[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.]

Why create a model?

To know yourself better despite your complexity.

Every system of self-improvement, at least that I know of, has some concept of increasing your self-awareness, your knowledge of yourself. “Know thyself.”

Modeling the part of you that creates value, importance, and meaning helps you understand what you value, what you find important, and what means what. Not knowing where value, importance, and meaning come from complicates understanding them.

If the complexity of the self you want to know exceeds your capacity to understand, you don’t benefit from trying to know it. The human brain being perhaps the most complex system in existence, you likely won’t succeed at understanding its full complexity. A simplified model helps.

Every philosopher, psychologist, guru, or whoever taught how to improve your life, from Aristotle, Buddha, and before to Anthony Robbins and later, worked from some model, whether they stated it or not.

The more you understand your model, its applications, and its limitations, the better you can apply it to your life. Leaving it implicit makes distinguishing it from what it represents harder. As we will see, the more you confuse your model with reality or the more you confuse your map with the territory, the more you will imprison yourself in patterns of beliefs and behaviors that restrict your ability to bring about emotions you want.

In contrast, the more you understand your model and distinguish it from any concept of objective reality, the more freedom you have in creating the emotions and therefore lifestyle you want. As we will see, emotional freedom gives you more opportunity for emotional reward and happiness than anything else, at least that I know of.

I try to make my Model simple to communicate and understand. I try to communicate it in plain English. Let me know if I’ve succeeded or could improve.

Tomorrow: the beginning of the Model

• ← The Model: models in general
• The Model: environment and behavior →