[EDIT: I covered this series in more depth in Leadership Step by Step, so I recommend the book, but the core is here. I use The Model as a part of my life, basically daily.]

Here is The Model—my model for the human emotional system designed for use in leadership, self-awareness, and general purpose professional and personal development—in series form. Click in the table of contents to the left for each page.

I find this Model the most effective and valuable foundation for understanding yourself and others and improving your life.

Why?

A model’s value comes not from its accuracy but how well it serves its purpose, which improves from effective filtering of information. Street maps, for example, are more useful for driving for having less detail than, say, a satellite picture. Subway maps are more useful for their purposes for having yet less detail. For leadership, self-awareness, and general purpose professional and personal development, I find this model has an optimal amount and choice of information.

Combined with the Method, I find it the most effective and valuable foundation for understanding yourself and others and improving your life.

Contents

Introduction and Overview

• Introducing my model for the human emotional system
• The Model
• Models in general
• Why

Examples of Models

• Maps
• The Earth from several perspectives
• Beliefs and mental models
• How a slight change in your model can create big changes in behavior
• Why he or she didn’t call
• “Beliefs and expectations filter your perception”
• “Everybody does their best according to their abilities and perception of their environment”
• Mexico city, lack of awareness, and leadership

Models: Passive and Active

• The passive view
• Why I stress that they all have flaws
• Flaws from experts
• The active view, part 1
• The active view, part 2
• Examples of the active view

Exercises

• An exercise in evaluating models
• An exercise in spotting the model

Building the Model from first principles: environment, beliefs, perception, emotions, behavior, and reward

• Environment and behavior
• Adding emotions
• Adding belief and perception
• Adding reward
• Reward, happiness, and pleasure

Discussion and examples of the Model

• Where emotional cycles came from
• Examples of emotional cycles
• Emotional reward differs from the emotion that brought it about
• Our emotions transcend “nature red in tooth and claw”
• Your emotional system is consistent and predictable
• Our emotional system is outdated

The Model and cognitive behavioral therapy

• The Model and cognitive behavioral therapy
• Shortcomings of cognitive behavioral therapy and remedies to them

The Model in more depth

• Environment in more depth
• Perception and belief in more depth
• Emotions in more depth
• The origins of your emotions and emotional system
• Characteristics of emotions
• Behavior in more depth
• Reward in more depth
• How your emotional system chooses your emotions
• A single cycle is simple. Many cycles get complex.

What the Model tells us about our lives

• What are awareness, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence?
• More functional views of emotions
• More on the difference between “positive” and rewarding emotions
• The source of all meaning, value, purpose, and importance
• “What is the meaning of life” is a needlessly and counterproductively complicated question
• Bring about emotions you want and enjoy them, don’t dwell on them
• Strategize, then enjoy
• What is freedom?

• ← Non-judgmental Ethics Sunday: The Perks of Being a Layabout
• You learn behavior through experience, not people telling you what to do →