CHAPTER 14

The Model

I love the sport of ultimate frisbee, one of my great passions when I played competitively. For those who don’t know, it’s an intense, active sport, as athletic and exhausting as soccer or rugby. My freshman year, my college team made it to Nationals to finish fifth in the nation. As a freshman, I didn’t contribute much, but the experience established my passion.

In college, we drove to tournaments in vans. After the last game each day, we would gather by the vans to change out of our cleats and sweaty uniforms, covered in dirt and often blood, exhausted, and hungry.

I would say, “Guys, we all want to shower, eat, and sleep. Instead of changing here, let’s get in the vans and change on the way to the hotel. Then we can shower, eat, and sleep earlier.”

No one ever followed. I couldn’t understand why. My logic made sense. Why were they not convinced?

My teammate K.J., once explained, “Josh, what you’re saying makes sense. But the way you say it makes me not want to do it.”

I was somehow influencing people to do the opposite of my goal. Convincing didn’t work.

Why was I trying to convince, anyway? If it didn’t work, why did I keep at it? I think my tendency to lead through logic and convincing came from growing up learning to contrast reason with emotion. I learned that reason was systematic, and so concluded that emotions were unsystematic and irrational, even weird. They were for artists to express, not people to get things done with. Why bother trying to understand them, anyway? It seemed like trying to predict a coin toss. To conceive of empathy, compassion, and self-awareness as useful or well-defined skills I could learn was alien. Let artists deal with emotions, I figured.

Despite presenting emotions as irrational, my culture also enshrined the pursuit of happiness—an emotion—among its highest values, with life and liberty. In surveys, people ranked happiness as what they wanted most. In what they wanted for their kids, parents ranked happiness first.

With this confused and contradictory picture of emotions, no wonder I avoided thinking about them in favor of logic and convincing. In fact, learning more about emotions made them make less sense. For example, I learned that the root of the word happiness is hap—the same root of, perhaps, happenstance and haphazard—meaning “luck or chance.” What does it mean for a culture’s highest goal to be based on luck? Why pursue something that changes by chance?

My culture also told me that love, that other most valued emotion, came when struck by Cupid or Eros—outside agents. Fate and destiny are other outside forces, sometimes personified, predetermining our futures. We implore muses to inspire us, more outside agents (and the origin of the word music). Inspiration generally implies divinity, another outside force. Enthusiasm, from theo, meaning “god” (as in theocracy), means “with a god in you,” again another independent agent. Cupid loved Psyche, another supernatural agent whose name, meaning “a supernatural soul,” came to name the field of psychology. The word disaster comes from aster, meaning “star,” as in asteroid, which means “bad star,” implying astrological causes. Star-crossed means something similar, applying mainly to love, implying that the stars, not you, control your most important relationships. Fortune has the same root as fortuitous—fort—also meaning “chance.”

I had little doubt that other languages and cultures had similar patterns, seeing as these lingual roots went back millennia and probably started earlier. I checked French, and its word for happy, heureux, comes from heur, meaning “luck.”

With mainstream views of emotions favoring luck and supernatural agents over consistency, reliability, and predictability, no wonder I preferred logic, even when it didn’t work. As a result, a decade after college, in business school, I was still trying to convince people like I did by the vans and still getting nowhere. This time it was classmates chatting at the start of study sessions instead of working. I would explain how we would enjoy talking more after finishing the work and how we might run out of time to finish our work chatting too long. My words had no effect. I told a leadership professor my frustration dating back to the vans. He laughed at K.J.’s explanation but didn’t help me lead my classmates.

With logic and convincing getting me nowhere, I finally explored the value society placed on emotions. I would have to work with them, not just learn about them academically. I applied this book’s exercises in beliefs and flexibility from units 1 and 2 to emotions to create a new model for them. Instead of trying to make one that was “perfect” or “right,” I aimed to make one that was useful. Eventually, I came up with a model of the human emotional system, which this chapter’s exercise covers, and a method for using it, which chapter 15 covers. This model enabled me to understand the human emotional system as consistent, reliable, and predictable—a foundation to build a leadership practice on. And a more rewarding life.

The point of presenting my model is not to tell you it’s right, as you’ll see, but to show you that you can create your own. Freud made his with the id, ego, and superego. Maslow created his with a hierarchy of needs. Cognitive behavioral therapy is based on one. There are countless models for how humans work. Each has its uses. I’ve found mine useful in leadership, personal development, and professional development, as have many students. You can use it when it works for you. You can also change it and not use it when it doesn’t work. Nearly every leadership tradition, school, and teacher has models for how people work. Few share theirs, forcing people to follow instead of becoming independent leaders. My goal is to enable you to be independent of them when you want or to draw on them when you want. To make you their peers

The Model Exercise

In chapter 13, you wrote your models for leadership, emotions, and self-awareness. In this one, you’ll learn about a model for the human emotional system that I call The Model.

As leaders, we motivate people through their emotional systems like mechanics work on cars with wrenches and carpenters work on wood with saws. The better we know that system and the tools that work with it, the more effectively we can lead. The Model is a leadership equivalent of a schematic model for the internal combustion engine for car mechanics.

No model perfectly represents what it models. They simplify what they represent for a purpose. The purpose of The Model is to represent enough of the human emotional system to include the relevant parts for leading someone without being too complex.

First watch the three-part videos on The Model at http://spodekacademy.com/bookcourse-videos, based on my in-person course.

Then do the exercise described at the end of the third video, which I describe below.

After watching the video, you should be familiar with The Model and its most important properties, which I’ll summarize here.

The Model’s Highlights

The Model represents the human emotional system and how it works. Again, it’s not designed to be perfect or right, just useful.

Its main elements are environment, beliefs, emotions, behavior, and emotional reward. They operate in a cycle, as illustrated here:

Emotions arise involuntarily based on your environment, beliefs, behavior, and the wiring we inherited from our ancestors to guide them to stay alive and reproducing.

You can’t choose what emotions or emotional reward you feel, but you can choose how you act on them. You can also choose the rest of the elements—your environment, beliefs, and behavior.

Emotions are not good, bad, positive, or negative. They were evolutionarily useful for our ancestors.

The emotional system is consistent, reliable, and predictable, not random. Its outputs depend on one’s environment, beliefs, and behaviors, so it may seem random if you don’t know someone’s environment, beliefs, and behaviors. Alternatively, the better you know someone’s environment, beliefs, and behaviors, the better you can predict his or her emotions.

Your whole emotional system consists of many cycles, each interacting with each other—for example, ones for hunger, anger, satisfaction, and so on. Your mind has other parts than your emotional system, like your inner monologue, your executive functions, and so on.

Your emotional system evolved for our ancestors’ environments. Where ours differs, its reactions may not be optimal for our modern world. For example, we often feel motivated to fight or run when stressed at work or to eat more sugar than is healthy.

Flexibility with beliefs helps you solve problems a fixed perspective can’t.

What to Write

The exercise’s written deliverable is write two situations you’d like to improve in your life in The Model’s terms. Start by writing the following:

Environment: ___________________________________

Belief: __________________________________________

Emotion: ________________________________________

Behavior: _______________________________________

Then fill out the details for your situation. For example, if I didn’t like my situation at work with my manager, I might write,

Environment: At work, when I’m in person with my manager.

Belief: He doesn’t listen to me or care about my professional development.

Emotion: Frustration and impatience.

Behavior: I do what I’m told, but I don’t talk to him about what I don’t like.

Or if I wanted to get more fit, I might write,

Environment: My apartment in the evenings, not working out, eating unhealthy food.

Belief: I’m never going to get fit so why bother.

Emotion: Resignation and complacency but also pleasure.

Behavior: Watching TV and eating unhealthy food.

Those are two examples of situations I dislike. I could also put an example I like but still want to improve.

Environment: In front of my computer once a day.

Belief: If I write in my blog every day, I’ll create structure in my life and develop new ideas.

Emotion: Accomplishment and satisfaction.

Behavior: Writing my blog posts daily.

Post-Exercise

I developed The Model to help me understand emotions and motivations to lead others and myself more effectively. Many historical figures had developed comparable models—Freud, Maslow, Jack Welch (as I described in the videos), and so on—each designed for its purpose. The Model’s purpose is to understand the human emotional system in the context of leading others and yourself. No other model seemed to achieve the same purpose as well.

Since The Model covers emotions, happiness, and emotional reward, it overlaps a lot with the big questions of philosophy. I only took a few classes in philosophy, so I might be speaking in ignorance, but it seems to me that its biggest questions are what a good life is and how to improve yours—what Plato and Aristotle wrote about. If, as a twentieth-century philosopher said of European philosophy, “it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato,” then everyone since has worked on details or less important questions.

I ended up studying Plato and Aristotle more after approaching leadership through Method Learning than in school. I came to see them as regular people trying to figure life out. When you don’t see them as sources of quotes for term papers you’ll be graded on, their writing becomes more accessible. Ideas like “the unexamined life is not worth living” and “know thyself” seem simpler, more meaningful, and more helpful.

Working with The Model has led me to see meaning, value, importance, and purpose as based in emotions. In Shakespeare’s words, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” That is, MVIP is not inherent to things but in our perception of them.

I’ve come to see something that creates emotions I like and emotional reward as having positive value, something that creates emotions I don’t want or emotional punishment as having negative value, and things that don’t create emotions at all as having no value.

For example, there are millions of dogs in the world. A dog I spent years playing with and mutually caring for I value positively. A dog that growled at me and made me fear getting bitten I value negatively. A dog on the other side of the world that I’ll never see or interact with I don’t value much one way or the other.

Value happens the same with people, books, and everything else. Meaning, importance, and purpose happen the same way as value.

Where emotions used to seem weird, ethereal, and ephemeral, The Model led me to see that I can sense them directly. Material things I observe indirectly, through my senses and in my memory, both of which are fallible. Realizing that I sense emotions directly has made them more important and accessible, which has filled my life with more MVIP. Since people create more rich, complex, intense, and long-term emotions than inanimate objects, and therefore MVIP, my relationships have also become more important parts of my life.

The result: Understand emotions and you understand MVIP, which means you know what a good life is. The concept of goodness is rooted in value, which is rooted in emotions. Since The Model bases emotions in evolution, implying that they are consistent, reliable, and predictable, it says that MVIP is consistent, reliable, and predictable, a major advance over believing that Cupid, the Muses, or the stars create them.

I had the advantage of knowing about evolution, which gave a billion more years of thyself to know. Even Darwin didn’t know about twentieth-century discoveries like DNA, which helps us understand motivations like altruism.

The upshot for me is that The Model helps me understand MVIP, self-awareness, and the other important concepts to answer the first big question of philosophy. When I look at convincing, I think of what it motivates, which is debate. When you try to convince, as I did with my teammates and classmates, you inherently motivate people to debate.

In terms of The Model, a good life is one with as much emotional reward, emotions I want, and pleasure as I can create, of many characteristics, given my constraints of resources.

The rest of Unit 3 and Unit 4 answer the other big question: How do I make my life better?