Get On With It! Step 1 to Making Decisions

Have you ever been driving down the road behind someone who is indecisive? It is terrible; they wander up and down the road. They pull off to the side. They slow down. You know where you want to go; you want to go past them, and you want to get there.

Let’s not waste our time not making decisions when we are out there in the executive world.

What are some of the steps we can take in making great decisions?

Roice, Mark, and I have all spent years and years teaching some of the most effective and successful executives on the planet how to make quality decisions. From our conversations together, we have it boiled down to eight steps—eight things you need to know and you need to do to make great decisions.

1. Put Yourself in a Great State

What does it mean to be in a great state? We’re not talking about the state of Illinois or the great state of Mississippi. What state are we talking about?

You need to be filled with confidence. You need to be awake and alert and have high energy.

You don’t want to be making a serious decision that is going to affect the quality of your business while you are tired, depressed, or have a bad focus. For me, the best time is in the morning.

After I wake up from a good sleep during which I have rested my mind and body, I have a little breakfast, and then I write down two or three things I need to make decisions on. I attack them right then because I know I have my best mental energy to do it.

The best leaders all make their decisions early in the morning. That’s why I have always wanted to start a restaurant that started at 5 a.m. and was done by 1 p.m., and just serve breakfast for decision makers. This is a great idea.

You, too, need to find the times of the day, the places, the way that you move your body, the foods that you eat, the people you want around you, that put you in the best state that you can possibly be in for making the key decisions in your life.

W. Clement Stone used to say, “When you wake up in the morning you are supposed to say, ‘I’m healthy, I’m happy, I’m awake, I feel terrific!’”

That is a great time to make a decision.

Now Tony Robbins does it differently. He has a thing he calls the “Whoa clap.” This is a great state to be in. You want to stand up, get your chest up, breathe deep, stand tall, and be energized. That is the state you want to be in to make a decision. It is purposeful; you can cause this state. It’s not something that just happens.

I cause this state in my seminars for mega-book marketing and mega-speaking. When I’m doing my seminars, I frequently have singer Lynn Rose perform. Lynn opens for everybody from Jay Leno to Sheryl Crow. At my seminars this amazing woman takes an audience from an energy level of 2 or a 3 and brings them up to a 10, with her high-volume, highly energized singing and speaking talent. So when she finishes and the audience is at a 10, that’s when I begin speaking.

Everyone has the state, I’ve got the state, and we feed the energy back and forth. Then we keep going higher all weekend long.

You can do this too with different variations. You can get into music, for example, that will put you into a deep contemplative state where you are completely aware, completely jazzed about life. Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” is one piece of music that does this to me.