[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.]

What goals do we have in life if not to understand what makes life good and how to make our own better? By good I mean by the values of the person living that life — not by some abstract standard.

I want to distinguish the following from so-called positive thinking. The phrase “the power of positive thinking” makes me bristle. It sounds like putting lipstick on a pig. My recent posts have discussed how counterproductive to a better life for a person I consider judgmental terminology. I don’t like the idea of someone living a life they don’t like, forcing a smile, and calling it good.

The following posts cover something different.

What makes a life good for a person is not abstract positivity or smiling or labeling it as good. Life is better to the extent a person likes it — that is, by how it fits that person’s values and brings about emotions they want. We will return to this core concept that values, importance, and meaning derive from your emotions from different directions

The next several posts will cover the core model grounding the seminars I lead and executive and life coaching I do, based on a model of the human emotional and evaluative system — how you perceive your environment, evaluate it, and react to it. I call it the Model. I know, I should come up with a catchier name than just capitalizing the word.

I believe this Model will enable you to understand and improve your life as much as anything you’ll learn. I believe understanding it, followed by practice (I’ll cover implementation in later series) will put you on a level with any coach or guru.

Why in a discussion on values and improvement — a good life, making it better — do we talk about emotions? As we will see, your emotional system evaluates your world and determines how to react to it. To evaluate means to give value to — your emotional system creates value in your life. Things that change your life change your motivations, which your emotions are.

If you want to understand your values, you have to understand your emotional system. To react means to act or behave based on your environment. Again, your behavior — for that matter, your life and lifestyle — derives from your emotional system’s perception and evaluation of your environment.

The concepts of environment, perception, belief, and behavior will return over and over on your life and how to improve it.

Tomorrow: models in general.

• ← The Model — introducing my model for the human emotional system
• The Model: models in general →