[This post is part of a series on The Method to use The Model — my model for the human emotional system designed for use in leadership, self-awareness, and general purpose professional and personal development — which I find the most effective and valuable foundation for understanding yourself and others and improving your life. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.]

The Method’s first two steps — knowing your emotional system and understanding your current emotional cycles — involve little action. They cover awareness.

The appeal to act on a situation you want to change quickly and decisively can tempt you. I advise against it, whether you are leading yourself or others.

Acting without awareness can point you in counterproductive directions. It can spur you to ever more action to make up for the initial wrong direction until you finally stop and reset yourself. I call acting that way reactive. Besides wasting your time, holding you back from your potential, and possibly worsening your life, reactive behavior puts you at the whim of others’ control. That’s why advertisers and politicians try to get you to act quickly.

Besides, building awareness takes little time and often no other resources.

Moreover, building awareness can reveal new solutions you may not have thought of otherwise. Pausing to do so will help all the more.

This post is short because everyone knows the value of awareness, so I don’t have to convince you of it. It’s here more so that when you’re acting purely reactively from having skipped these steps you’ll remember to step back and start from the beginning.

• ← The Method, step 1: understand your current emotional cycles
• The Method, step 2: conceive of new emotions →