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The best gift I got last Christmas was my beloved Tom Tom GPS for my car. I've always told myself I'm directionally challenged, which ended up just being a good excuse for not being responsible to really pay attention when I was driving. Now I can get around that excuse by trusting Mandy (the pre-programmed voice I've chosen to help me find my destination)!

One of the coolest things about my GPS is that I don't even have to tell it where I am before I tell it where I want to go - it just knows. Of course, that doesn't seem to work the same way in real life. If we don't know where we are, it's pretty tough to pick a starting point. That's why, when I don't have my GPS with me (like in the Mall of America, for example), I rely on that big red arrow telling me exactly where I am. That way I can get my bearings and decide where I want to go.

However we do have that same ability in our lives if we'll just listen to our inner navigation system. In Maxwell Maltz's classic book Psycho-Cybernetics he refers to this as our Automatic Success Mechanism (ASM). When we set our ASM with a clear and detailed sense of direction, we don't have to know how we're going to get where we're going - we just have to be clear about our intention.

Now is a great time to decide if where you're headed is where you want to end up. As Lao-Tzu reminds us:

"If you do not change direction,
you may end up where you are heading."

There's no time like the present to set your ASM for 2008!