[This post is part of a series on 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.]

Today we’ll see the first part of the Model. It comes from evolution in general and the burgeoning forefront scientific field of evolutionary psychology.

Let’s start with your behavior and environment. Like all life, you exist in an environment and you behave in certain ways within it. You move toward food and away from predators. You maintain your temperature and humidity away from extremes. You seek a mate. The following diagram is the starting point for the full Model to come.

Note the arrow points in both directions: your environment affects you and you change your environment. In other words, you react to it and you act on it.

I start the Model simply and I’ll keep it simple the whole way. As a model, it simplifies to fulfill its purpose, ease in communication and understanding. As we’ll see, the simplicity belies its applicability. As with any model, holding off on judging the Model until you have the whole thing, helps you understand it.

We will add elements to the Model until we’ve presented them all. Once we have a complete picture of the Model we will go into more depth for each element as well as the Model as a whole, after which we’ll see how to apply understanding it to improve our lives.

Tomorrow: adding emotions and motivation to the Model

• ← The Model: why
• The Model: adding emotions →