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

Most continuous improvement practitioners are trained to prize logic and treat emotion as noise in the system. D. Earl Johnston spent nine years and thousands of research hours across twelve disciplines discovering that framing is backward. His book, “Choosing Emotions,” grew out of a father-daughter moment involving depression, post-it notes, and a single powerful text message. What came out of that work challenges something most leaders have never stopped to question.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• What Winston Churchill’s 8 words reveal about how emotions work (3:14)
• How a father-daughter dinner became a 9-year research project on emotions (3:57)
• The three most common misunderstandings people have about emotions (11:40)
• Why doom scrolling is an emotionally driven navigation, not a bad habit (16:56)
• What ego actually is and why most high-performers misunderstand it (19:12)
• Why trauma persists until you find the words to describe it (22:00)
• How naming an emotion releases its grip on your behavior (26:11)
• What neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett says about emotional vocabulary (28:05)
• How an emotionary differs from an ordinary dictionary (31:13)
• Why making friends with your emotions makes life easier (32:13)

Keep Learning

If the idea that naming an emotion is the first step to solving a problem resonates with how you think about coaching and people development, the School of Leadership builds on exactly that kind of human-centered foundation.

Podcast Resources

• “Choosing Emotions”
• Choosing Emotions Website

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What Do You Think?

Where in your work do you see emotional vocabulary, or the lack of it, affecting how problems get solved?