Whether you have an audience who cares about your writing or not, the practice of putting your thoughts into words and writing them down in a coherent fashion is an invaluable tool for personal development. Communication plays in role in everything you do. Your friendships, professional relationships, future opportunities, and personal happiness will all be largely determined by how effective you are at communication.

Writing teaches you how to think before speaking, how to hear your words as others hear them, how to better clarify and organize your own thoughts, and how to find your own voice. More importantly, the challenges of writing are a way of discovering things about yourself that you can’t do any other way.

The blank page functions as a mirror for the relationship you have with yourself. If you’re not reading, meditating, paying attention to life, seeking out adventures, nourishing your soul, loving deeply, dreaming wildly, processing your feelings, playing around with new ideas, meeting people, engaging the world, collecting experiences, or just doing things in general that make you feel more alive or more connected to the essence of who you are, all of this will be made plain to you when you sit down to write.

There’s something about the creative process that demands an honest confrontation with your soul. What have you been filling your heart and mind with? What have you been neglecting and suppressing? How true have you been to what fires you up? How distracted have you been by the things that no longer serve you? Are you learning anything new? Are you falling in love with anything new? Are you still evolving? Are you telling yourself the truth? Are you lying to yourself?

It’s one thing to answer these questions with your mind. It’s another thing to listen to what your heart has to say about these things. Writing is a way of listening to the heart. If you want to know the differences between the story you’re telling yourself and the story you’re actually living, you should write. Writing will not only reveal who you are to others, it will reveal who you are to yourself.

Read Why Students Should Blog – My Top 10

Read 15 Reasons I Think You Should Blog

Read Ideas’ Lives Matter

• Refer to your list of the 6 most important lessons in life. Publish a post sharing what’s on your list. Then write two paragraphs explaining one of those lessons.

1. What’s the value of writing down your ideas?
2. How can writing help you get to know yourself?
3. Why is blogging relevant to students? How can writing make you a better thinker?