Raise | Of the 272 Emotions, Most Parents Only Know 12 (w/ D. Earl Johnston)
Chasing Excellence
Ben Bergeron & Patrick Cummings
4.8 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2026
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What if most of what your kids are learning about emotions isn't coming from what you say — it's coming from what they watch you do?
In this first episode of our new Raise series, we explore Doug Earl Johnston's groundbreaking book Choosing Emotions — now the single most comprehensive reference on human emotions in the English language — and what it means to parent as someone who chooses their responses rather than defaulting to them.
Doug walks us through why the average adult operates with a vocabulary of 8-12 emotions when hundreds exist, and how precision with language is the key to naming — and taming — the feelings that derail us. The key takeaway: the vocabulary we give our kids now is the vocabulary they'll reach for when life gets hard.
👉🏼 Get the full Listener's Guide here
❤️🔥 Free Newsletter & the Chase Club
👋 New to Chasing Excellence? Start here
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, before we get into it, quick heads up on something. We're going to relaunch the Chase Club in |
| 0:05.3 | April with some real honest-to-goodness structure. Daily lessons Monday through Thursday, |
| 0:10.3 | aka the Daily Chase, 21-day challenges every single month. And Friday, Chase Club chat clubs to keep |
| 0:16.7 | all of the work alive. And in May, importantly, the price is going to go up significantly. |
| 0:21.4 | Right now, it's just $8 a month or $80 a year. If you've been thinking about joining us, |
| 0:26.6 | April is the best time. Lock in the lowest price it'll ever be. Chasingexcellance.com. |
| 0:31.5 | Email, the link is in the show notes. Okay, let's get into it. |
| 0:39.1 | Hello and welcome back to the show. |
| 0:41.9 | Hi, I'm Patrick. |
| 0:42.4 | Thank you so much for joining me. |
| 0:44.5 | I'm excited for you to join me. |
| 0:45.7 | We're doing something a little bit different today. |
| 0:47.8 | I'm going to give you a sense of it here in a minute. |
| 0:49.4 | But first, I am joined today by Doug Earl Johnston, author of a new book called Choosing Emotions, Thinking With Your Head and Acting with Your Heart. The book came out in December of last year, correct, Doug? You did, yeah. Okay, cool. So, folks, if you like this conversation, which I think you're going to, definitely go check out the book again. It's called Choosing Emotions. Before we get into it, I want it i want to do first of all hi doug thank you so much for joining me patrick pleasure |
| 1:15.0 | being with you thank you yeah i'm really excited about getting into this into this conversation in |
| 1:19.4 | this book we're doing something a little bit different here with this conversation with conversations |
| 1:23.8 | going forward it's a series of interviews a series of conversations i'm going to have that we're calling Rays. And the idea is pretty simple, but one I'm really excited about |
| 1:32.0 | digging into. And it's the conversations we often have here are geared towards ideas and |
| 1:39.8 | executing ideas for us as listeners or our participants in these conversations. And what I want to do |
| 1:45.8 | with the Rays series is take a lot of those ideas, have a lot of the same conversation, |
| 1:51.0 | but twist it a little bit and say, okay, how does this apply to our role as parents? What can we |
| 1:57.2 | take out of these ideas that make us better parents or better coaches or better educators, whatever that role may be? |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ben Bergeron & Patrick Cummings, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Ben Bergeron & Patrick Cummings and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.