Do you know anyone who over and over again makes poor choices in their life, in their business and particularly, in managing their time? Yes, you probably do. Have you ever found yourself struggling with a decision, not knowing what to do? Maybe you are faced with a poor performance employee who has been loyal yet you know they aren't working out. Or perhaps you are being offered a chance-of-a-lifetime opportunity, but deep in your gut you don't feel it is right.

Every day we are faced with making choices for our precious resources (time, people and money.) Those choices either align us with our vision, or distract us. What highly successful people do very early in their career is leverage the power of a mentor.

Now some of us don't have the luxury of a personal mentor, maybe you work alone or you feel that you can't afford your own coach. So here is the little known secret that will help you leverage the power of a mentor even if you are already working with a coach. Model the mindset, behavior and choices of successful people you admire. Here are some tips on how to model others.

Pick 3 to 5 successful people you admire. You don't have to know them, you just have to identify what it is that you admire about them. You don't have to love everything they do, but you probably respect parts of their life. One of the successful people I admire is Oprah Winfrey. Not just because of her show, but because of the way she runs her billion-dollar companies.

Identify the key strengths they offer. What does their model of success represent to you? What do they do well? How did they get where they are today? Read about your model or, if you can, interview them. Find out their inner secrets of success. There are many resources out there for learning about your models of success.

Create your virtual board-of-advisors. Once you have researched your models, create a ?virtual board? so you have access to them when you need them. You may hire a coach (I did), or perhaps you gather articles and books, or maybe your models are just images in your mind to visualize.

Learn to think like your mentor. When you don't know what to do, put on your ?mentor's thinking hat? and ask yourself, what would they do? When I get stuck, I think, ?What would Oprah do?? This gets you out of your own thinking and into a bigger playing field.

Act-as-if. Every successful person has emulated someone they admired along the way. Why? Because they have already done it. When you model the behavior of another person, you can short cut your path, eliminate problems, and resolve issues quickly. Act-as-if you are already that successful and you will notice HUGE shifts in your life.

This may sound simple, but research proves that using a model of success can improve your bottom line. Remember, 90% of our success is determined by our inner game. Our inner game has a huge impact on our outer results. One of the fastest ways to up-level our inner game is to start thinking like other successful people. Right now, while you are still thinking about it, pull out a piece of paper and put a line from the top to the bottom in the middle. One the left side, write down the people you might want to model. On the right side, write down what you respect about them. You now have your first modeling tool to help you form your virtual board-of-advisors.

Take action today to strengthen your inner game! Have fun with it! And as always, we would love to hear your successes with this technique.