Task 2b- Reflective writing

As you can all probably tell I'm excited for christmas by the background picture change!!

So initially going into this i thought how hard can it be? At my drama school we had to do a lot of reflective essays daily logs about how lessons went that day. The guidelines were simple questions like:
what did you do this lesson?
How do you think you did this lesson?
What was a strength?
what was a weakness?
one thing you would like to improve on?
what will you take forward to your next lesson?
and mark yourself out of 10 for effort.

This kind of format was pretty straight forward to follow as the questions it asked were straight to the point and didn't require a massive answer.
Researching more on after reading reader 2 i have a found a good website for anyone who might want to try a different form of online journal writing, I think all of them are free but all of them are a completely different format so might be worth having a go!

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/5-online-journaling-tools.html

I really liked this line from David Bound's 'Using journal writing to enhance reflective practise'

"Reflection involves taking the unprocessed, raw material of experience and engaging with it as a way to make sense of what has occurred."

For me this is my weakness in my journal writing so i have decided to take a different approach and ask myself questions after writing about my day. Here is an extract from my private journal:

got paid: £--- amount
transfer money to savings.
hair cut @ 11am
work @1pm
meeting 5-6pm

Work was fine today but we didnt have a manager present in the meeting this is annoying as we can get as much done and can't ask if the managers agree with our feedback with new trainees. It means we now have to go another week before we can have a full on session to be updated with what new things will be happening in the upcoming weeks and where we are at in terms of training ready for christmas. So as it was just 4 of us we basically just sat there for an hour moaning about everything that was wrong and didnt really get anywhere. We all then left in a bad mood all wound up about everything that is going wrong for us at work at the moment. I then left in an awful mood and had everything everyone said going round and round in my head and i started to think oh yeah actually thats happened to me too. Once one of us started ranting about something the others would join in and keep adding fuel to the fire.

So looking at a reflective view 
did i learn anything? 
what worked?
notice anything to avoid?
what if a manager was there?
how did this meeting compare to last weeks?

looking at all these questions i ask myself my answer is the whole thing was very negative wasn't productive at all. If a manager was present it wouldn't of happened, compared to the week before meeting which we got a lot of planning done and was very productive. I have learnt from this that if you need to moan about something do it at home as it effect everyone in your work place around you and makes them question things too and you all just end up in a bad mood together. I would definitely avoid bringing up anything negative or if i need to maybe end the sentence with a positive so it is more constructive. Ive learnt that being negative gets you nowhere and we didnt get any work done at all. Although this is a pretty negative experience I'm glad it happened as i now know what it feels like to be in that mental head space and its not healthy. I have managed to turn this into a positive thing and its all part of my learning journey. Asking myself questions has really helped me just to exhale the situation and treat it as a learning curve rather than an annoyance. 
I look forward to reading everyone else's journal journeys! any comments or feedback please let me know :)