Best Online Journaling Software For Therapy & Coaching Clients

Journaling is a very useful tool in therapy, helping clients process difficult emotions and manage their mental health. It can be a valuable tool in coaching, too, deepening a client’s learning to enhance their progress.

This article will show you how to use journaling software to share digital diaries, trackers, logs, and more with your clients, so that you can help them express themselves and create a healthy habit for life.

If you’d like to share digital journals easily with your coaching or therapy clients, get started with your $1 Quenza trial today. With 30 days of unlimited access to all of Quenza’s blended care tools, you’ll have everything you need to create personalized, professional journals effortlessly and better help your clients on their wellbeing journeys.

7 Benefits of Journaling in Therapy & Coaching

Countless studies have examined the role of journaling in mental health, so there are plenty of evidence-based benefits to support its use as a strategy in counseling, therapy, or coaching.

While it can be as straightforward as typing a few lines daily, the habit of recording one’s thoughts, feelings, or behaviors can be very effective for clients who are facing a range of challenges.

To list a few of its best-known mental health advantages, journaling can:

1. Be a form of narrative therapy – it gives clients a safe way to express difficult feelings and thoughts
2. Help clients reduce stress, making it a valuable treatment for clients with anxiety or depression
3. Foster self-awareness about symptoms, improvements, or situational triggers for better self-management, and
4. Facilitate cognitive processing, enhancing feelings of control and mastery over traumatic events.[1]

Writing a journal is also a valuable way for coachees to improve their development in coaching because:

1. It’s an active learning technique that promotes reflective practice or self-examination[2]
2. Journaling helps coachees identify their challenges, gain new perspectives into them, and assess their strategies[3]
3. As with counseling and therapy, it’s a useful way to collect data. In development contexts, it can provide both clients and practitioners with useful insights that inform coaching interventions.[3]

Journaling is only partly about having a comprehensive record of a client’s internal and external experiences. It’s the act of journaling itself that makes it a practical, strategic tool in coaching and therapeutic contexts.

Journaling is only partly about having a comprehensive record of a client’s internal and external experiences, although this can provide some useful insights.

Whether it’s done online or on paper, it’s the act of journaling itself that makes it a practical, strategic tool in coaching and therapeutic contexts. For this precise reason, journaling is most effective when it’s done on a regular basis.

Best Online Journaling Software To Use

Classic style journals required a pen and paper, but today’s digital journaling tools now offer a far more convenient, effective way for clients to record their thoughts and feelings.

On top of this, online journaling software is much faster and more accessible. It helps users log their emotions, thoughts, habits, or behaviors from anywhere, and enables them to store their entries securely without carrying a notebook around everywhere.

Journaling software comes in all shapes and sizes, from interactive PDFs or eBooks to bullet-style templates and spreadsheets. If you’re planning to use journaling as a therapeutic or coaching solution, however, blended software like Quenza allows you to integrate it into a broader treatment or program.

Quenza’s client app is essentially a convenient, private therapy or coaching portal that makes it effortless for clients to:

• Log their notes on the go
• Organize all their entries by time and date
• Share their responses securely with you, and
• Be reminded to make entries when they’re due.

As a professional blended care platform, Quenza’s tools and features are cleverly designed to help you build personalized journals for clients. Not only this, but Quenza is the only platform with which you can easily use your clients’ journals as part of a bespoke program or package – one that’s uniquely catered to their wellbeing or learning goals.

How To Use Quenza For Journaling

With Quenza, you can create journals that are uniquely tailored to a client’s coaching plan or a patient’s therapeutic goals.

The most suitable solution for your coachee or patient will ultimately be a factor of what you hope to achieve together and how journaling fits into that strategy, but Quenza is perfect for:

1. Creating professional journals efficiently by modifying convenient digital templates, or
2. Crafting bespoke client journals from scratch.

1. Using Quenza’s Journaling Templates

Quenza Pathway Expansions are ready-made journaling solutions with a whole variety of potential uses in therapy or coaching.

You can share these convenient templates as they are with pre-set intervals between each activity/step, or amend Expansion Pathways by:

• Personalizing each Activity
• Branding your Pathway steps, even
• Changing up the intervals to suit your client’s goals.

Journaling Through Grief in 40 Days

Narrative therapy is often a very valuable outlet for clients who are dealing with the trauma and pain of losing a loved one.

With this Journaling Through Grief in 40 Days Expansion, you can send a daily journal entry to help clients navigate their feelings with exercises and prompts:

Each day, they’ll receive a new journaling prompt such as The Pain of Grief, Lost Hopes and Dreams, or Searching for Answers.

Daily Exceptions Journal

One of the most valuable roles that journaling in therapy plays is that it encourages repeated daily practice of new behaviors.

This is exactly what the Daily Exceptions Journal Expansion encourages: each day, they’re prompted to reflect on what goes right, rather than their problems and challenges.

With repeated practice, The Daily Exception of Your Problem exercise can reveal insights that encourage a more positive mindset when it comes to tackling life’s difficulties.

Creating a Positive Body Image

If you’re working with clients who would like to foster a healthier, more positive body image, this Expansion Pathway invites them to reflect on the different things they appreciate about their bodies.

Creating a Positive Body Image includes six steps, each delivered on consecutive days – but it’s easy to add your own Pathway steps and exercises for a diary that’s tailored to your client’s goals.

2. Create a tailor-made journal

While Expansion Pathways are quick and convenient to modify, there will be times when you want to share a completely bespoke intervention with those you help.

With Quenza you can design a unique journal Pathway of your own by organizing Activities into a custom sequence that’s aligned with your patient or client’s goals.

If you’re creating your own journal for the first time, read on.

Journaling with Quenza: A Practical Example

Crafting your own journals allows you to share tailor-made Activities or modified Expansions with clients on a schedule that you decide on.

Here’s how to create a coaching journal in three simple steps.

1. Head to Pathways > Create Pathway

Here you can title your journal Pathway, set featured images, or leave notes for yourself about your tracker, diary, or journal.

2. Load an Activity or create a new Pathway-specific Activity for your first step

3. Repeat for each of your entries, selecting custom intervals between each Activity for a daily, weekly, or self-paced journal.

Each step you include can be modified as you see fit. With Quenza’s Pathway tools, it’s also easy to duplicate steps and reduce your prep time even further.

9 Unique Features Included in Quenza

Quenza is unique in its customizability, and it’s incredibly easy to differentiate your solutions with your own personal brand.

Here are some of the practical platform features and tools that you may want to make use of when designing your journals:

1. The Activity Builder – for creating bespoke, ground-up solutions like journal entries, multimedia-rich introductions, or separate steps such as intake and evaluation forms
2. Pathway Tools – that make it easy for you to put your journals together
3. Quenza White Label – a wonderful way to brand your solutions with custom colors and your practice logo
4. Quenza Notes – to keep your therapy or coaching notes secure, private, and organized by client
5. Quenza Expansions – your in-app library of customizable Activity of Pathway templates
6. Quenza Groups – the easiest way to coach teams, groups, or run therapy programs with multiple participants
7. The Wheel of Life tool – a state-of-the-art Activity Builder feature for creating assessments such as Life Domain Satisfaction quizzes
8. Quenza Chat – for fast, HIPAA-compliant communication with your clients, and
9. The Quenza Client App – where your coachees, patients, or students receive all your journals, messages, and reminders, and where they can check their progress or download your Activities as PDFs.

Final Thoughts

There are many ways to help your clients get the most out of journaling, but helping them turn it into a habit is hands down the most effective.

With Quenza’s tools, you’re free to engage and motivate them in the way that suits them best – whether that’s daily reminders, personalized videos, or quick check-ins with Quenza Chat.

Your $1 Quenza trial will give you instant access to all of Quenza’s online journaling software tools for a full month, so that you can start creating powerfully effective solutions for coaching and therapy.

Do let us know what you share with your clients; join in the conversation below!

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