7 ways to keep your New Year's resolutions

New Year's Eve is a time of new beginnings. It's the time to shut the door on the mistakes of old and vow to do better next year. Unfortunately, whether it's getting finances in better shape, losing weight or quitting a smoking habit, few New Year's resolutions make it through February.

Indeed, a study by the authors of a book on behavioral change found that 98% of those who made New Year's resolutions failed to change their bad behaviors. The problem isn't willpower, said Joseph Grenny, the best-selling co-author of "Change Anything." It's really that the deck is stacked against change. Your habits, friends and even the television shows you watch, are likely to encourage the status quo.

Few people understand the multitude of factors that hold us back from changing behaviors so we imagine that the problem is simply a lack of willpower, he added. In fact, what's usually lacking are the skills to identify and remove the hurdles that trip us up.

Unless you want to live up to those "never change" yearbook cliches, it's time to take a look at seven ways to beat the odds and keep your New Year's resolutions.

1. Baby steps

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[jeanmarietodd]

Nice start, at least, but I'm not clicking through 8 pages to get to the end, sorry. How about a little more meat on one page, or a single-page-view option? Thanks.

[hankblank]

Great thoughts. Here are some New Year's Resolutions Everyone Can Keep.

http://hankblank.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/2012-new-years-resolutions-everyone-can-keep/

Take care.

Hank Blank
www.hankblank.com

[MotivAider]

The biggest problem with following through on New Year's resolutions or on any good intention is that the normal human mind isn't wired particularly well for follow through. Despite its awesome capabilities, amazingly there's no good mechanism for seeing to it that the intelligent decisions we're able to make about what we "should do" will actually drive our behavior. We often truly intend to do one thing while actually doing another.

A clinical psychologist, author and inventor who focuses on helping people follow through on their own good intentions, I'm convinced that accepting the mind's faulty wiring is a key to doing a better job of following through. We accomplish nothing, for example, by persisting in expecting the good reasons that motivate to us to decide to make a certain change to also motivate us to actually make the change. As logical an assumption as that may be, the mind just doesn't work that way.

I'm working on developing a free online educational tool that's designed to help users work around the mind's faulty wiring and position any chosen good intention for success. Although it's a work in progress that I'm planning to improve and expand, it's now available to try at http://myplan.followingthrough.org.

[randomites]

Best way to "keep your New Year's resolutions"? Don't make any.

[spartanu1978]

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