[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.]

Continuing the series on the Model from last time, let’s look at elements of the Model in more depth. The elements are environment, perception/belief, emotions/motivation, behavior, and reward.

We’ll start with environment today.

An emotional cycle’s environment includes everything outside the cycle that affects it. The most obvious part of the environment is your physical environment — dogs, cats, trees, air, and so on.

Other people are part of an emotional cycle’s environment too. I presume you already figured that out, but I draw specific attention to other people’s role in the environment because other people tend to evoke greater emotion than, say, trees (depending on one’s priorities).

More subtle a part of a cycle’s environment, but no less important, is your body, most of which lies outside your emotional system. For example, when your body runs low on water, a cycle regulating your water level perceives the lack and motivates you to drink, which we call thirst. Your body lies outside the emotional cycle — that is, in its environment. I don’t know how you sense the lack of water, but some mechanism causes you to perceive that you need more.

More subtle still a part of a cycle’s environment, but again no less important, are other cycles. Cycles that regulate your need to go to the bathroom are in the environment of the thirst cycle. When you have to go to the bathroom and are thirsty, the cycles can conflict as elements in each others’ environments.

Tomorrow we’ll look at perception and belief in the Model in more depth.

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