2452 - Embracing Life’s Challenges Through Emotional Strength and Humor with Doug Johnston

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0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it's Doug Johnston. Doug, historically, you have been the CEO at Five Management LLC, litigation support. But for today, we're talking about something I'm so excited to talk about because you are the author of the book, Choosing Emotions, Thinking With Your Head and Acting With Your Heart. Doug, it's great to have you. Great to be with you, Josh. It feels like friendly territory. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. It's totally a friendly territory. Your website is choosing emotions.com.

1:27Before we get going, talking about your work and your life insights from the street to the stratosphere. You know, I always love kind of hearing what people are into when they're not at work. You and I were just chatting beforehand and you are known throughout your family and beyond as a connoisseur of dad jokes. I was hoping maybe you could share a couple of your favorites with us. And I've got one. It's kind of like my go-to dad joke. Thank you. But let me hear yours. Thank you. Being a dad joke killer might not be the highest compliment, as my daughter would profess. But the book started at the father-daughter dinner and where we would exchange dad jokes.

2:09So I'll hit you with a couple. What did the drummer call his identical twin daughters? So he's a drummer. He's got two daughters look exactly the same. What does he name them? I don't know. And the answer is Anna one and a two. Okay. Yeah. That's absolute jet dad joke territory. That's a total, total dad joke. Yeah. I'll give you mine. Where does, where does the president keep his armies? You got to tell me in his sleeve ease. Well, of course, yes. I'll make a note of it. Okay. Thank you. thank you go ahead and you have one more yeah i have one more where where do you store your dad jokes i don't know in your database uh perfect perfect one to close this out with uh thank you for listening to dad joke uh the dad joke podcast well doug uh listen i i was sharing with you i was of going through your website.

3:14Your website, again, is choosingemotions.com. I really love a lot of what you're sharing here, but would you mind maybe just kind of kicking this off with, tell us, I guess, just a high-level overview of what the book Choosing Emotions is, what you talk about. So thanks, Josh. So a fairly long career as a corporate executive in banking and private equity. I had morphed into becoming a researcher hired by National Scope Law Firms to help them of search complex, high stakes business disputes. So I had regular dinners, father-daughter dinners with my daughter every two weeks. And I would bring a list of questions for her to answer on any topic.

3:53And if she got the answer right, I would slide her a$2 bill across the table. That was a wonderful father-daughter exchange. But one night she came to the dinner and she said, Dad, my turn to ask questions. What is depression? Well, I faked it and I presumed, you know, I sort affected and assumed that was an economic question. So I gave her an economic answer and she shook her head and she said, no, no, no. I mean the emotional depression. And Josh, I knew next to nothing about emotional depression. So I said, sweetheart, it's my job to go back to work and to school and to understand depression.

4:26In the course of the next two weeks, I learned a ton about depression, much more than the standard off the top. It's a deep sense of sadness over an extended period of time. I came across three quotes from three depression survivors who had lived to share their experiences, and I wrote them down. I'll give them to you quickly. Rollo May was a self-help writer in the 1950s. He was a PhD and whatnot, and he was quite a good writer who had survived depression. His quote about depression is, depression is the inability to construct a future. Well, to me, that was a very powerful quote. Two days later, I came across another quote from J.K.

5:11Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series. She too had suffered terribly from depression before she became the world-class novelist. Her quote was, 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, which is powerful, of course. Then a third from I'm a freelance writer by the name of Haley Cornell, again, a depression survivor. And her quote really hit me. It is, depression lies. It tells you you've always felt this way, and you always will, but you haven't, and you won't. Well, so here I am sitting at my desk.

5:48My daughter's across town struggling in class, and I texted those three quotes to her. And minutes later, I get a response. I'm crying. And I thought, my gosh, are you crying? These people all survived. there's hope. And she texted back. That's why I'm crying. Thank you, dad. So that was a really powerful moment for us. And we realized that using quotes of people who've experienced an emotion is often better and more powerful and more relevant and resonant than, you know, sort of dry descriptions from textbooks. Yeah. Well, we don't feel, we don't feel alone. And that we also know, you know, when it's someone's like, Hey, been there, done that.

6:29I know what you're feeling right now. And I want you to know that, you know, there is a path out of this is kind of what I think of. Very precisely said. So it took nine years. Imagine writing a book over nine years, 272 different emotional states, as described by 8 ,000 quotes from 1 ,800 people across history, the thought leaders of all the fields of academic discipline, whether they're sciences of the arts. And so finishing the book, 375 pages, I submitted it to Claude AI and ChatGPT after we published it, and they each responded, this is the most comprehensive consumer reference on emotions in the English language, which frankly astounded me and my daughter as well.

7:18So we've done something that's never been done before, and that is to describe emotions by how they feel rather than traditionally how they look. When you pick up a standard dictionary, it's how it looks to a third party, but we've done it by how it feels in addition to how it looks. So we've done something innovative and very helpful. Founders and leaders, I suspect, and I don't know if you're in your research, you have found that, you know, business founders, leaders, you know, folks that are really driven, you know, to achieve something that others maybe would not have the stomach for. often comes with some other traits and other maybe sensitivities or emotions.

8:03And any observations just regarding those that maybe have kind of walked your career path as well, that we should be aware that, listen, if you're feeling this, you're not alone. And quite frankly, you're not that special, but you're among friends here. Any observations there? You bet. That's beautifully said. So in the course of my business career, I've been around, as you have in all likelihood, some pretty powerful people, a few billionaires. I helped start and manage some pretty big companies. So I've been around pretty hard charging people for much of my career. One of the 272 emotions and emotional states that I covered is leadership.

8:45Another is anxiety. Another is frustration. Another is encouragement. You know, all of those things are sort of known by the average executive, but they're not really known. And why not take advantage of the quotes, the personal quotes from 1800 thought leaders throughout history in each of those emotions and take advantage of what people before you have experienced and said. That's really what we've done. And I think you just nailed it right there. So I think a really valuable part, I know for me, at least at the beginning, if I'm feeling sad about something, is to get curious about that and to really just kind of explore and unpack.

9:33because especially if I'm sad or if I'm worried and if maybe I did get triggered by something, maybe something happened and I feel like I have a disproportionate response to that emotionally. I have found curiosity to be a helpful tool, but I'm sure that this is something that you've encountered as well. I mean, depression again, maybe just it was a really, really small rejection. Someone didn't want to go to lunch with you or something like that. And then all of a sudden that kind of, you know, knocks you out and you start thinking about all these other things. And, and, and maybe that's not necessary, but I'm hoping maybe you could shed some light on this concept.

10:15So beautifully said, whether it's boredom or, or curiosity or anxiety or any of the so-called, you know, states that we all live with and sort of wonder about, you know, the most common question entered into the Google search bar is, am I wrong to feel this way? Right. Why not understand? And this is a finding of the book that the one thing that you always control is your attention. If you find that you're worried or frustrated, you can control your attention. You can shift your attention to something else that you can do. And as opposed to whatever it is that you're facing that you might think you can't do.

10:54So my experience with really high performing leaders has been that, that it isn't what you can't do. It's what you can do. And to follow what you said, curiosity is what leads you there. When we are creating, if we are writers or executives or actors or engineers, when we devote our attention to something, that's under our control. And that's where we're creating. And that's where you often get out of a rut, if I can use a word. Yeah. You know, something, Doug, that I know you talk about, too, is, you know, I think it's helpful for obviously for us to identify, you know, what what is really going on?

11:35Because there's secondary emotions. And then there are primary emotions, right? Anger often is, I'm married to a therapist. So, you know, I've learned, you know, I've learned some of the vocabulary and some of this along the way. but you know which is why I think you know curiosity is a valuable tool and I think it's important to you know and you say this you know it's like name it to tame it but on the on the other hand you know sometimes you know when we're naming it maybe we feel like we want to remove or share some of the yoke that we have on our shoulders and so oftentimes sharing or confiding our feelings with a friend relieves a lot of that pressure off of our own shoulders.

12:26And then some of us use social media in some ways to do that. Some of us use AI in order to offload some of this. But then you also run the risk of oversharing, right? And it's like, whoa, that's something I probably should process quietly without maybe making a big, long LinkedIn post about my depression over some things. How do we navigate that world when there are a lot of outlets? Well, I love the question. So emotions are navigational. Oftentimes we think, well, I just react. No, emotions are navigational. Number one, you do react because your emotional system's primary duty is to protect you.

13:08So you will navigate away from things that are troublesome or problematic. And separately, you can also choose to pursue other emotions and other courses that advance your life. So emotions do two things as navigators. They steer us away from bad things and they steer us toward things that are extremely helpful. The quote that you mentioned a moment ago, Josh, name entertainment is a quote from a UCLA clinical psychiatrist by the name of Dan Siegel. And I I think name entertainment, maybe one of the most helpful five word sentences in history. His clinical research says, essentially, if you're troubled by something and you might want to share or overshare or wherever you are with your friends, if you can name the emotion.

13:54You are instantly calmer. So they did fMRI research that said, you know, empirically in clinical settings that when you can name the specific problem that you have, I'm worried, I'm frustrated, I'm anxious, I'm depressed. When you can articulate that, your emotional system immediately becomes calmer. Science knows this. And so name it to tame it, which is one of the great scientific findings of history. Dr. Dan Siegel from UCLA is one of them. I have also found in my research 13 other leaders from Nobel laureates to 100 prize winners who effectively say the same thing. There is a scientist by the name of Lisa Feldman Barrett.

14:39She is one of the top half a dozen neuroscientists in the world. She also has done clinical studies. Her specific quote, which is really a grabber, the more finely tuned your vocabulary, the more precisely your brain can construct emotions. And what that means is find the words to explain what it is that's troubling you. Maybe it's two or three things at one time. It's perfectly natural to have three different emotions going on at one time. But if you separate them out and say, well, I'm worried about my son, I'm concerned about my business partner, and I'm really excited about the NBA game tomorrow.

15:15All those three things can hold at one time, but the moment you separate them out and name them, you're calmer. And that's quite a wonderful finding supported by 13 thought leaders across science and the arts. Wow. You know, another thing, Doug, I wonder if you have any insights on this. In the past, I'll share with you or confess here, I feel like I used to be maybe a little bit toxically happy. um in other words and and part of it was a part of the culture i was um a member of of a particular group um but you know a lot of the response was oh that's just you know that that's not real that's not you know just be happy instead so just put on a happy face because you should be happy for this or that or the other thing and you know there may be some value in that but i i've come to find that it's not long.

16:15It's not a great long term solution. Do you know what I'm talking about? I don't know if I need to be more clear on this. I think I do. And I would respond here. I would respond that we've all seen people who are sort of falsely optimistic and overdo it over the top. Well, one of the falsely optimistic is a great that's a great phrase. One of the great quotes of history is that cheerfulness is a sure sign of wisdom. So, you know, it's a pretty good good thing. And I believe that one came from Aristotle. So, you know, we can trust his wisdom over the years, but cheerfulness is often a sign of wisdom.

16:49And, you know, that's something to share. We've all seen false optimism. That's a different thing, but cheerfulness is a basic disposition in life. People are magnetized. People gravitate toward that. And I'm sure you've seen that in your own life. Yeah. All right. So Doug, your website, choosingemotions.com. The book is for sale. I highly recommend this. You know, I think any time that we can be just much more cognizant of like what's going on on the inside. And again, we can explore that. And rather than just being in kind of this, you know, NPC or non-player character mode, where we're just, you know, that no, that we're truly aware.

17:31And Doug, I think, you know, one thing that you're helping to do here is just normalize that, you know, we all have a lot of the same vulnerabilities. We, you know, we all get scared of being alone, not belonging, being unsafe. We, you know, being rejected by the tribe. You know, these are, these are very evolutionarily, you know, hardwired things that exist in all of us. And so I just want to say, thank you so much for bringing this conversation. One more thought. Yeah, please. Very quickly. Humor is, a really, really important thing. And everyone in life before you has likely experienced the same emotion that you're feeling.

18:12And if not everyone, certainly the thought leaders have. And to read what the brightest, most successful minds in the world have said about suffering, about joy, about excitement, enthusiasm, there are so many opportunities, so many occasions in this book where you will absolutely laugh out loud with what somebody said about something that you thought was serious. And then you realize that humor is just a great solvent, and it works in most arenas. So humor is very much a part of the book, in addition to sort of wisdom and enlightenment. Choosing Emotions, Thinking with Your Head and Acting with Your Heart, it's available on Amazon and everywhere else.

18:55Kindle, hardcover, paperback, and of course, Doug, at your website, choosingemotions.com. Doug, thank you so much for sharing your message. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing. Thank you, Josh. Love being on your show. Thanks for having me.

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