Have you ever been depressed over a situation, been angry at someone, or even felt totally stressed out? We all have. Now, say you needed to be in a peak performance state to achieve an important goal.  If you don’t find a way to change your state out of down and depressed, how good are your chances of achieving the goal? Well, I can tell you, that the chances are very low. Hence, the value of creating self improvement in the area of state management.

Have you ever been in these negative types of states, where it has totally disempowered you? Has it caused you to not be at your best and fail to succeed at something important? Chances are that it has – it happens to all of us. So then, the value of being able to manage our states is very important. We can go from a negative state where failure is almost a certainty, to a totally empowered state where we can produce excellent results. How can we do this?

There are two main factors that control our state. First, is our mental focus or what we are paying attention to the most. When we focus on something that we don’t want or doesn’t correspond to our beliefs of how things should be, especially if there is a lot of negative emotion associated to those thoughts, chances are that this will instantly put us in a negative state. So one way to control our state is to control our mental focus. We can consciously control what we focus on. How do we control our mental focus? Choose to focus on the positives of a situation. That’s right, it’s a choice. If there is something negative you are focusing on, try to think of what you can do to improve that and begin to focus on what you can gain from it. After all, that’s what problems are meant to do in my opinion. They are meant to help us grow, learn and improve. So it is important to focus on what you want, not what you don’t want out of a situation.

The second way to change our state from low gear to high gear, if you will, is to move our body and change our breathing in a way that gets our blood moving. In other words, we need to have the physiology of someone that wants to take action. Move your body how you do when you feel unstoppable and powerful. Now, compare feeling physically unstoppable to this following description. Think about a time when you were at home for example and had nothing to do. You may have felt a little bored. You may have been slouched over with your face looking down. Your body movements will most likely have been a little lazy too.  Did you feel like doing much when you were in that state of boredom? The scary thing is, to feel better, you may have tried to do something really easy to get out of that state like eat or watch TV. The problem with this is that we will feel a little better, but only for a few moments. That’s a trap that can lead us into a cycle of misery. How can we empower ourselves to get out of these negative states, as well as stay out of the traps? The answer is to learn to consciously use powerful, physical movements to rapidly change our state from low energy to high energy. When you notice that you are bored, go for a brisk walk, call a friend and talk about something that normally gets you going. If you play sports, go shoot the ball around or roller blade. Or, if you don’t have the time to do any of those things, think about something that makes you feel great, and complement that with some quick physical movements like pumping your fist or looking up and smiling from ear to ear. Just try this and you’ll see what I mean. Your physical state will change and this better mood will put you in a better position to succeed.

In order to be effective at anything, we need to be able to control our states.  By knowing how significant a role our focus and physiology play in how we respond to any situation, is a start. Remember, the actions we take each moment of each day, determine the outcome of our lives. That’s some serious stuff – especially if you want to improve your life. By learning how to better manage your state of body and mind, you will start to create better control over your life, make better choices and allow yourself to act on correct disciplines. Remember, it’s as easy to do something as is not to do something. If we are in a poor state of body and mind, we tend to do what’s easiest, which means nothing. Doing nothing is a sure formula to total failure in life.  I think if we have a choice, we should choose the actions that help us create an excellent life – and that’s the value provided from this self improvement article on state management. Learn to control your state by knowing that our focus and physiology control our actions. Mastering this area of self improvement will help increase our chances of succeeding in our lives. Now, all that’s left to do, is to put the act of managing our state into practice – and as to old saying goes, practice makes perfect.