Strategic Living: What is your Strategy?

Do you sometimes wonder why you made a specific decision? Looking back on what happened, you cannot find the reason for doing what you did? Why did I say ”X” to him or why did I not do “Y”?

Everything that you do involves making use of a strategy to get to a certain result or effect. Does this sound “weird” to you? You have never thought of it in this way?

Yes, you may never have thought of it as using a strategy in the decisions that you make everyday. However, that is exactly what you do. You make choices between doing “A” or doing “B”, or even a choice not to do “A” or “B”. All of these options are choices.

Example 1
How do you get from point A (let’s say home) to point B (your office)? You need to make a picture of where you are and where you are going to. The 1st time you go from point A to B you gather verbal information until you have drawn a map, checked your map book or the GPS, so that you have a clear picture of the entire route that you are going to travel. That is a strategy for driving somewhere.

When you have successfully driven from point A to B a few times, you trust the information which is now part of your Unconscious Mind and you don’t have to think so hard anymore about the route, as it is now familiar to you.
However, if you do not have a clear picture of where you are going, it is easy to take a wrong turn or to get lost.

Example 2
Depending on the strategy that you use, for example getting out of bed in the morning, will affect how you experience your day.

Strategy 1: Does your strategy involve lying in the bed after the alarm clock goes off in the morning, just to “rest” a little bit more before rushing out to get a shower?

Strategy 2: Or do you immediately jump out of bed and jump into the shower to wake up?

Strategy 3: Or do you set the alarm for 5 minutes before you need to get up and then set a 2nd alarm?

3 totally different strategies which will all give you different results:
If you choose (note my choice of words: “choose”) strategy 1, you will probably feel rushed all day as this was the way your day started.

Strategy 2 will immediately generate excitement and energy as you jumped out of bed to face the day and would give you ample time before leaving for work to have breakfast, catch up on the daily news from the newspaper or whatever you choose to spend your time on, before getting to the office.

Strategy 3 would allow you to get the best of both strategy 1 and 2 (depending on allowing ample time to get ready).
I bet you have not looked at these options as strategies.

Example 3
You are invited to dinner by a friend. Do you want to know who else will be there? What is on the menu? Whether you must bring wine or desert, etc.?
These are just some of the strategies that we use every day. Yet, we become so accustomed to using these strategies that we don’t think of them in these terms. In most cases we don’t even realise we are using a strategy to make our decisions.

It is like baking a cake. You follow a specific recipe. If you want to bake a chocolate cake, it’s no use using a cheesecake recipe.

Albert Einsten said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

In your life, you produce the same result each time you use the same strategy. However, when you are not getting the results that you want, you need to change the strategy that you use.

Your Conditioned Mind (also called your Unconscious Mind or Subconscious) affects your thinking. Your thinking impacts your behaviour and actions. Your actions and behaviour give you your results.

So, in order for me to change my end result, I need to change my thinking, behaviour and actions. If I can also learn to support these changes in my behaviour and thinking by controlling my conditioned mind or subconscious, I have the power to change my results dramatically.

Example 4
Sandy wants to loose 10 kg. She can change her behaviour and start eating healthy foods, but she also needs to take action by doing regular exercise. However, these things alone cannot give her the result that she wants. She needs to support her new behaviour (eating healthily) and actions (doing regular exercise) by changing how she sees herself, how she sees food, as well as the importance of her health. She therefore needs to change her thinking and Self-Talk (the words she uses in describing her experiences). By doing all of these listed above, she will support her change in behaviour towards living healthily and loosing weight.

If you are not happy with the results that you are currently getting, you need to change your strategy. If you don’t know what strategy you are using to base your decisions on, it’s time that you start thinking about your strategies.

Exercise to elicit your stategies:
Write down what you think your strategy is for each of the following:
1) How you decide to buy something.
2) How you learn.
3) How you get up in the morning.
4) How you respond to feedback.

Conclusion:
A strategy in essence is what you do in your mind, in the process of doing something or making a decision. We use internal processing strategies for everything that we do. We use strategies for love, relationships, learning, sports, sex, fun, communication, relaxation, etc.

When you know your own strategies you can use them, modify them, adopt them to other areas of your life or even replace them with a more appropriate strategy.

Every choice that you make affect your life, so the best advise I can give you is to choose wisely.