I recently came across a photo on Facebook that showed just how powerful the process of positive thinking can be. For those of you who doubt that something good can result from something as simple as a positive thought try listening to this little account of positive thinking…

In 2011 Morolake Akinosun had a dream. She was only a seventeen year old senior in high school, but she already knew what she wanted to achieve in a few years, and so she went on twitter to let her friends and family know about this dream. On July 28, 2011 at 12:28 pm she posted a tweet that read, “In 2016 I will be 22, graduated from a school I have not chosen yet, and going to the Olympics (:” Fast forward five years, and that dream has become a reality. Not only has she won a spot on the US women’s 4×100 relay team, but she will also be graduating from the University of Texas in December.

Akinosun said that she would be in the Olympics and that she would graduate from college this year, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people out there who thought that her dreams were too big and that she could never achieve both of these things. It would have been easy for her to give up and listen to those negative voices, but she made the conscious decision to listen to the positive voice in her own head. She probably even had some of her own doubts along the way (she is human after all), but she didn’t let these doubts overcome the positive thoughts that she had in her head about making her dreams come true. And whenever those negative voices started to creep up I’m sure that she just started thinking about how much she wanted those dreams to come true and those negative voices went back into the recesses of her mind. Akinosun knew what she wanted out of life and she wasn’t going to let negative voices stop her from making it happen.

And this was by no means an easy task. I went to college and graduated from school and it was difficult enough for me. Akinosun dreamed of graduating from college and she also had a bonus dream of becoming an Olympic athlete tacked on to that dream. But having that positive thought allowed her to become accountable for herself and the actions she needed to take in order to achieve her dreams. She knew that if she wanted to graduate from college that she had to study and get good grades. And she knew that if she wanted to become an Olympic athlete that she would have to physically push her body to places that it had never gone before. Positive thinker, saying a thought isn’t enough to make your dreams come true. You have to work towards it. But having that thought handy is the first step to making your dreams a reality because once you have your thought in your mind you too will know what things that you have to do in order to make your thoughts a reality.

Your thought doesn’t have to be something big like going to the Olympics. It can be as simple as believing that you’re a great person. If you say that thought enough and if you want that thought to become reality, soon enough your actions will start to shift and your world will become one that allows for those thoughts to manifest themselves.

Positive thinker, it is completely possible for you to have the life that you dream of, you just have to be brave enough to believe that you can have it. Once you believe that thought then you can start working towards your goals. And as you continue on your journey towards the actualization of these goals, you will also have this powerful belief to take a hold of whenever those negative thoughts start to creep into your mind. So make a goal positive thinker! Dream a dream! And one day that goal or that dream won’t be a goal or dream anymore. It will be your reality.

I also encourage you to embrace the following challenge…

“Choose one positive thought to embrace this week. Try ‘I’m awesome’ of ‘I can do it.’”

Practice makes perfect, and if you’re able to embrace this mantra for a week, soon enough you’ll be able to embrace it for two weeks and three weeks, and a month, and then the thought will become second nature to you. And once this happens, you’ll see that your dreams are completely within your reach!