[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.]

A quick followup to yesterday’s post on first learning to manage your emotions, then enjoying the freedom mastery brings you.

Here is some general advice for anything that requires planning. You probably already know it, but it bears repeating.

First strategize, then act (and enjoy).

In other words, don’t skip either and don’t do both at once or in the other order.

Acting before you create your strategy or while creating it generally leads to not acting optimally. Likewise, once you create your strategy, not acting on it means you did it for nothing. Continuing to strategize while you act will detract from whatever you act on.

So be open to recognizing problems in your strategy once you start acting so you don’t continue when you should stop or change course. And recognize sometimes you have to act spontaneously before you have time to create your strategy.

But in general, dividing your tasks into strategy and action helps. My extended series on the Model is about strategy — how to create the lifestyle you want through bringing about the emotions you want, based on self-awareness and the skills to act on it. Learning the Model and the Method don’t take long.

Once you get the awareness and skills, you can act on them the rest of your life, living the lifestyle you want, without wasting resources on doing things you don’t want. Without second-guessing yourself.

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