ABSTRACT
Emotional literacy is designed specifically with emotions in mind, but the approach can be applied more broadly to help leaders understand and manage other aspects of their internal life, including attitudes, heuristics, and biases. The authors modified and extended standard emotional literacy and combined it with transactional analysis and research on the triune brain to develop a simple behavioral literacy framework that will help leaders in the challenge of making risky and important decisions. They call this the Seven As Framework. The Seven As Framework is a simple structured process that allows leaders to modify the behaviors of themselves and others in an intentional and deliberate way in order to optimize the chances of achieving a desired outcome. It involves the following steps: awareness, appreciation, assessment, acceptance, assertion, action, and appraisal. If Assertion is the point of intentional choice, then Action is the point at which leaders implement that choice and actually do something.
