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.

For quite some time I have been focused on getting more associated when I watch movies. I imagine being in the scene with the characters and being involved directly in the action. It not only makes movies more fun, but also gives a richer and more meaningful experience that sits with me much longer.

My desire to do this was initially fueled by the knowledge that the more senses that get involved in learning, the more deeply one retains and understands the material. For instance, if you remember a phone number by singing it as a song or making a series of internal images into a story from it, you will remember it much better than simply memorizing the numbers themselves. I have been doing this since high school. In one class I easily memorized entire sheets of notes word for word this way. It’s a great tool in itself.

Also I started this process because I’ve wanted to be more in the moment in everything I do. There is something exhilarating in feeling like I am present and awake all the time, so finding new ways to get a deeper association to what I am doing has been a really strong motivator for me. If I am associated, I want to be really associated. If I am in a detached, objective state I want to be really in that state as well. Being present really opens the mind up to soak in new experiences and learnings with ease.

However, the moment when these deep experiences became more solid and useful was a couple years ago when I started getting interested in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) from my friend John. If you aren’t familiar with NLP it is basically a system for modeling successful people with the intent of using their strategies for yourself. The fundamental presupposition of modeling is that experience has structure and that structure can be learned. So in effect you could take someone who does something well, find out what they are doing and learn to do that.

In the book Introducing NLP by Joseph O’ Conner and John Seymour, they say the following about modeling:
“With some skills, replicating physiology may be the most important part. To model an excellent skier, for example, you would watch him ski until you begin to move your body in the same way. This will give you an experience of what it is like to do what he does, and you may even have some intuitions about what it is like to be that person, or at least to be inside that body. By precisely mirroring the patterns of movement, posture and even breathing, you will begin to feel the same way as him on the inside. You will have gained access to resources that may have taken him years to discover”.

This is an amazing way to approach learning. It sure as heck beats the current learning strategy taught in the public school system of repeatedly hammering in useless trivia for 12+ years in a row. As far as learning strategies go, modeling is miles better than that tired old system.

Now here’s where it gets even better. With the internet we have an almost infinite source of audio and video from successful people. We have all the reference we need to model anything we could ever want to learn. A simple YouTube search will bring up a whole pile of great stuff to use.

By taking this concept of modeling and combining it with that state of presence and openness I started to get some mind-blowing results. I found a video of Tony Robbins giving one of his passionate talks to an audience, and I started mimicking his voice. It was fun to just see how close I could get to matching him as he was speaking. As I got better at doing that, I started noticing his eye movements. I matched those as well. Then when I got that down, I started incorporating his head turns and facial expressions. I kept noticing new things to include in my emulation. When the video ended I felt like I had just awoken from a dream. The state was so deep. The best part is you get better at it the more you do it. It’s absolutely explosive for growth.

So how exactly do you emulate? Let’s take public speaking as an example, something that nearly everyone is afraid of. Bring up a video of a speaker that really moves your soul. Find a video where they are giving one of their most memorable speeches. Play the video. Repeat the speaker’s words as best you can, following their rhythm and reproducing their tonality. As you start to sink into the pacing of the words, start mimicking their body language as well. The goal is to accurately achieve an almost mirror like effect between you and the speaker, and maintain it for a at least 10 minutes. As you start to nail down certain characteristics you will notice more. Add those as well. Keep going deeper. It’s so holographic that it can be surprising at first. It feels like truly stepping into the shoes of the other person.

One thing that I do to add to it even more is download the video and horizontally reverse the image in an editing suite. The model’s left side is my left side. That way when I watch it and mimic it, it feels even more like a mirror image of myself.

I recommend doing this for at least 15 minutes a day. After a while you will start to notice the model’s behaviour creeping into your own experience. This is deep learning, the same kind of learning that young children use to learn how to speak. You will be blown away at how incredibly powerful and transformative it is.