Category Archives: Self-Improvement

How journaling can be useful for you

Journaling is a great way to express yourself and write down your emotions, the journal is a great way to analyse your emotion and create a space just for you.

What is a Journal

If we search in the dictionary what the term “Journal” means, we can find this definition:

“a written record of what you have done each day, sometimes including your private thoughts and feelings”.

This definition describes perfectly, what the practice of Journaling is and what the idea behind him, the Journal is essentially a “journey” of your day. In the journal you can write all you have done and most importantly all you have felt during the day, without any fear of any judgment, the journal is your personal space and is the time you dedicate to the most important person of your life, yourself.

The benefit of the Journaling

Journaling offers a huge benefit for our mental health. One of the most important is how to deal with overwhelming emotions.

Our daily life can be stressful, in particular with the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, most of us can fell under pressure, the work from home lifestyle most of us are pushed for, the kids at home and the problem with the on house schooling can create a lot of pressure to everyone, and this can lead to an overwhelming of emotions and stress.

Journaling can help us with:

  • Help us manage the anxiety
  • Help us to reduce the stress
  • Help us with depression

Write a journal, and adopt the journaling practice, help us to write down the situation we had lived during the day, this helps us to identify what situation create the stress or the anxiety. When we have identified the situation, we can easily work on a plan to reduce it.

How to journaling

There is no correct or wrong way to do journaling, you can write a journal in a simple notepad or on your computer, the only important thing for journaling is to write down what you have felt during the day, and keep in mind journaling is your daily personal space.

If you want to start journaling there are some tips that can help you to start your journey, at least this is what helps me with my journey:

  • Write at least three A5 pages per day, sometimes you can write less sometimes you can write more, but try to write 3 pages daily
  • Be open and honest, don’t worry about any judgment, write exactly what you feel
  • Schedule daily time for your journaling, have a booked time for the journaling help to be consistent, remember you want to build a habit around the journaling, and have a specific time dedicated to that help
  • When you start, don’t stop just continue to write. Start writing can be hard, for this reason when you start to write don’t stop, just write down what you have in mind
  • Take your time, when you write don’t rush, remember journaling is your time and is the time you use to reduce anxiety and stress

Writing a journal helps us to organize our thoughts and our emotions, this can drive the way to our self-awareness and helps to reduce the stress and the anxiety of the day.

Be a better person with the Emotional Intelligence

one can become angry, that is easy. But to be angry with the righe person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, this is not easy. (Aristotele, The Nicomachean Ethics)

What is emotional intelligence?

If we search online for a definition for emotional intelligence, we can found this definition: “Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to identify and manage one’s own emotions, as well as the emotions of others”.

Emotional intelligence plays an important role in our daily life and can be defined using four attributes:

  • self-awareness, the ability to understand our own emotions recognize our strengths and our weakness and how these emotions affect our job and our relations
  • Self-management, the ability to manage our emotions and our behaviour in a productive and efficient way
  • Social awareness, this skill is directly related to empathy, you can understand other people emotions, you recognize and understand the power and the dynamics of a group of people
  • Relationship management, you can have a good relationship, you can communicate clearly and efficiently, and you can influence others and you can manage conflicts in a correct way

The importance of emotional intelligence for your success

My main job is as a Software Engineer, and of course, I daily interact with other team members. In this context, emotional intelligence is more important the IQ.

The why can be easily understood if we think about the four attributes of emotional intelligence.

When we work as a team, have good relations with other members of the team and understand what help others to give the best, is the golden ticket to drive the team productivity.

A recent study from Havard University and released by the National Bureau of Economics Research highlight the importance of emotional intelligence instead of IQ when we work as a group.

The study was made with 255 volunteers and evaluated using a standard test for intelligence and personality, the study shows how people with high EQ are more consistent instead people with only a high IQ.

The reason is simple, people with high emotional intelligence are able to understand how another member of the team feeling simple seeing their face, or during the meeting, they are able to “feel the room temperature” and because of that they can solve the conflict first this start and made all the member of the team motivated.

What makes emotional intelligence so important for our workplace is the capacity to be able to cool down under stress and because of that, people with high emotional intelligence are more successful instead people with the only IQ.

If we want to summarize what emotional intelligence can be useful for us this will be:

  • Help to make better decisions and a better process for problem-solving
  • Help us to stay calm under pressure
  • Help us to resolve conflict
  • Help us to listen better, and because of that to communicate more effectively

These are just some of the benefits brought to us by emotional intelligence.

How we can improve our emotional intelligence

How we can see emotional intelligence is an important skill to add to our repertory.How we can see emotional intelligence is an important skill to add to our repertory. Unfortunately, not everyone has the same level of emotional intelligence, but luckily for us, we can learn how to improve our emotional intelligence.

If we want to improve our emotional intelligence we can follow some simple strategies:

  • learn how we react to different situations, why we react in this way? what emotion trigger us? Do we have some bias? what are our beliefs? This can be done with journaling, for example, journaling is a great way to analyse our behaviour, you can have a small introduction about journaling in my previous post
  • Do a test to understand our weaknesses and our strength, for example, we can use the Gallup test in order to identify our weaknesses and strength
  • Examine how your behaviour impacts others, this helps you to raise empathy
  • Ask for feedback, this can be scary and for sure out of our comfort zone, but ask for feedback is a great way to collect information about ourself

These strategies can help to improve your emotional intelligence, but this is nothing we can do is not an easy task and require a lot of work on ourselves, this means leaving our comfort zone and investing a lot of energy in ourselves.

Personally, when I start my journey to improve my emotional intelligence, I start to read literature around that, one book I highly recommended is Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Dr Daniel Goleman, this is one of my favourite books on the topics. But online you can find a lot of documentation on this topic, the important is to start the journey.

Conclusion

How we can see emotional intelligence becomes a very important skill to have in our “toolbox”. Luckily we can learn this skill and we can improve our emotional intelligence and this can help us to have a better quality of life not only in our work but as well in our private life.