Your personal power system is made up of those five elements that determine how you perceive everything that happens in your life. To understand it is a science and therefore governed by predictable laws and patterns. Your personal power system is important because it controls the way you feel and what you do every moment of your life.

Now when you understand the personal power system of others you will begin to tune in to the core of who they are and their systematic way of reasoning, be it your boss, spouse, child, co-worker, friend or relative. You will be able to know what drives them and understand why it is they behave the way they do and connect with them on a higher level.

Because of our individual perspective and conditioning we all evaluate what is happening to and around us differently and hence different things will be important people. We all have a way or a procedure that we go through that assists us in determining what things mean to us and what solutions we need to employ in almost every situation we may face in life.

Consider a situation in which you are making a presentation to a prospective buyer and the slides you have cued up won’t show because the projector won’t work. You continue with your presentation without them and when you are finished you say to yourself “I blew it”. But from the buyer’s perspective it was a great presentation. Why the difference in viewpoints? People react this way because when something bad happen they begin to crucify themselves and in some cases in a brutal way. At this point no matter what they do they would never be able to give a good presentation.

People who are successful in life or who have mastered anything tend to make superior evaluations in those areas of expertise. So people like Michael Jordan evaluate how a game is going and his opponents manner of playing to be able to play as well as he did. You see if there is someone who is doing better than you are in any area of life, it is because they have a superior way of evaluating what things mean and what they must do about it.

The challenge for us all will be to develop and take control of our ability to evaluate our lives and everything in it, so that we are consistently guided to make choices that will produce the results we desire. To be able to do this we must first understand the five elements of our personal power system:

The State You Are In
The mental and emotional state you are in when you are making an evaluation determines your response to what is happening to you. So if someone tells you that you are pretty or handsome, at certain times when you are in a good sate, you will feel pretty or handsome. At other times, when you are not in a good or receptive state, the same compliment has made you will feel the opposite. It is very important, therefore, when making evaluations that your decisions about what things mean and what to do are made when you are in a very resourceful state of mind rather than a negative unresourceful state.

The Questions You Ask Yourself
When something happens in your life your brain begins to evaluate it by asking questions such as “What is going on? What does this situation mean? Will it cause me distress or pleasure? What actions can I take now to avoid, reduce or eliminate this distress and get some pleasure?” So if you were considering applying for a particular job, whether you apply or not is determined by your evaluations. The specific questions you ask yourself as you contemplate applying for the job will greatly affect your evaluations. If you ask yourself questions like “It would be fantastic if I get this job, wouldn’t it? I am more than qualified for this job aren’t I?” chances are you will feel more motivated to apply for it. But what if your questions were “What if I am not qualified enough? What if they don’t even bother to consider my application? What if after I go to an interview they reject me?” Chances are these kinds of questions will cause you to evaluate things in such a way you won’t even bother to apply.

Your Value System
As we go through life we all tend to value certain emotions more than others. We either want to experience pleasure or move away from distress and with this in mind we develop a ‘program’ for what means distress and what means pleasure. These programs are present in our value system. Consider this, you go through life associating pleasure to the idea of being successful, yet another person may associate great distress to the same idea because they have noticed that their successful family members and friends are very unhappy and in some cases they committed suicide. The values you choose will mold each and every decision you make in life. All the decisions you make boils down to the level of clarity you have about what you value most within a particular situation.

Your Beliefs
A belief is a sense of certainty about something. Your beliefs are your sense of certainty about things in our lives. Things like how to feel and what to expect from life, from ourselves, and from people in general. You also have beliefs about what has to occur for us to feel that what you value is being satisfied. Your beliefs tend to control what you are willing to evaluate and also determines your expectations.

Your Experiences
Everything you have ever experienced real or imagined in your life is stored in your brain. These experiences form the reference point from which most of, if not all, your beliefs are developed and by which our decisions are guided. Whenever we are deciding what something means to us, we tend to compare it to something, usually a past experience. We all have a reservoir of experiences we can use when making decisions but which experience we employ will determine what meaning you get from any experience, how you truly feel about it, and ultimately what action you take.

Once you make a change in just one of these five elements of your personal power system it will dramatically affect how you think, feel and behave in different areas of your life concurrently. You will find that you won’t even consider certain evaluations anymore, certain questions you won’t ask, and you won’t accept certain beliefs anymore.