[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.]

As the Tao Te Ching says,

A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

Yesterday’s post described and illustrated the long-term potential of improving your life through self-awareness — freedom, genuineness, authenticity, and more.

Remember, all this life improvement rests on one transformation cycle, doing it once or twice, and getting the hang of it. So no matter how much you want to change your life — your relationships, your job, your hobbies, whatever — it all boils down to learning on skill. That big long arrow that goes from where you are now to the person and lifestyle you dream of, full of reward and whatever emotions you want, consists of many small rewarding cycles. In a sense, once you begin the process, you effectively are there.

Certainly there are other ways to improve your life than the Method I described, but it works consistently, reliably, and predictably, and is rewarding.

Once you transform once or twice, experience the reward and improvement it brings, and realize you can expect more results from doing it more, you realize repeating the process can improve your life non-stop forever.

While this idea is straightforward in principle, it can take time and resources, especially step 4, implementation and its three implementation stages.

Implementation means changing part of your life. Sometimes changes happen overnight or in minutes. Sometimes they take years. As always, performing them through the Method makes them rewarding.

I will write more on how to do your first transformations, how to make them easier, and various other ways to put the Model and the Method into practice, but it’s all still based in this foundation.

To me covering the Model and Method — the material I cover in the first half of my seminar — tells you all you need to know to improve your life, to lead better, to win friends and influence people, and so on. I get more comments that people like the second half more. I call that part “where the rubber hits the road,” since it relates more directly to your life.

So for most of you who have read through about the Model and the Method, the best is yet to come.

• ← Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” reveals more than you’d think
• The Method: long term →