Can You Beat the Odds Against Keeping a New Year's Resolution?

Dec. 30, 2011 - PRLog -- If you keep making and breaking New Year's resolutions, you're in good company. An estimated 80% or more of resolutions bite the dust.

Clinical psychologist, author and inventor, Dr. Steve Levinson, would like to help you beat the odds this year. He's developed a free online tool that's designed to help people follow through on their own good intentions. "How to Develop a Follow Through Plan" is a Flash-based educational tutorial that takes users step by step through the process of positioning any chosen good intention for success.

Levinson has spent over a quarter of a century helping people follow through on their own good intentions. In addition to teaming up with executive coach, Pete Greider, to write the critically-acclaimed book, "Following Through: A Revolutionary New Model for Finishing Whatever You Start," he is the inventor of the MotivAider®, a remarkably simple personal electronic device that helps people of all ages follow through on making desired changes in their behavior and habits. The MotivAider®, which is manufactured and marketed by Behavioral Dynamics, Inc.,  has helped thousands of people in over 40 countries achieve a wide variety of life-improving changes.

Levinson is convinced that it's not exactly our fault that our good intentions often crash and burn. "Despite it's awesome capabilities, the human mind is rather poorly wired for follow through, " he says. "It does a great job of allowing us to intelligently figure out all kinds of ways we could improve our lives. But, amazingly, it does a really lousy job of connecting our intelligent decisions to our behavior. The result is that we often find ourselves truly intending to do one thing and yet actually doing another."  

A key to following through, Levinson believes, is understanding the mixed-up way the mind treats good intentions. "For example, people commonly make the mistake of assuming that if they have a good  reason, like staying healthy, to make a certain change, that good reason will motivate them to actually make the change," he explains. "As irresistibly logical as that may be, the mind just doesn't work that way. A good reason is often just not good enough. Following through requires a truly compelling reason - one that you can really feel in your gut - one that shouts 'Do it!'"

Levinson says the new online tool, like the MotivAider® and his book, is designed to help people work around the mind's faulty wiring so that they can do a better job of following through. "We plan to improve and expand this tool based on user feedback," he says.

You can try out "How to Develop a Follow Through Plan" at http://habitchange.com/docn/followthroughplan/index.html.

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Behavioral Dynamics, Inc. is a proudly small and highly focused Minnesota firm that was founded in 1987 to develop, manufacture and market the MotivAider(R) and support its users worldwide.