!

I feel ashamed, once again. So I decide to react and to be more careful about this aspect of my behaviour that I have just discovered. The next day, while skiing with my son again, I challenge him and let him win without giving him the impression that he succeeded too easily.

Attention and analysis

Over the next few days, with this new perspective in mind, I remember other experiences that I now see under a different light. I realise for example that dancing generates in me that same desire to show off. I know I’m a good dancer and whenever I become the centre of attention on the dance floor, it inflates my ego. A few weeks ago, I was dancing with a few colleagues and they started forming a circle around me, cheering and clapping. I knew I was going to be subject to emotions of a nature that was not quite clear to me yet, so I refused to play along and I stopped dancing. Thanks to the reflective work I have undertaken since then, I can now make a more precise diagnosis.

Recording your experiences thus not only allows you to correct your behaviour from one day to the other, it also catalyses a self-analysis that can lead to better self-knowledge and accordingly has a deeper and longer-lasting impact. Discovering a failing usually affects us. It remains imprinted in our mind. At first, it translates into a state of astonishment mixed with a pleasant feeling akin to that of a researcher who just found the key to solve a problem after years of work. This impact can shed some light on the origin and causes of a particular behaviour. It thus constitutes a step forward in the process of self-knowledge. Together with behavioural changes in the long run, it participates in a truly ethical approach to self-improvement.

It has now been two months since I realised that I had this tendency to show off and, with regard to my son at least, I believe I have been careful not to repeat the same mistake.

Drastic change of perspectives

Another way to benefit from keeping a logbook is to review your notes in order to recall previous experiences, even old ones. It is very informative and allows you to: 1. Become aware of the frequency with which a particular fault manifests itself; 2. Convince yourself that it is harmful; 3. Understand that certain situations may constitute opportunities to fight against this fault. Those difficult situations then reveal themselves as therapeutic and become easier to accept.

I am currently experiencing a difficult professional situation. My superiors criticised my lack of leadership during my annual evaluation interview, and they considerably decreased my responsibilities shortly afterwards. Following the merger of my company with another one, all the members of my team got promoted. They were assigned new responsibilities and one of them became my manager. Basically, though I kept the title of Division Manager, I was downgraded to the rank of mere rep.

This situation was very hard on me at the beginning. I felt completely humiliated. I was scared to lose my job, but mostly, thinking about what other people thought of me was painful. Then, little by little, as months went by, I started accepting what was happening to me, telling myself I should look for the cause within myself and that this humiliation was most probably a therapeutic tool to fight against one of my main failings: pride.

Awareness

Going through my logbook helped me confirm this diagnosis: my behaviour these past few months had indeed been that of a proud person, someone with an excessively high opinion of their personal value.

For instance, if I had left a message to someone on his or her phone and this person didn’t call me back, I would conclude that this person was a lout who deserved to be given the “brush off” at the first occasion. This hypersensitivity was a result of the perception I had of my importance: I wasn’t being treated with the respect I thought I deserved. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that anything was good to justify attributing importance and value to myself: “you have such and such professional title, so you’re worth this much; you’re in charge of this, so you’re worth this much; etc.” In short, finding myself deprived of responsibilities and means of arguing in favour of my own worth, because of this downgrading, was the occasion to become aware of this fault.

Confirmation

Another experience recorded in my logbook convinced me that my new professional situation was therapeutic and necessary, and allowed me to put an end (temporarily at least) to the arguments of my imperious self:

A month earlier, as I was driving out of a parking space, another car suddenly blocked my way. I refused to back up to leave enough room for this car to go through, which quickly created a mini traffic jam. The honking of the other cars should have made me move, but I was convinced to be acting within my rights (even though under traffic law, I was not) and completely blinded by my ego. Only after several minutes did I concede a foot or two to this other car, forcing its driver–who I didn’t even bother looking at–to undertake complicated manoeuvres.

Reversal of situation

Reading my logbook revealed how frequent and harmful the manifestations of this failing of mine were, which in turn made it easier for me to carry out the self-suggestion that lead me to accept my new professional situation. I started by telling myself that my pride was a real plague that was infecting my relations to others, and that I was better off suffering a bit and for a little while now, than constantly enduring this pride for the rest of my life, or even worse, in the hereafter too.

Thanks to this work and to my prayers in which I ask for divine help, the fog has slowly lifted, and I now better understand that this hardship is a kind of remedy, a beneficial and necessary therapy. My intention in expressing my gratitude to God slowly became more and more sincere.

Conclusions and practical advice

As in anything else, the degree to which keeping a logbook is useful depends on the effort made. The greater our daily efforts to pay attention and fight against our failings, the more sincere we are toward ourselves and the clearer our motivations, the greater the benefit. If we don’t continuously focus on our objectives—a more ethical behaviour or divine satisfaction for those who have faith—, we miss the lessons to be learned from our experiences because we are unaware of the nature of our thoughts, intentions and actions. Keeping a logbook enables us to take the pulse of our spiritual practice. If we don’t have much to write, it means we haven’t paid attention enough or we don’t know how to go about it, because every day is rich in lessons. Even while sick and stuck in bed we can be bombarded with negative thoughts. Every single one of them is an occasion to fight and thus progress toward more humanity.

Going through our logbook over a longer period of time also gives us a panoramic view of our behaviour and inner lives that can provide motivation to work harder in order for certain faults to manifest themselves less frequently.

I, for one, have been trying to practice spirituality for about fifteen years and before I started keeping a logbook, I had never truly realised how many mistakes I make and how often negative emotions strike me. It’s easy to forget, and how comfortable too! Patiently rereading the account of our endless mistakes and negative thoughts and emotions allows us to better understand the nature of the tendencies that dominate us and that rarely, if ever, push us towards our ethical goal.

To conclude, here is a little practical advice: for the use of a logbook to be optimal, it is best to record and analyse the experiences 12 to 24 hours after the facts—48 hours maximum. Any immediate analysis can only be biased by our emotions and waiting too long can lead to overlooking essential elements in our analysis because we forget.

 This work is offered under a Creative Commons licence