One of the key applications from my time at St Andrews Hall (our CMS training earlier this year) was on the topic of journalling. I’ve been journalling for a number of years now. But this new insight was really helpful. The suggestion was to have two concurrent journals; one journal for what you observed on a particular day, the other journal for your state of mind, your feelings that day; basically where you were up to. The point is that our observations are affected by how we are feeling, how we are travelling.

Now this isn’t necessarily a new insight, but its easy to forget. The real value of this double journal (or you could just have both aspects in the one entry), comes from a distance. We won’t necessarily remember how we were feeling as we read back over our diary entry. But having insight into how we were going enables us to assess our observations and read them through the way we were feeling. Normally we associate double vision with blurriness and inaccuracy. But this kind of double vision actually aids the accuracy of our observations as we interrogate our own state of mind. The highs and lows of entering into a new culture will affect the way I observe things and the conclusions that I draw from those observations. Whether in the honeymoon phase of entering a new culture, or further down the track when home-sickness hits, this second journal (or recording feelings) may help me to read my own observations well.