We all have an “Emotional Source Code” that is set when we were children. It’s what drives us and is why we do everything we do.

What if that code isn’t working to your advantage? You can change it! In this episode I discuss how to do that with my guest, Dov Baron.

 

 

For over 30 years, Dov Baron has been empowering inquisitive leaders and influential figures worldwide to explore their own “Emotional Source Code” and their organizations “Emotional Source Code” to discover how to generate Fierce Loyalty.

He is the creator and host of The Dov Baron Show podcasts (previously known as Leadership and Loyalty), named the #1 podcast for Fortune 500 Executives by Apple podcasts. The Dov Baron Show has featured hundreds of hours of interviews with top leaders, entrepreneurs, theologians, military intelligence officers, and artists.
What is Your “Emotional Source Code”?
Your Emotional Source Code is a thesis that has come out of a blend of quantum physics, neuroscience and psychology, organizational psychology and subjective personal psychology. It's profoundly insightful into what it is that drives us. Very often you'll meet somebody, and they'll say, “I really have this bad behavior, and I want to change it.” You might say, “I can help you with that.” Great. And then you help them, they change their behavior, and it doesn't stick.

They wonder “Why didn't it stick?” Maybe the problem is that they have a belief system or a value system that's holding that behavior in place. That’s when they realize they have to do some real work on their behaviors and to my beliefs.

Then they do some belief restructuring. They get happy because the belief's better now, and as a result, the behavior's gone away. And then a year later, they’re back in the same boat. Why? Why does it not change? Because you have an emotional source code. That’s what Dov calls your Emotional DNA.

Your DNA is not dominant. It's just the most... obvious place to start. What Dov means by that is you may have a predetermination for certain situations from something in your DNA. It doesn't mean they’re going to happen. It just means it’s there in your Emotional DNA. It's waiting to kick in. That's the same with your emotional DNA being in your Emotional Source Code.
Going Back to the Beginning
Your Emotional Source Code starts at the base level at the foundation of it, which is the origin of your Emotional Source Code itself. That’s the environment and the circumstance you grew up in. Now, you might be thinking “Oh, my God, we're going to spend 20 years on a couch talking to a therapist.” No, it doesn’t have to be like that.

Consider your parents, especially if you have siblings. Not only have your parents changed and matured over the years, but as parents, they as parents respond differently to their firstborn than they do to their thirdborn. On top of that, there's also an economic situation. There's a pretty good chance your parents were in better financial shape by the time they had their third kid than they were when they had their first child. They'd matured in age, hopefully emotionally. Their relationship had also matured, again, hopefully to make it better. And there was an economic change also.

That means you and your siblings didn't have the same parents. In fact, none of you did. You all had different parents. And so, as a result, you built your Emotional Source Code based on the environment you were in at a moment in time.

Dov was born into abject poverty with violence, crime, abuse, addiction all around him. That told him how to survive. He remembers thinking, “If I'm going to make it through this, I've got to work out certain things about how to be.” He would look at the world and think that's dangerous, that's safe. We all do it. It's not because of his background.