By: Eva Keller
The standard argument for why Christian leaders should manage Fear, Lust, Anger, and Pride is theological. Dr. Dave Jones makes that argument in Plan to Win.
He also makes a different one, and the second argument may be the more useful one for a Christian CEO sitting in a board meeting at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday.
The hypothalamus, Dave writes, is the originating point for fear, lust, anger, and pride. Also for phobias, panic attacks, rage, and aggression.
Drawing on Henry Wright’s work in A More Excellent Way, Dave is making a claim that most faith-based leadership books do not bother to make. The four toxic motivators he calls FLAP are not only spiritual realities. They are neurobiological ones.
Why This Changes the Conversation
The standard framing of sin in leadership contexts places the burden entirely on character. You are afraid because your faith is weak.
You are angry because you lack self-control.
You are proud because you have not surrendered enough.
The solution is always more prayer, more surrender, more spiritual discipline.
Dave does not reject that framing. He adds a layer underneath it that makes it more actionable, not less.
When a Christian CEO understands that their cortisol spike after a bad quarter is a hypothalamic response, a physiological event and not only a spiritual failure, the problem shifts from “what is wrong with my faith” to “what is happening in my body right now, and what do I do about it.”
That shift is not a concession to secular psychology. It is a more precise account of how God made human beings, and therefore a more precise account of what Christian leaders are actually managing when they try to lead from vision rather than emotion.
The Cycle Has a Physical Mechanism
Dave maps FLAP as a self-reinforcing loop. Fear leads to Anger when threats materialize. Anger fuels Pride as a defensive mechanism. Pride intensifies Lust for validation and control.
Lust deepens fear as leaders become attached to outcomes. In Dave’s account, each of those transitions has a neurobiological correlation.
Fear, as he describes it, floods the body with cortisol and activates the amygdala, narrowing the range of options the prefrontal cortex will consider. Lust, in the same framing, engages the brain’s reward pathways and creates a craving mechanism he compares to compulsive behavior.
Anger, he writes, activates the same stress-response systems as fear, but with an outward rather than inward orientation.
Pride, Dave argues, is the quietest of the four, and the most dangerous, because it hides behind the brain’s confirmation bias, filtering out the feedback that would correct it.
Understanding this sequence does not eliminate FLAP. Dave is explicit that the goal is management, not eradication.
But it changes the nature of the intervention. A leader who recognizes they are in a cortisol cascade after a setback can apply a different kind of discipline than one who simply tells themselves to trust God more. Both are necessary. Neuroscience makes the discipline more precise.
The Distinction That Matters
This is what separates Dave’s FLAP framework from the traditional Seven Deadly Sins as a leadership tool. Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, and Sloth are theological categories with deep biblical grounding.
They are not, as Dave frames it, neurobiological realities in the same way.
Try mapping Gluttony or Sloth to a physiological sequence in a board meeting. The translation does not work.
Fear, Lust, Anger, and Pride, by contrast, connect to physical signals a leader can learn to recognize in real time. The tight chest before a difficult conversation. The compulsive email checking for validation. The inability to hear a team member’s concern as information rather than a challenge.
The Practical Implication
For Christian CEOs, this framing offers a way to talk about spiritual formation in organizational terms without reducing it to either therapy or theology alone. Dave is arguing that the biology and the Scripture point at the same thing: a set of emotionally driven responses that originate in the body, distort decision-making, and require daily, disciplined management if vision is going to lead instead of FLAP.
The assessment Dave built at plantowintoday.com rests on this premise.
Seven questions.
The output is not a spiritual diagnosis. It is a current-state read on which toxic motivator is driving decisions right now. Not as a verdict. As a starting line.
That is the contribution Plan to Win makes that most Christian leadership books do not. It gives leaders a way to name what is happening in their bodies before it shows up in their decisions.
And naming it, Dave argues, is the beginning of managing it.
Dr. Dave Jones’ book, Plan to Win, is available for purchase on Amazon.
