42 | 3 Advanced Journaling Techniques for Managing Your Emotions

Today, I'm sharing three advanced journaling techniques that will help you take your emotional processing to the next level. 

Whether you're feeling stuck in your current journaling practice or tired of just venting on the page, these strategies will help you build deeper emotional resilience. I break down powerful techniques like guided prompts, progress tracking, and emotion mapping - a special tool I use with my coaching clients. 

This episode is perfect if you've mastered the basics and are ready to transform your journaling practice from simple self-reflection into a powerful tool for emotional growth and self-discovery.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

So if you are someone who's been journaling for a while that you feel kind of stuck or like you're not actually making progress or seeing the growth emotionally that you want to, or if you're the person that's like, okay, I've kind of gotten started, but I just feel like I'm kind of venting on the page all the time. I'd like to do something different. Well, today is for you, because I'm gonna share a couple of advanced journaling techniques that are going to help you dig deeper and build emotional resilience, including one of my favorite things to do with my coaching clients. If you're tired of feeling like you're drowning in your emotions and want to stop walking around feeling numb and overwhelmed, you're in the right place. What's up? I'm LaToya, an emotional resilience coach and fellow highly sensitive introvert who learned how to manage all the feels with journaling, and I love helping women like you identify and work through your emotions, embrace your God-given sensitivity so you can stop running away from your feelings in a way that feels authentic to you, ready to dig in? Grab your weighted blanket, get comfy and let's get it. We are on day four of our Feel your Feelings series here on the podcast and I'm curious how's it going? How are you feeling? Have you learned something new? Do you have any questions? Share all of those with me. I would love for you to hop on over to the Facebook community LatoyaEdwardsnet slash community and share your thoughts. Share your thoughts, share your questions, share some of your things that you've been journaling about. Come share all about that in the group. Remember, if you were listening in a real time, I'm currently hosting a giveaway over there, and the way that you enter in to win the prize, which is a free coaching session with me win the prize, which is a free coaching session with me, is to interact in the group, be engaged, sharing, leaving your questions, leaving your comments, sharing your work. All of that is going to get you entered into the giveaway to win a free coaching session with me. So today we are going to dive deeper into some journaling tactics that are really helpful for going deeper with your emotional resilience. So on Tuesday, I shared a five minute, a quick and easy journaling technique that can help you get started to figure out what you're feeling, what you're thinking, all those things and today I want to give you some advanced tactics. Okay, so these are going to be things that, yes, will take you longer than five minutes, but it's really for the person who's like, okay, I'm ready to do this, I'm ready to dig in. I've been doing those five minutes and it seems pretty easy what's next? Right? So these strategies are going to help you to process your emotions on a deeper level, right? More than just kind of figuring out what you think and what you feel, you're actually going to go deeper and you're going to be able to move forward with more clarity and confidence and hopefully develop some self-compassion for yourself along the way.

Speaker 1: 2:48

So the first technique that I want to share with you is guided prompts. So I've talked before about using prompts for journaling as a way to reduce or eliminate decision fatigue. It's great for beginners, but it's also great when you want to go deeper. So a couple of things that you can try when it comes to guided prompts is to just ask yourself things, right. Ask yourself the question that you don't want to answer. Sometimes that works, and an example of this prompt is what am I avoiding feeling right now and why? So I do this a lot. I will get super busy with work or the kids or just doing other things that I am avoiding actually addressing this emotion. That really is like, hey, I need you to pay me some attention, okay, and so I sometimes I'd stop say, okay, latoya, what are you avoiding feeling? And usually it's loneliness or boredom or sadness, right? Or something like that. Like, why are you avoiding it? And really explore that? Okay, because being able to say what you're avoiding is great. Being able to figure out why you're avoiding that is even better, because once you understand why you're avoiding it, right, you can begin to make a plan to not do that anymore. Okay, and also, you'll probably notice over time well, every time that I feel this way right, I do this you put it, catch yourself before it goes on unchecked for a long time, which means that you're building emotional resilience, right?

Speaker 1: 4:21

Another prompt that you can ask yourself is if this emotion had, like a message for me. Who's going to say something? Um, a great example of this for me is when I was feeling bored. Right, I was man y'all. I was so bored. I was so bored that I was getting cranky because I was so bored and I was like, okay, it was like my whole self was saying, hey, you're bored, so find something to do so that you're not bored. It was basically telling me to get a life. Get a life, find a hobby, make some friends, like, go do something that does not involve church or your kids, and you'll stop feeling bored. So, yes, it can be funny.

Speaker 1: 5:01

Everything doesn't have to be deep and heavy all the time, but using these prompts are going to help you focus your time, like your journaling sessions, and uncover what's a lot deeper. So remember when we talked about that five minute technique and I gave you those optional next steps, right? So, like, step one is just get it out on the page, and then we talked about, well, let's mark emotions, let's mark thoughts, let's mark questions. And then the other thing was to, like, you know, actually examine some of those things. This is what we're talking about here. Right, those can become guided prompts, right, I'm feeling? I've been feeling, you know, rejected lately, like what's going on there? Why am I feeling that? Right, what do I need to change because of what I'm feeling? Okay, asking yourself those questions is great.

Speaker 1: 5:50

Now, number two is tracking your progress over time. So I am not a huge fan of just pulling out your journals and like having just a let's be sad session and just reading all the horrible things or whatever it was that you were processing, right. I don't want you to do that, it's not, it's counterproductive. But I do encourage you to look at your past journal entries to notice patterns, to see growth right, to see how you worked through things in the past, because I promise you, if you are dealing with something right now, that you probably have dealt with something similar or that same emotion somewhere before. And when you are journaling you actually have track of all of those things, and so using your journal to track your progress is great because you can celebrate. It's really easy to feel like I'm not making any progress, I'm not growing, nothing's different until, like, you have the proof in the pudding, which is like on the pages of your journal, telling you otherwise, right, you'll notice, oh man, like I'm really struggling with feeling jealous lately and it's just not getting any better. And you'll flip back, you know, some six months before, and read an entry where it took you three weeks to deal with jealousy and you notice that today it took you, you know, two hours. Right, that's progress. You can be able to celebrate that. You'll also be able to see what kind of prompts were really helpful before.

Speaker 1: 7:08

We talked about prompts for the first technique, but go back and look at the things that you've written about before. That's a great way to find prompts. It's a great way to find new ways, not new ways, but finding ways to explore what you're feeling currently, because as you notice your patterns, as you see your growth, it's going to motivate you to continue the work, continue to do the work of exploring, of journaling, of building that muscle, and you're just going to have that much more resilience in the end. So the third technique that I want to share with you is it's one of my favorite ones and it's one that I do with my clients Okay, so, if you ever work with me, what we might work on this, and it's called emotion mapping.

Speaker 1: 7:49

So what this is is basically big picture. It is a way to take all the work that you're doing, so all of the journaling that you're doing, all of the exploring that you're doing, all of the things that you're uncovering, and put it in like one place, one page, so that you have an overview or a map of that emotion for you. That you have an overview or a map of that emotion for you. Okay, so you might say anger, right, so I might do an emotion map of anger, and I'm going to have anger written at the top somewhere, and on that page is going to be everything about anger as it pertains to me. So what are the things that you write about on this map? Well, you want to look at what triggers it. What are your triggers? So, latoya, what are your triggers when it comes to anger, like, what are the things that make you angry? I'm going to have that listed on my map.

Speaker 1: 8:42

Another section is going to be how does that feel in my body? I know I've talked about this a little bit, but our emotions are part of us, and so you will experience different emotions, different places of your body. Right For me, when I get angry, I usually get a headache, right. Right, I feel really tense. When I am anxious, I get shaky, I get sweaty. Right, I start breathing quickly. So what is it doing in your body?

Speaker 1: 9:08

Another section on my map is going to be what patterns do I notice? What patterns of behaviors do I notice, like, when I am angry, what are the things that I do? I'm going to list it out on there. I'm also going to have a section where I'm going to ask myself what are the thoughts that I have when I'm feeling angry, because our thoughts and your emotions are, like, linked to and, like you, can't separate the two, right? Your emotions affect your thoughts, your thoughts affect your emotions. It's really hard to separate out the two. So, when you are having a feeling, there's usually at least one, if not more, thoughts that go along with it, and I might even say, right, alternate thoughts, because sometimes my thoughts that I'm having are wrong, and so I might, you know, make note of a truthful statement about that, of a truthful statement about that.

Speaker 1: 9:58

And then I'm going to have a section on my emotion map where I am going to list out all of the things in my toolbox that I need to help me cope with this emotion, right? So, when I'm angry, what do I do that helps me to feel better? Right, because I don't want to stay angry. I want to feel something different. So what are the things that I can do to help me feel differently? And it's going to be in that little box right On my emotion map, it might be. You know, I'm going to go for a walk, I'm going to do an extra workout, I'm going to call a friend, I'm going to journal, right, I'm going to do some deep breathing. I'm going to go just stand outside and have some green time, put my feet in the dirt, put my face up in the sky and inhale the fresh air.

Speaker 1: 10:38

Okay, so, having all of that in one place is like a cheat sheet almost, so when the next time that I feel angry, I don't have to sit there and figure out oh my goodness, what am I going to do, let me pull out my journal and start exploring things, because I've already done the work. I can just look at my map and it's right there in front of me and I'm going to tell you the reason why I love, love, love, love doing emotion mapping with my clients is because the emotion work that we do sometimes it's not super tangible. I can't physically hand you something different. I'm not going to have a completed planner or a final project or something like that. This work is ongoing and it's not super tangible. But when you can have a map of your emotions and you have this in there, like it, it really it demonstrates all the work that we've done.

Speaker 1: 11:29

Right, because we are looking at exploring. What are your triggers, right? What are your patterns? How does it feel? What are the things that you can do to cope like. We talk about all of these things in our coaching sessions, and so it's really nice to have that all in one place. It's like look at all the things that you have uncovered, look at all the things you identified, um. So it's really really great to have that right now.

Speaker 1: 11:50

These advanced techniques that I've shared with you. They really take journaling from a surface level habit to a tool for transformation. Okay, so, the more that you use them, the more that you figure out guided prompts, the more that you track your progress over time, the more emotions that you map right, the more that you update the maps that you have completed, because things will change, right, I have things that used to make me angry that don't even bother me anymore. I don't want to have it on my map anymore, right? So the more that you do that, the more clarity you're going to have right, the more confidence you're going to have in your ability to cope with those things, to manage those emotions, to process those feelings right, and the more resilience that you're going to have built up over time. Okay, so that's why it's one of my favorite things.

Speaker 1: 12:30

So tomorrow we're going to wrap up this series with some actionable next steps. Ok, I'm going to talk to you about what you can do moving forward and I'm going to share how you can get personalized support from me on your journey to building emotional resilience with journaling. Did you learn something new or have an aha moment from today's episode? I would love to hear from you. The best way to do that is to leave a five star rating and review in Apple Podcasts. This also helps other women like us find the show. Thank you, so I would love to hear from you. The best way to do that is to leave a five-star rating and review in Apple Podcasts. This also helps other women like us find the show. Thank you so much for joining me today.