In past postings, we’ve been discussing some of the internal filters you use to maintain your sanity and to sort the 10 million bits of information that come to you every second from your five senses.

Remember the role of the reticular activating system in helping you with the processes of deletion, distortion and generalization, and how these further break down and constitute your values, attitudes and memories that make up your world.

This time, you will see how the decisions you make are based on all of the above.

Please listen to the 4.41 minutes AUDIO if that fits in better with your time.

None of the above or all of the internal filters that will follow, including the decision-making one which we will address today, are performed in isolation. Every thought produces a corresponding feeling that is interrelated and affects any one or more of the internal filters at any given time.

Decisions are another major filter of your second-by-second experiences.

Memories eternalize your beliefs, and decisions are the manifestations of these.

Of immense importance are also the significant emotional events (SEE) that have occurred in your life, and that are so deeply cemented in your subconscious that you are often not aware of their existence.

NLP has processes to bring those subconscious significant emotional events (SEE) to the forefront into your awareness in order to deal with them.

When some of these SEE are brought to conscious realization, they can become a very positive motivational resource for behavioural change.

Throughout your day you consciously and unconsciously make decisions based upon the way you see reality, ie your subjective analysis of reality.

You may see an objective event but you subjectivise it according to your internal filters.

You make a deliberate decision to accept a belief and based upon that acceptance, you will make a decision, which can become a memory, and develop into a belief.

You’ve heard it said that you tend to get what you look for.

If you are always getting what you have always got, then it is time to change your decision-making processes on that subject.

In a previous posting, the Cartesian Quadrant was addressed.

If you are looking for different outcomes, then asking yourself the following four questions will expand the scope of your possibilities:

• What would happen if I did?

• What wouldn’t happen if I did?

• What would happen if I didn’t?

• What wouldn’t happen if I didn’t?

Your life at the moment is a reflection of conscious decisions.

Decisions are stored in the subconscious mind, and they continue to determine current behaviours, as has been said above.

If you are still applying limiting decisions which are holding you back, again NLP has processes to get rid of these limiting decisions and replace them with more empowering ones.

A process called anchoring will do the trick, because your decisions determine your destiny.

As Christopher Howard says is in his ground-breaking book: Three Steps to Wealth and Power: “It is not the events in your life that shape your destiny, but the decisions you make about those events.”

In the next posting, we’ll look at the importance of language as one of your internal filters.

 In the meantime, keep actioning the information you read, as it is only when change your thoughts and behaviours, and practise those changes that you will actually expand your world.