Making Better Decisions – Part 1

How can I make better decisions? This has been a powerful question in my development. In fact, this has been one of the central orienting questions for me for quite a long time. In this two part series, I’m going to reveal two ways to dramatically increase the quality of your questions, and as a result get explosive growth in your life.

The first factor in making better decisions is our short-term awareness directed by our physical and emotional state. It’s common sense that a bad emotional state leads to bad decisions. The opposite is true as well. The moments when we are most in tune and in the flow are largely due to the state we are in. But what most of us need is a healthy strategy for calling up appropriate states when they are needed, and that is what I will talk about here.

When I was a teenager, I suffered from depression. I even went on Paxil, an anti-depressant for a while. Unfortunately, it made it worse. As I went deeper into the depression, my school work began to suffer. I had no idea why I felt the way I did, and I felt powerless to find a way out.

Thankfully, at some point I started to notice something interesting. The depression was its worst about two hours after eating supper. What was it about supper that could cause it though? Then it came to me. Almost daily I would finish my meal, grab a handful of Oreo cookies, and head into the living room to eat them one by one.

As an experiment, I decided to stop eating the cookies for a bit to see if they were at all linked to my emotional turmoil. Sure enough, I began to feel a lot better right then. I realized that the sugar in the cookies was most likely to blame. By cutting my intake of sugar, I noticed a huge increase in my energy and emotional stability. It was the first major breakthrough in my life. I learned that environmental factors play a huge role in physical and emotional states. I also learned to take personal responsibility for my state of mind. Eventually, I went on to graduate with honors, something unthinkable a couple years before.

By taking this experimental approach to life, we can begin to find out how to control our state. When applied, this begins to immediately raise our awareness, and that will significantly impact the moment to moment decisions we make every day.

You can try this for yourself by introducing or eliminating things in your life and watching how the presence or absence affects your state. Keep a journal of these experiments and you will soon notice what makes a difference. You can then find out for yourself what induces the states you want to be in all the time.

Another great tool for controlling your state is anchoring. Anchoring is the process of mentally linking a stimulus, whether external or internal, to a response. For instance, if I was in an extremely negative state and someone touched my shoulder, I might get the two things linked. Then the next time someone touches my shoulder in the same way, I would immediately be sent back into that negative state. It happens for us unconsciously all the time. Fortunately, we can use this process in a conscious way as well.

A lot of the time, I am paying attention to the things I have linked to my positive states: creating a library in my mind. When I feel depressed, I run through all those things one by one, pulling myself back to the state when I felt good. For example, I’ll say “I feel phenomenally bad at this amazing time. I’m so brilliantly tired of being in this awesomely depressed state”. I even start to move my body in an excited way, excited about feeling bad. It doesn’t take long before I am cracking up with laughter at the ridiculousness of it. The point is to bring up as many positive anchors as I possibly can: words, thoughts, body language, emotions, vocal pacing, etc. It’s almost impossible to feel bad when you engage in positive thoughts, emotions and actions for a length of time.

If you want to make better decisions, you absolutely need to be in the right physical and emotional state to do so. This means you have to take personal responsibility for controlling and directing your state. When we can move into a desired state on cue, we have mastered our internal world. Only then are we truly capable of taking further steps toward our highest potential.

In part 2 of this article, I will talk about an even more significant factor controlling our decisions: our model of the world.