About

About the Junto Emotion Wheel

Who built this, when, why, and how the digital wheel relates to The Junto Institute and its work on emotional intelligence.

The Junto Emotion Wheel is the free digital daily-practice companion to a tool built in 2016 by The Junto Institute. The Institute is a learning community for growth-stage company leaders, founded in 2012 by Raman Chadha in Chicago and now headquartered in Boulder, Colorado. Emotional intelligence is one of the core pillars of its work — the Emotion Wheel is one expression of that work, made freely available so anyone can practise naming what they feel.

About The Junto Institute

The Junto Institute was founded in 2012 by Raman Chadha. The name has roots in an earlier entrepreneur peer group Chadha had run in Chicago since 2006 — and the Institute itself was incorporated and named in March 2012, in Chicago. It is now headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, and delivers its programs both in person and remotely.¹

The Institute's stated mission is "to help companies and their teams become infinitely better, smarter, and healthier." Its tagline puts the same idea in concrete terms: "Helping companies and their teams become infinitely better, one leader at a time, since 2012."²

Its programs are aimed at growth-stage companies — broadly, organisations of roughly fifty to five hundred people whose leaders are figuring out how to scale their effectiveness past the founding-team mode. The Institute's current offerings include:

• Executive Coaching — in two formats: one-hour calls every two weeks, or a one-hour monthly call paired with a one-and-a-half-hour private class drawn from a proprietary curriculum.
• Team Training — built on the Institute's "simple Building Blocks framework" (described in detail on the methodology page).
• Leadership Training — a curriculum based on the Building Blocks of Emotionally Intelligent Leadership framework.³

Across all three, emotional intelligence is treated not as a soft skill but as a leadership prerequisite — the ability to lead other people, the Institute argues, starts with the ability to lead yourself.

About the Junto Emotion Wheel

The wheel you can open at juntoemotionwheel.com is one of the Institute's most public artefacts. It was developed inside the Institute in 2016, after Chadha and his team — preparing a new program cohort — realised they lacked a tool for the labelling step in emotional self-awareness. They tried existing scientifically-based emotion wheels with their forums, their team and their families, and found them incomplete in three specific ways: there were far more negative emotions than positive ones; many scientifically identified feelings weren't on the wheels at all; and many emotions people were actually identifying in practice were missing too.⁴

So the team compiled their own list of emotions, hired a graphic designer, and built a wheel of their own. They introduced it to the Institute's established forums in January 2016 and to a new cohort that February.⁴ The wheel has been in continuous use inside Junto's coaching work for the past decade. Member companies have brought it into 1:1 and group meetings, team huddles, company-wide town halls, interview icebreakers, the start and close of hard conversations, and discussions about mental health.

The wheel itself — the printed cardstock version used in coaching rooms — remains available from The Junto Institute.

About this digital companion

juntoemotionwheel.com is the digital, daily-practice version of the same wheel. It is free, with no advertising and no email gate, and runs on the web, iOS and Android. The intent is straightforward: to make the practice of naming what you feel — a short, repeatable habit — available to anyone who wants it, the same way the Institute makes the printed wheel available to its member companies.

The site is a complement to the Institute's existing work, not a replacement for it. The wheel is the same wheel. The structure (six core emotions — joy, love, sadness, fear, anger, surprise — branching into more than a hundred named secondary and tertiary feelings) is the same structure. What this site adds is the ability to make the practice a daily one: tap an emotion, optionally write a short sentence about the moment, and your check-ins assemble into a private record over time.

The reasoning behind the daily-practice angle is documented separately on the methodology page.

Who runs this

The Junto Emotion Wheel digital companion is built and maintained as a public-facing extension of The Junto Institute's work. Raman Chadha — founder of The Junto Institute and the principal voice behind its emotional-intelligence curriculum — is the original creator of the wheel and the author of the canonical explanation of why and how it is used (2016). The wheel itself was developed by the Institute's team, not by Chadha alone; the graphic designer who produced the original artwork is not publicly named.

For the underlying psychological research that the wheel and the practice rest on, see sources. For privacy and data-handling on this site, see privacy.

Contact

For questions about the Junto Emotion Wheel as a digital tool — feedback, bug reports, partnerships — email hello@junto.co.

For questions about The Junto Institute, its programs (executive coaching, team training, leadership training), or licensing the printed wheel for organisational use, contact the Institute directly via thejuntoinstitute.com/contact.