Emotional Intelligence (also referred to as ‘EQ’ or ‘EI’) is the ability to recognise, understand and manage your emotions as well as the emotions of others. It is a combination of skills that can be taught, learned and developed.
It is often assumed that women are more emotionally intelligent than men, but actually this is not the case. Most testing shows men and women to score fairly equally when it comes to emotional intelligence.
This assumption is probably related to gender stereotypes, of men being less emotional, more likely to suppress or avoid discussing emotion and the fact that young, male friendship groups were traditionally less likely to show empathy as frequently.
Although it isn’t true that women are inherently more emotionally intelligent than men, I would put forward the argument that traditionally, women are able to practice and develop their emotional intelligence more freely and more frequently. Men can often fear reprisal for seeming ‘too emotional’ in social situations, when around friends or in relationships (though, conversely, we know this is an insult often directed at women in a work setting, where a man would be called passionate for the same response).
The gender politics of emotional intelligence is beyond the scope of this blog, but really the point I am trying to make is that a lot of men could benefit from having a place to practice and develop emotional intelligence, without fear of derision or judgement.
A journal can provide this much needed space. This is because a journal is not simply a place to write to-do lists or recaps of your day (though it can of course be used for both of those things), but it can be both a powerful and highly practical tool for aiding personal growth and self-development.
What is emotional intelligence?
We’ve already touched upon the idea that emotional intelligence is a skill that can be exercised and developed, but it is actually a combination of skills, that combined, give a measure of EQ. Those skills are;
Self awareness
How much ability do you have to honestly recognise your own strengths and weaknesses and are you able to see yourself the way others see you? Self awareness is not about being overly critical or hard on yourself, but is instead about being able to see blind-spots and areas for development, they can ultimately make you a better and more well-rounded human being.
Empathy
Can you put yourself in other people’s shoes and fully comprehend their point of view? Empathy is a massively important skill in any type of relationship and can provide us insights into thoughts and opinions that are not our own, allowing us to question are assumptions and beliefs and see the world in a different way.
Self regulation
What is your capacity for processing and dealing with your emotions in a constructive way? Do you control your emotions or do your emotions control you? Are you able to acknowledge the way you are feeling and understand why you feel that way, and then act in the way you deem appropriate? Are you able to accept accountability for the way you are feeling? This is all indicative of strong emotional self regulation. This is different to suppressing or denying your emotions, but instead is the ability to feel, identify and and accept your emotions, weigh up the emotional response against the response that best reflects who you are, and react accordingly.
Social skills
Social skills refers to how adept you are at forming, maintaining and managing relationships; whether that’s friendships, partners or colleagues. How you make others feel, the ability to take on opinions and viewpoints that are not your own and to navigate interpersonal relationships all plays into your social skill.
These elements of EQ can have enormous impacts on all aspects of our lives. The way we handle our emotions, the level at which we can understand and appreciate our own shortcomings, the way we interact with other people – all has a huge bearing on our success and happiness when it comes to relationships, careers and our own mental health.
The link between journaling and emotional intelligence
How can journaling help you to improve your self awareness, empathy, self regulation and social skills? What is the connection between writing and emotional intelligence?
When I first started journaling, most of my entries were diary style recaps of events through the day. It was nice to write about the positives of my day, to get any stresses off my chest, and eventually to have a lot of entries to look back and reminisce on. However, the moment my journal became a truly useful tool was when I started to actively write about the type of man I wanted to be. This allowed me to set standards and values for myself, to set goals and be more ambitious.
With this template of who I wanted to be, my journal increasingly became a space to reflect on my thoughts, feelings and actions. To compare myself to my standards for myself (what Warren Buffet might call, the ‘internal score card’) and identify the areas where I was living up to them, and the areas where there might be room for improvement.
This space to self-reflect and consciously reinforce my own standards for myself has been one of the major appeals of journaling for me. It has improved my self-awareness and helped me move closer to being the type of man I want to be.
Beyond that, journaling can also help us to recognise and process emotions, a major part of self-regulation and empathy. It can be hard to spot, in the moment, when you are being driven by emotion and not thinking rationally. Journaling allows us to reflect on our decisions and spot situations and triggers that cause an emotional response. We can identify the emotion and reflect on whether the way we acted was the best course of action or not. Over time, this reflective action of identifying and naming emotions and spotting the situations and triggers that give rise to those emotions, allows us to become better at recognising them in real time, and therefore better at regulating our emotions and thinking more rationally.
That’s not to say you should suppress your emotions, or that it isn’t right to feel them, but there is a difference between identifying, accepting and feeling your emotions, and being controlled by them.
This exercise can also aid emotional literacy, which is the ability to name and identify more complex emotions, and recognise multiple emotions acting at once. We are complex emotional creatures, and there are many shades of emotion between just ‘happy’ and ‘sad’. Traditionally, men have been shown to be quite poor at emotional literacy, which may be due to the differences in emotional expression between men and women. Young men, typically, don’t tend to move past expressing basic, top-level emotions, and aren’t encouraged to explore and widen their vocabulary when it comes to expressing their feelings.
Journaling can help you find the words to express the way you feel and better recognise a wider range of emotions, or deeper underlying causes for the reason you act a certain way in certain situations. Being more emotionally literate can also help you to better recognise emotions in others and therefore become more empathic.
Emotional intelligence isn’t a gendered skill. It isn’t ‘unmanly’ to be able to identify and name your emotions, and to empathise with others. I’m certain you can think of situations right now where a relationship may have gone better if you were more skilled at self-regulation and empathy with the other person, or how being able to recognise emotional triggers might have helped avoid an argument with your partner, or how the ability to regulate your emotions and accurately gauge the emotions of another might have led to greater success in business. These are life skills that can improve all aspects of a man’s life, and are worth working on.
Benefits of journaling for men’s emotional growth
Whether we appreciate it or not, our emotional intelligence affects almost every relationship in our lives; our spouses, partners, friends, colleagues, children and even our relationship with ourselves. The EQ skillset can be developed through active journaling and can lead to better, stronger, happier relationships as well as greater self-awareness and self-acceptance. Here are just some of the benefits of journaling for emotional growth:
Self-awareness
Regularly writing about your thoughts and feelings can help you identify patterns and recognise behaviours that don’t necessarily align with the standards you set for yourself. Being more self-aware can help us feel more confident, make better decisions and allows us to communicate more clearly. When journaling for greater self-awareness, look at old patterns of behaviour and ask yourself why you behaved in that way, if your behaviour aligned with your standards of yourself and how you could avoid acting in a way that you didn’t want to in the future.
Stress reduction
Using journaling as a tool to get things off your chest can help with the self-regulation aspect of emotional intelligence. It provides a space to express and work through your emotions in a productive manner, and helps us avoid bottling things up or expressing ourselves in a manner we wouldn’t be proud of.
Better relationships
What relationships can’t be improved by better communication? Regularly writing about our own thoughts and feelings improves our communication style, clarifies our thoughts (helping us speak more directly), allows us to develop our emotional vocabulary which can lead to greater empathy, helps us think rationally and be less controlled by our emotions and allows us to assess, evaluate and review our communication style (or even plan out what we want to say in future situations). All of this is a fantastic toolset to help you be a stronger, more effective communicator, which will have a compounding effect on all relationships in your life.
Personal accountability
Personal accountability isnt about blaming yourself or beating yourself up. Instead, its about recognising what issues you are causing for yourself and what obstacles you are putting in your own way. It is a positive mindset, because it makes us ask ourselves, where was the opportunity to be better? When you commit to developing and maintaining a long-term journaling habit, you are providing yourself data about your habits, behaviours and emotions over a long period. This is great for helping us spot trends and patterns that we want to change, and even for highlighting times where we assigned the blame for our problems to some external factor, when really, personal accountability would have helped us learn more from that situation and potentially avoid repeating it in the future.
How to get started with journaling
If you’re new to journaling and looking for the best way to start, try reading my post on ‘how to journal.’ Some quick tips to get you started journaling for emotional intelligence would be:
Set an intention
What is it you’re wanting to achieve with your journaling and how will you know when you’ve achieved it? If you are looking to improve your social skills, for example, set yourself daily tasks to interact with new people and journal about your experiences. If you’re looking to improve empathy, write about your relationships and look for times when you could have been more empathetic, or write out a conversation from the other person’s point of view to practice getting into another person’s mindset.
Setting an intention gives your journaling habit purpose and direction and helps you avoid those situations where you don’t know what to write, because you write what brings you closer to your intended purpose.
Create a routine
It can be tempting with any new hobby to just be vague with the time you will devote to it, but this vagueness can be a defense mechanism, because we feel less bad when we miss a day. We can rationalise it as, “Oh well, I hadn’t planned to do it today anyway” or, “I wasn’t that committed” and then it becomes all too easy to give up altogether. If you’re serious about personal growth and developing your emotional intelligence, commit to a time and frequency that works for you. Set time aside and make sure you don’t miss it, and when it’s time to journal, make sure you’re focused on it and not getting distracted.
Start small
Another reason that habits and hobbies can fail easily is because we overcommit and overextend. There is a tendency to want to go from nothing, to everything, with no inbetween. When we decide to lose weight, we massively overrestrict our calories and try to get in the gym eight days a week. It’s too much, and too drastic a change, and eventually we give up because we’ve made it too hard for ourselves. It’s the same with journaling. You don’t have to commit to a hundred A4 pages every day. Writing one page a day, one paragraph a day, one sentence or even just one word is absolutely fine. It’s about finding what works for you, to a level you can stick with. Once you have built the habit, you can start to build on it.
Use tools for success
People will love to tell you that you have to use a certain brand of pen or notepad in order to journal, but it simply isn’t true. Journaling can be done anywhere, in any medium, so if you find it easier to use a digital tool (such as Notion) rather than a physical notebook, or you have found a journaling app that works for you, then that is absolutely fine. Find and use whatever works for you.
Simarly, you might be told that you should be doing unguided rather than guided journaling, or that journal prompts are for beginners. Again, this simply isn’t true. Yes, prompts may help people who are new to the hobby get started and understand the questions they might want to ask themselves, but the questions are meant to be deliberately challenging and thought-provoking, which makes them a great option for anybody who journals. If you can find good prompts that fit with the intention of your journal, then absolutely consider using them.
Journaling prompts to develop emotional intelligence
Jornal prompts are questions that are intended to make us think. They are often deliberately challenging, so that working to answer them might bring us greater insight, and they can often be focused on a specific intention. Below are some journal prompts aimed specifically at helping you develop your emotional intelligence. For more, please take a look at my journal prompts section.
What emotion am I feeling most often lately, and why?
What recent event triggered a strong emotional response, and how did I handle it?
What is one area of my life where I could practice more empathy?
What is the most challenging emotion for you to feel, and why? What could you do to more positively deal with this emotion?
How do you communicate your feelings to the people who care about you?
When did you last feel misunderstood? What could you do to ensure you were better understood?
Write out an apology to someone you feel deserves it.
Overcoming common barriers
Journaling around emotions can be an uncomfortable experience for a lot of men. It is difficult to put ourselves in a position of vulnerability and openness, and to talk in a way that we are traditionally discouraged from talking. Even though a journal is our own, private space, it can be difficult to not feel judged for being emotionally open.
An emotional intelligence journal can also feel less productive than say, a habit tracker journal or bullet journal. With those two styles, there is a clear purpose and practicality that can often be appealing to men. With journaling for emotional intelligence, the end goal can sometimes be vague, or it may be difficult to gauge progress. This is why it is important to properly set your intention and expectations when you start. What are you hoping to get out of the habit?
Remember, the experience of being vulnerable while writing is a very worthy goal. You can also add more concrete tools to your EQ journal to solidify the practice. Habit trackers, journaling prompts and lists can all be used to great effect whilst focusing on developing emotional intelligence.
Not knowing where to start can often be a huge barrier to entry when it comes to EQ journaling. Do you just write down your feelings? Which one feeling should I focus on? How much do I need to write? What do I write to help my development?
This is where guided journaling and the use of quality prompts can really start to help. They take pressure away from not knowing where to start, and guide our writing towards our specific end-goal. Finding a journal that is specifically focused on emotional intelligence and awareness can help ease the pressure of starting by giving us a framework to work from and adapt for our own needs.
Journaling for EQ can seem vague, unproductive and perhaps un-masculine. I would argue that being willing and able to put yourself in a position of vulnerability, to be open and honest with yourself and to recognise your potential self-development areas and weak spots, is an incredibly powerful set of skills that will help you become a better, more well-rounded and more confident person. Remember, journaling is not a passive activity, it is very much an exercise, and like going to the gym, if you can be consistent and committed, show up and do the work, you will see long term benefits and development. Journaling is a tool for developing strength, not an admission of weakness.
Conclusion
Emotional intelligence is a set of skills which can be worked upon and developed. By improving our EQ, we can become more empathetic, more confident, better communicators and less controlled by our emotions. This can have enormous benefits on relationships of every kind, whether romantic, professional or friendships. The ability to recognise, appreciate and accept emotions (both in ourselves and in others) is a key ability in great leaders, great partners and great men in general.
If you want to become more emotionally intelligent, you now have the toolset to get started, and I would encourage to make that first step, no matter how small. Commit to a few days of journaling. Use the prompts provided above, and see what insights you reveal about yourself. Remember that journaling is an exercise and something you can see compounded benefits from if you can commit to even small actions over a period of time.
I’d love to hear if you’ve started journaling for emotional intelligence and how it has helped you.
As always, happy journaling.