One thing I love about life is the ability and freedom it grants each and every one of us - regardless of status, background, age, gender, race - to create a new “you” at any given point and time. A simple decision to make a change, initiates the entire process. An old Chinese proverb states, “The journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step.” Just one step - a decision - begins the journey! And many of us have done just that, we’ve taken the first step of deciding to make a change in our lives, time and time again. Yet, somehow our efforts continually fall short, leaving us frustrated, hopeless, and sometimes feeling like a complete failure. Why?

Well, we fail at successfully manifesting and maintaining meaningful change in our lives because we make the decision, and stop right there… never completing the process, never realizing that the decision is merely the first step. A decision must be followed up with an effective plan of action to ensure a solid foundation. Now, please be forewarned that after making your decision to create a new “you”, you will inevitably be confronted by the enemy of all successful endeavors, dreams, goals and ideas. This enemy has destroyed more dreams than anything else on the planet. This enemy is waiting to destroy your dream… this enemy is called procrastination. Procrastination’s method of operation is to eat your life away, one-second-at-a-time. The minutes, hours, days, months and years are unimportant because procrastination fully understands that it can accumulate those minutes, hours, days, months, and years by simply eating away at each second wasted, doing absolutely nothing, going absolutely nowhere. Understand that this enemy is working diligently, 24 hours a day, to prevent any forward progress, so you must work even more diligently at eradicating it from your life. And the absolute most effective way to rid yourself of procrastination…. is to take action. Taking action will cause it to flee from you, but remember, it will not go very far. It will lurk around in the background waiting for you to welcome it back into your life by putting things off again. That is precisely why you must continue to taking action on a consistent basis.

When formulating a plan of action to create a new “you”, one of the most powerful internal forces we naturally possess, but often fail to fully activate, will play a critical role. That force is known as… imagination. Imagination is defined as the act or power of forming mental images of what is not actually present. One of the fantastic things about imagination is that it gives us the ability to pre-play our future, unlike memory which constantly re-plays our past. When we fail to use our imagination, our memory takes over, allowing us to stay trapped in our past, failing to cultivate a vision for our future. Imagination grants us hope for a brighter future and the expectation of a successful, fulfilling life. I empathically suggest that you trade in your residency in the nation of procrastiNation and become an active resident in the nation of imagiNation. This is crucial because you will need a mental picture of your future to continually motivate you to take the necessary steps to get there. And rest assured that once you decide on your destination, your mind will then create the roadmap to get you there, utilizing this life-changing force called imagination. It’s in this nation of imagination that the new you is first created, nourished, and given a fighting chance to win in life.

I challenge you to take action today, to swiftly evict procrastination and deliberately and consistently activate the power of imagination in your life. Spend at least 15 minutes a day seeing yourself being the person you want to be, doing the things you want to do, and having the things you want to have. Once you get into a habit of visualizing your victory, take determined action on the roadmap that your mind will create to get you to your desired destination.

As I said in the beginning of this article - the one thing I truly love about life is the ability and freedom it grants each and every one of us, regardless of status, background, age, gender, race - to create a "new you” at any given point and time. Take advantage of that opportunity, take advantage of a brand new year, make the decision, then follow it up with the necessary actions to create the you.... you've always wanted to be!