Reply To: Exercise 14: The Model
by Eugene Bible
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Exercise 14: The Model
This week’s exercise from Josh’s Leadership Step By Step was called The Model, and the assignment was to watch a few of Josh’s videos on The Model, which showed me a system to begin to analyze my own emotional processes surrounding something I’d like to improve at, then try to do the analysis for a couple things I want to get better at.
I could try to explain The Model here, but I don’t think I would do it much justice, so I will leave that to Josh and his YouTube channel and give a quick summary of my interpretation of it for those who don’t want to go that far. My understanding is that the basic idea is that our emotions are the primary driver of so many of our actions, and The Model asks you to analyze your behaviors through four lenses: the environment, your perception/belief that is leading to the behavior, the emotions you feel, and the behavior itself:
The idea being, that once you’ve identified these four areas, you can use his next process (“The Method”, next week’s exercise!) to change those situations, behaviors, and the emotions you feel – in other words, getting rid of situations you don’t like in your life and replacing them with ones that you do.
As examples, I’ll use the two situations that I wrote out:
Situation I’d Like to Improve: Have more meaningful relationships with friends and family.
Environment: Anywhere, mostly at home (phone, video calls, etc.)
Belief: Everyone (including myself) is too busy to talk, I will be interrupting them if I call them and bother them “just” to chat. Friends and family will get uncomfortable if I bring up “hard” conversations.
Emotion: Loneliness, sadness, frustration, emptiness
Behavior: End up not calling/texting/communicating, and if I do, limit the conversation to shallow topics.
Situation I’d Like to Improve: Posting online content on a schedule and staying with it.
Environment: Anywhere (mostly at home?)
Belief: I am too busy with too many other priorities to get ahead on writing and scheduling content. “It is too hard or takes too much time to do right now.”
Emotion: Stress, frustration, helplessness, disappointment
Behavior: Avoid writing and posting, even though I know I have the time to do it.
Writing these out was an interesting process. It feels stupid to say at this point, but it felt like I was taking the first step towards fixing two uncomfortable situations in my life! If you want to figure out how to fix a leak in a pipe, you first have to figure out where the leak is, how big it is, what methods you could use to fix it, etc…And this model just does the same thing for a disliked situation. I don’t like having conversations that are shallow and feel superficial. Now I’ve analyzed when it happens, what I’m doing, what shallow conversations make me feel, and what is the belief behind why I don’t just make the change.
The biggest help this exercise gave me was in just being introduced to the concept of a model for dealing with emotions, beliefs, and situations I don’t like. These situations can often feel powerless; that this is just how it is and it’s hard to change. I don’t like it, so therefore if it were something I could control, I would. It’s easier to just say “I don’t even know where to start with fixing this” and just give up. But this model made it pretty simple: break it down into 4 simple categories. I didn’t anticipate that doing that alone would change how I feel about a situation, but I was surprised at just how much breaking them up made it feel like I was taking control over them. It gave me some ownership over them. They began to turn ‘powerless’ into ‘powerful.’
There were times as I wrote the situations and categories that didn’t quite feel like they were complete – maybe there is another category that I could add to make the analysis feel more complete or satisfying to me, but I haven’t been able to figure it out yet. Something just felt like there’s a way I could make this model fit myself even better. However, now that I know a model exists, I will use this one as a jump-off point to start thinking about what my own model could be.
I’m looking forward to going into next week’s exercise when we will have to practice The Method, which is Josh’s model for taking this analysis and using it to create change and take control of these disliked situations.