This paper presents a number of different route discovery strategies for on-demand routing protocols, which provide more control to each intermediate node make during the route discovery phase to make intelligent forwarding decisions. This is achieved through the idea of selfselection. In self-selecting route discovery each node independently makes Route Request (RREQ) forwarding decisions based upon a selection criterion or by satisfying certain conditions. The nodes which do not satisfy the selection criterion do not rebroadcast the routing packets. We implemented our self-selecting route discovery strategies over AODV using the GloMoSim network simulation package, and compared the performance with existing route discovery strategies used in AODV. Our simulation results show that a significant drop in the number of control packets can be achieved by giving each intermediate node more authority for self-selection during route discovery. Furthermore, a significant increase in throughput is achieved as the number nodes in the network is increased.