GA 635 | Emotions Are Not the Enemy with D. Earl Johnston

that if you're living a really, really good life, that you should be rational all the time. But that's not at all what the science says. And science always changes. But I've tracked across 12 different disciplines—hard science, soft science, the arts, literature—unanimity that emotions are foundational to logic.

Today, I am very excited to welcome Doug Johnson to the show. Now, as you'll hear, today's a fantastic episode. I mean, it's a a really good one. And it's not our typical sort of talk about Lean, talk about Six Sigma, continuous improvement, anything like that. No, it's actually something very different, but it's— I will say it's very, very connected to what we're trying to do with continuous improvement, with leadership, with just people development, that sort of thing. And really, the topic of the day is emotions. And obviously, all of us experience emotions every really second of the day. As soon As you wake up, they're feeling an emotion. As we navigate the day, there's good emotions, there's sad, there's happy, there's angry, and everything else in between. And so what we do is we talk about Doug's book. He wrote a book called Choosing Emotions: Thinking with Your Head and Acting with Your Heart. And we just really just kind of dive into what are emotions and what are we to do with them. And anyhow, I don't even want to go into too much. Towards the end, there's such a thing It was an emotionary. There's an emotionary that Doug came out with, basically like a dictionary, which is what the book is. It's essentially a dictionary about emotions. And so if you're feeling angry, you look up anger in the book, and then there's going to be a bunch of different quotes and stories and things related to that emotion. And, you know, basically the premise is when you name it and you kind of assign what you're feeling and put it into words, you're going to start to feel better. In that case, you would hopefully be less angry. So anyhow, fantastic episode. I really, really enjoyed this one. Please give this one a full listen all the way through. Show notes can be found over at gembapodcast.com. Just look for episode 635. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 635. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Doug, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Great, Ron. Great to be with you. Thank you. Good morning.

Right. Where are you calling in from?

Well, at the moment I'm in Tennessee with my daughter seeing her new boyfriend, but good to be in the Volunteer State.

Okay. Okay. Where are you?

Where do you normally reside? In Houston. So I'm a Texan, like I believe you're in Texas as well.

I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, north.

I'm up in the DFW area, but my brother's in Houston, so.

Yeah. It's a little hotter down there in the summer, you know, but tiny bit and steamier too. Yeah, a little bit. A little bit.

Got a little more water around you. So. All right. Well, hey, Doug, as you know, we like to begin all of our episodes with a guest sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Well, a favorite quote of mine which helps to define emotions is actually from Winston Churchill. He's well known, of course, as the Prime Minister of England during World War II, but he also won the Nobel Prize in Literature later in his life. His quote, which so beautifully describes emotions, is 8 words: Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision. What beautiful economy of 8 words. And it really is helpful in understanding emotions. Yeah, that's a good one.

That's a good one. All right. Well, hey, tell us a little bit about yourself, Doug. Tell us about your background. And obviously, we're going to dig into emotional vocabulary and all kinds of fun stuff. But just tell us a little bit about Doug.

Dupe had a long career as a corporate executive in banking and finance. I became a part of a team doing what's known as due diligence, which is going around the country and also in Europe digging into countries— companies rather— to find whether they're worth buying or not. So I'm pretty familiar with being thrown into complex scenes and being asked to figure out which end is up. About 10 years ago, I had morphed also into being hired by major national law firms to help them in complex business cases determine who was at fault. Um, so at that point in time, I was then a professional researcher and I had established— my daughter was in 8th grade, Ron, and we'd established a game, uh, which we called College Bowl, which was where I would, uh, bring to dinner, a father-daughter dinner every couple of weeks, a list of 150 prepared questions on any topic. Could be geography, history, whatever. But if she got the answer right, I would slide a $2 bill across the table to her. And she loved it. It was fun for both of us. I got some insight as to what was going on in my daughter's life. And she began to ask about, "Gee, when do we get to play College Bowl again?" 2 years later in 10th grade, she asked me to dinner and she arrives at dinner with a sullen face and she says, "Dad, what is depression?" And I faked it, Ron. I thought, you know, well, I'll just act like she's asking a business question. So I said, "Well, it's a slowdown in business activity, decline in interest rates." And she said, "No, no, Dad, you've got it wrong. I'm talking about emotional depression." And I said, "Sweetheart, I don't have any idea. I don't know. And I've got to get to work." So as a researcher, I went back to work as a student, reading books, going online, going to Barnes Noble, wherever. And I found that in the course of trying to understand the emotion of depression, Psychologists are often very, very helpful, but what I was looking for was to be able to help a 15-year-old daughter. And what was helpful was quotes from people who'd experienced that emotion. So in essence, a scientist would describe what an emotion looks like, but I was looking for what it feels like. So I came across 3 quotes in the course of a few days. The first of which was from Rollo May. I don't know if you know that name. He was— one of the first self-help authors in the 1950s before anybody ever even heard the term self-help. He had his PhD and his bachelor's in divinity. He was a pretty well-rounded guy. And his quote, having survived depression, was, "Depression is the inability to construct a future." And I thought that was a really powerful quote. I suddenly— it wasn't just sadness, it was the inability to construct a future. And I thought, Gosh, you know, for people who've told me they can't get out of bed, now I sort of have a better sense of what they mean because here's a guy who's been a big success in life and he overcame it. I then came across the second quote. Undoubtedly, you'll know who J.K. Rowling is, the author of the Harry Potter series. Yeah. She had this, suffered from depression as a young woman. Oh, I didn't know that. Before she became a successful writer. And so her quote is, "Depression is that absence of being able to envision you will ever be cheerful again. It's the most unpleasant thing I've ever experienced." Well, I wrote that down also on a Post-it note. And then a couple of days later, I came up with a third quote from, again, somebody who's experienced depression and come out well on the other side of it. This is a freelance writer by the name of Hailey Cornell. She's not yet famous, but presumably she will be. Here's her quote about depression: Depression lies. It tells you you've always felt this way and you always will, but you haven't and you won't. So imagine I'm sitting at my desk surrounded by books and laptops and articles, and I decide to simply text those 3 quotes across town to my 10th grade daughter who shouldn't be looking at her text, but she was. And, and so I sent all 3 emails, texts to her. 3 minutes later, she texts back, Ron, she says, I'm crying. I'm like, oh my goodness, why are you crying? These people all survived it. They all, you know, went on to live happy lives. And her answer was, that's why I'm crying. Thank you, Dad. Well, that was a wonderful father-daughter moment for obvious reasons. But what it led me to understand, and for me and my daughter to understand, she recovered in a period of a few months from a having been out of school for a month and has become a nurse and done well. What we agreed was that quotes from people who've experienced an emotion are often much more helpful than what a scientist might say it looks like. So we expanded from depression to anxiety to OCD to codependence and to a lot of very positive emotions like enthusiasm, excitement, zeal, wonder, But the idea was accumulating quotes from people who've experienced it and done well in life, whether it's a sort of a favorable emotion or an unfavorable one. And 9 years later, 272 different emotional states. When I completed the book in January and published it, a friend called and said, why don't you submit this to AI and see what AI says about your book, uh, ultimately 272 different emotional states as covered by 8,000 quotes from all of history, including the latest in science. And I, you can appreciate, I might have paused before I press send on having AI opine on what it thought of the book. Well, I decided to go ahead and do it, and minutes later, both ChatGPT and Claude AI each responded that this was the most— the book Choosing Emotions, our book, my book was the most comprehensive consumer-facing reference book on emotions in the English language, which is a mouthful. I didn't expect that. I was, you know, I quickly emailed back.

So you literally uploaded like the entire transcript of the whole book?

I had it electronically, which I, you know, I just happened to have it electronically because that's the way I've been communicating with the publisher. And so I submitted all 130,000 words and 376 pages. And then within minutes, the answer came back that— and I said, my gosh, you're— come on, how'd that make you feel? Well, my jaw dropped. I thought, well, you know, I'm being cheerlead here. I mean, you know, so I texted back. I said, no, please be serious. You know, thank you. That's a nice compliment. No, no, you don't understand. Nobody's ever done what you've done before. And you might understand that if you go to a bookstore and you find a book about depression or anxiety or determination, those are typically one-emotion books. Nobody has ever put them all together in one place. And that's what we did. And we did it in an innovative way, which is to describe emotions and define them by using quotes of people who've lived them, which had never been done before. So it was a big surprise, to answer your question.

Wow, what a powerful story. My gosh. Oh man, I'm envious. I've always dreamt of writing a book on something, but I've never done it. But sounds like— now, I've not— full disclosure, I haven't read your book yet. I plan to. But man, that just must be just such a fulfilling feeling, really, to— it was a fun thing.

Well, there were 3 other things, if I may, that that came out of it. Imagine me with my dog sitting at my feet for 8 and 9 years working many thousands of hours to accumulate all these quotes. The average— what we've learned is really clearly, and this is well supported in academia, that the average American— and Ron, we all understand there's no such thing as an average American, but because everyone's unique and special— but the average American has 3 fundamental misunderstandings about emotion. Number one of which is the average person thinks there are only between 8 and 28 emotions total. And yet easily we've chronicled in the book, these are everyday emotions, they're in the low hundreds. So imagine that, that the average person thinks there are only 8 to 28 emotions and they're easily into the low hundreds. The second misunderstanding for the average person is that emotions are sporadic. For example, on Tuesday my boss was annoyed with me, so that was annoyance. Yesterday morning my wife was very cheerful, she found something on sale. This morning I was concerned because I have a meeting with my own boss and, you know, I'm anxious about that. And so the average person thinks that emotions are sporadic, that occasionally you might be annoyed or interested or whatever, but otherwise you're you're rational. The truth is that we are always, every day, all day, and even in our sleep, we are emotional. We're shifting from one emotion. And I'll briefly touch that because it's really significant. Imagine it's a Saturday afternoon run and you're sitting in your living room alone. You're lonely, you're bored, and you say, well, I'm going to turn on the TV. So that's your boredom. Now you shifted to curiosity. So you click on the remote and you see a rerun of some show you've seen before and you go, nah, No interest. I'm going to see what's in the kitchen. So you've gone back to boredom, back to curiosity. You head into the kitchen, you see the refrigerator and you go, aha, excitement. That goodie that I left in there last night might still be in there. You open the refrigerator door and yes, exultation, there it is. And you reach for it. Sadly, your cell phone goes off. You're annoyed. It's a telemarketer. You quickly dismiss the telemarketer. You got dive back for your goodie, you're satisfied, you eat your goodie, and then you're bored again. And you say, well, I'm going to call my friend Bill and see if he wants to go to the gym. You are constantly, we are constantly shifting from one emotion to the next. They're not sporadic or occasional. The number 3 misunderstanding that the average person has about emotions is that emotions are supposedly inferior to reason. And if you think back to the Star Wars TV show years ago with William Shatner as Captain Cook and Leonard Nimoy as the first officer, Mr. Spock. Mr. Spock was this paragon of reason. He was frequently annoyed by humans and how they let their emotions interfere with them. Well, that sort of still permeates our culture, that emotions are inferior to reason, that if you're living a really, really good life, that you should be rational all the time. But that's not at all what the science says. And science always changes. But I've tracked across 12 different disciplines, hard science, soft science, the arts, the literature, unanimity that emotions are foundational to logic. You cannot be logical. You cannot be reasonable without having emotions to assign value to your thoughts. And that includes from Antonio Damasio, who is arguably the number one neuroscientist in the world. It is widely understood, virtually unanimous, that emotions are foundational to logic, not the other way around. And so if you understand that, that's a subtle shift that really changes your life. We've all heard emotions getting a bad rap. You know, oh, Bill, he was so emotional yesterday, you couldn't talk to him. Or my girlfriend is so emotional, you couldn't talk to her. No, the reverse is really true. It's emotions that give us reason and allow us to assign value to to facts. So emotions are utterly foundational. So I'll wrap up this and I'll listen to your questions, which are more important than my rambling on. Emotions are navigational. And oftentimes we think that people are afraid of their emotions. You know, my lust got the best of me or whatever. Emotions are navigational. They have Duty number one is to protect us. You touch a hot stove, you navigate away from the stove. You hang around angry or deceptive people, you'll navigate away from them. And, but yet after we are protected and we're safe, they allow us to advance our lives. I want to investigate enthusiasm, excitement, love, curiosity, wonder, zeal. So emotions are navigational. And if you understand that emotions are foundational logic, ether navigational. Those are two very important, subtle things that really change our lives.

What is it about, like, as you've been talking, I think about myself, just my own life, and I'm guilty of, and I'm sure many people listening are also guilty of this. You see, get home from work and kids are there and the wife's there and dinner's being made. I'm just relaxing on the couch or whatever it is. And what do I do? Reach for my pocket and I pull out my phone and I just start doom scrolling with my kids sitting right there. You know, like, like, what is that? Like, is that— I mean, it's clearly an emotionally driven action, right?

Like, but what, like, it is. What's your insight into that? If I may answer your question, I'm going to start with, with a, with a bit humor. There's a very successful psychologist by the name of Harriet Lerner, and she's written a number of books and has quite a good following. And she came up with an expression, emotions are like children. You don't want them driving the car, but you can't stuff them in the trunk either. And I mean, it's a funny line and I've remembered it. But if I may, I think a baseline for people is boredom. You would almost rather do anything than be bored. You would rather challenge yourself. You would rather touch a hot stove. You would almost rather do anything than be bored. And so a natural state is you, when you don't have anything that's interesting you or pressing, you revert to boredom. And so you immediately navigate right out of that. You want to look at your cell phone, you want to entertain yourself, you want to find the answer to that question. Or whatever it is, right? Yeah. So we navigate away from boredom and hopefully we're navigating toward things that we like and we're choosing emotions rather than reacting to emotions. And we can do both things. That's why I led with the Winston Churchill comment, fear is a reaction, courage is a decision. Those 8 words really summarize what emotions do. They protect us, number 1, and they allow us to advance our lives, number 2.

Is there any particular emotion in your opinion that is, I don't know, misunderstood today?

I'll give you two that I discovered and I wish that I discovered when I was younger, one of which was ego. And that's not an emotion per se, it's an emotional state. But when I was a kid, my mom was quite successful in a number of areas. And I asked her at age 10, I said, "Mom, how is it you do so many things so well?" And she looks at me with motherly advice and she says, it takes a big ego to be a success in this world. And because she was my mom and because she was successful, I just accepted that as truth. Imagine me sitting at my desk late at night with my dog at my feet researching ego. And I come across a dozen quotes that all say what Carl Jung said, which is this, um, emotion is something that a man pursues mightily for the first half of his life and understands is important to abandon and dismantle for the second half of his life. And I must have read that a dozen times and I put my head in my hands and went, oh my gosh, I have lived so badly. I have lived so badly inflicting my ego, which is a false front, if you will, on other people. By false front, I mean your ego is an assumed personality that's not the real you. It's designed to put other people, dismiss them or whatever. But an ego is, in essence, widely agreed by scientists, hard, soft, and artists and the like, it's not a good thing. Well, here I'd lived my life as a corporate executive with a big freaking ego. And I realized what a terrible thing I'd done. Fortunately, I came across another quote from Eckhart Tolle. You may be familiar with him. He's reached 100 million people. And he said, well, the good thing about discovering ego is that the minute you discover that that's what you've been doing, you've been projecting a false front, that it's really hard to keep up the act. So there was hope for me, and presumably there still is hope for me in recovering from decades of being a a pain in the rear corporate executive with a big ego. And I'm trying to make up for that in a way. Trauma is another one that is widely misunderstood, but quite important. What is that? Say it again. Trauma. Trauma. Okay. Yeah. Trauma is another emotional state. If you'd asked me 8 years ago when I got into this what trauma was, I would've said, well, something to do with a car accident and an ambulance and an emergency room. That's really all I would've articulated. And, and trauma is really significant because it is where your emotional system shuts down. You experience an event, it's either physical and/or emotional, where you're overwhelmed. Your, your system goes tilt and it shuts down. And what happens when your system shuts down in trauma is that it really doesn't like it and it's fixated on it until it solves it. So we've all heard of women who've been raped and they can't stop talking about it. There's great science about why they can't stop talking about it because they don't have the words to fill the void from when their emotional system shut down. And the solution to trauma, as attested by Bessel van der Kolk and others who were among the top trauma specialists in the world, is you will continue to experience that trauma. Your brain will automatically go back to it until you find the words to describe what happened, and then you take it out of a fearsome memory and it just becomes a memory, but it doesn't run you or control you. So trauma is, to me, an extremely important thing to understand. I used to sort of live in a world where I would tell somebody like that, oh, just get over it. Well, you can't get over it until you can put the words to explain it, and then your rational mind says, yeah, we get it now. It was an unpleasant experience, but it's not something that's going to run our lives anymore because we finally put words to the emotion.

So if someone is dealing with whatever type of a negative situation in their life that they need help sort of unpacking, is it like— I always get them confused, even though they're very different. Where would you point them, like a psychiatrist or psychologist? To help them sort of unpack their feelings and their thoughts?

Thank you. I would point them to professional help, whether it's a family therapist or a psychiatrist. There's great help. I've sat in the chair myself for hundreds of hours, and a good psychologist, a good therapist, a good psychiatrist is worth their weight in gold. But the key point is that across 12 different disciplines— again, I'm repeating that, but it's really important to hear it— and I'm going to read what those disciplines are, just so you have— yeah, please do— flavor for it. Uh, theoretical physics, the philosophy of language, engineering, linguistics, psychiatry, psychotraumatology— there's a great word for you— literature, including William Shakespeare, neuroscience, psychology, art, logic, philosophy, and anthropology. All 13 of those disciplines agree that language is how we get out of problems. It is finding the words to address the emotion. Oftentimes, people have difficulty expressing their emotions in words. The book does a great job of that, of giving you quotes that other people who've experienced that emotion might jog your memory and you go, my gosh, that's exactly the way I feel.

It's so true. I'll be a little vulnerable here on the podcast. So last night, my wife, why did you say that? I can already hear her. So, I was annoyed with my wife yesterday. Okay. I'll just say I got home and she did something. I won't say what she did, but she did something and this irritated me. And my sort of normal mode when I get that is I just get quiet. I just pull away. I just disconnect. And she—

It's not uncommon. I appreciate the humor and I appreciate the scene. It's not uncommon, especially for men, to withdraw and be silent.

And so what happened was, I mean, we've been married a long time and she knew, right? And so she finally was like, just those famous words, what's wrong? She genuinely didn't know, right? And I'm like, nothing. And she's like, no, what's wrong? She persisted. And I told her and we just talked. It was like a 45-second conversation, right? I just told her and She apologized, and that was that. It was over, and I felt better. But had she not said, "What's wrong?" I would have probably been ticked off all night and gone to bed mad, and who knows how I would have woken up. But there is power in speaking your feelings.

Thank you. There is both power and release when you attach words to the emotion. There is a a wonderfully successful clinical psychiatrist at UCLA by the name of Dan Siegel, and he came up with a phrase that is one for the ages. It's only 5 words, but the phrase is, um, name it to tame it. Uh, if you're troubled by an emotion, if you can attach words to it, you're halfway to the solution. But moving out of science to engineering, you may have heard of the Sloan-Kettering Clinic in New York City. The Kettering in that name was not a physician. He was not a medical doctor. He was an engineer, Charles Kettering. He held 186 patents as head of engineering for General Motors before he made his fortune and created, helped to create the clinic. His quote is, I want to get it verbatim, a problem well stated is a problem half solved. It attests again to the importance of words. Nuclear physicist Niels Bohr, not your average dinner conversation, he was in the same genre as Albert Einstein. Here's his quote: "What is it that we human beings ultimately depend upon? We depend upon our words. We are suspended in language." If you ever thought that a theoretical physicist thinks in terms of square root symbols in math. No, they think in words just like you and I do. And it's really words that help us solve problems and to advance our life.

Well, even just think about, you know, as we're recording this, all this, you know, war and conflict and all the rest of it. And the only way out of it is words, right? It's talking and figuring things out and, you know, whatever it might be.

So if I may, I'm going to read one more quote, obviously.

Yeah, please do. You got a lot of them. That's great.

To indulge you. So in the scientific world these days, among the top 1% most cited scienti— uh, scientists in the world is a neuroscientist by the name of Lisa Feldman Barrett. She teaches at Northeastern in Boston, so she has a huge following. She is hugely respected. And here is her quote: The more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your brain can construct emotion. Can you say it again? Can you say it again? The more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your brain can construct emotion. All right. So I'm going to give you a really relevant case in point. I'm not a psychologist. I don't believe you are, but Imagine that you're a psychologist and you're sitting in the chair and across from you is your patient. And of course you ask, well, what's the problem? Well, it's not uncommon for a patient to have to struggle with what's bugging them. So let's say that the patient across from you, Ron, says, well, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm anxious all the time. I'm anxious. That's it. I'm anxious. But what if the problem isn't anxiety? What if the problem is addiction? And he's either too embarrassed to say it or doesn't understand what's troubling him. If you're the therapist, you're going to have a slower route to solution because you're not getting the words. All right. What the book does is across 272 different emotions arranged alphabetically, you can look at, see 20 to 40 quotes from people of all faiths, walks of life who've experienced that emotion. And you go, wait a minute, that's what I feel right there. What that what that man or woman said, that's very helpful to everybody. That's helpful to the therapist. It's helpful to you. And it's helpful in life.

So again, I haven't read the book yet. So, but like, let's say I'm angry at my wife. Like, is there, do I just go to the book and look up anger? Is that like how it works?

You bet. You look up anger and you're going to find 20 to 40 quotes on anger or annoyance or antagonism. You can look at each of them and you can see what other people who've experienced that emotion, what words they've used to describe it. And you will be amazed at either at both how helpful it is and how other people have dealt with it. That's very comforting.

And so it moves you closer to that release point, I guess, right?

Hopefully. Yes. And the minute you name it to tame it, you get the release point. You go, wait a minute, this isn't unmanageable any— anymore. I'm not confused anymore. I'm unstuck.

Wow. Wow. So good. What's an emotionary? I know this is something that you've written about.

What is that? Well, typically when you pick up a dictionary, it is the objective words to describe it. So, you would say anger. If you picked up Webster's Dictionary, it would say, well, somebody who was throwing things. I mean, I'm just making up a phrase, but it's what it looks like. Okay. What we've done in the book for the first time isn't what it looks like, although we do include that. It's what it feels like. So alphabetically by emotion, 272 different states, not only what it looks like to somebody else, but what it feels like. And we came up with a term called emotionary, which really, it's a new word, but it's caught on. People like it. It's helpful. Yeah.

The whole book's an emotionary, I guess, right?

Whole book's an emotionary is right.

Yeah. Fantastic. Oh my gosh, this has been such a great conversation, Doug. I really appreciate you coming on. I wonder, is there any sort of like parting thoughts or final words of wisdom that you want to leave with the listeners?

Thank you. I love the expression named detainment. If you got nothing else from this discussion, But Name It to Tame It, you would be on the right path. And if you understand that emotions are navigational, make friends with your emotions, they help you. Even touching a hot stove actually serves to help you. And if you understand that emotions, both good and bad, are navigational, you're going to have an easier time in life. And it's a fun read. There's plenty of humor in it, plenty of of laugh-out-loud quotes from people about various emotions that they've experienced. I think your readers enjoy it a lot.

Nice, nice. And if people wanted to connect with you directly, Doug, what's the best way? LinkedIn or something like that?

Website? Uh, easiest— the website is same as the book name, Choosing Emotions, choosingemotions.com. The book is available at Amazon in hardback, paperback, Kindle. Uh, it's at Barnes Noble and other places, choosingemotions.com. Okay, got it.

All right. Well, hey, Doug, I appreciate you coming on, man. This has been a lot of fun.

Love the conversation. Thanks, Ron. All the best.

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