General

You may already know what things you could do and should do to be a better partner, parent, or friend. But just because you know what to do and have decided to do it, doesn’t mean that you’ll actually do it.

In this post, you’ll learn why you don’t always do the things you intelligently decide you should do to make your relationships better, and how you can make your good intentions succeed by deliberately positioning them for success.

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The marketing industry knows something most consumers don’t: our good intentions are far more fragile than we think. Stella, a fictional AI robot created by the marketing industry, shows a retail business how to profit from its customers’ predictable failure to follow through. From mail in rebates to extended warranties, Stella reveals how businesses boost sales and profits by counting on their customers to be clueless about their own follow through failures.

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Follow through strategies work like a charm but only if you use them. The problem is, intending to use them consistently is the one good intention you can’t follow through on without relying on willpower.

Follow through strategies are amazingly effective tools that allow you to do a much better job of following through on your intentions. But when it comes to following through on the intention to use these tools, I’m afraid you have to figure out on your own how to make yourself use them.

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This post explains how you can use your natural laziness to make your intentions more effective.

We humans are wired to take the path of least resistance. You can actually use this to your advantage. Instead of relying on willpower to resist the temptation to do the “wrong” thing, youu can deliberately make it less convenient to do the “wrong” thing. Even a small obstacle — a speed bump — can help keep an intention in the driver’s seat where it belongs.

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A good idea that suddenly pops into your mind can act like an intention on fire. The problem is, spur-of-the-moment intentions also tend to cool rather quickly – so quickly that unless you act on them right away, they’re likely to be gone before you know it.

The “Strike While the Iron is Hot” strategy is about keeping a spur-of-the-moment intention alive by taking tangible action right away. The action should either move you closer to implementing the intention, or in the case of an intention that you’re not sure is a keeper, to buy you more time so you can carefully consider whether the intention is worth implementing.

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For decades, I’ve focused on helping people dramatically improve their ability to follow through on their good intentions all the time. But I’ve learned that not everyone chooses to invest the time and effort required to acquire the knowledge, skills, mindset, and habits to follow through better consistently. So, I’ve begun to think that there’s a need for Follow Through Urgent Care – help for people who don’t choose to make the investment but need help overcoming a particular follow through challenge that’s staring them right in the face right now. I’ve just started developing the Follow Through Urgent Care concept and look forward to sharing more in the future.

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New Year’s resolutions often fail because we make big promises without being realistic about what it will take to keep them. Steve reminds us to always do “due diligence” before making a New Year’s resolution, and to treat New Year’s resolutions as solemn promises that we can only keep by anticipating obstacles and using follow-through strategies to overcome them.

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Although artificial intelligence is often feared as a potentially dehumanizing force, Steve has a different take. He recently published an article elsewhere that argues that AI may someday enable us to do a better job of following through on our own good intentions. You can read the article here and decide for yourself.

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In this post, Steve takes a break from writing about how to follow through to remind us why we often don’t follow through. He does it in part with a simple cartoon that illustrates why it’s no wonder that we do such a lousy job of acting in accord with our own good intentions.

Steve’s message is that poor follow through isn’t exactly our fault. It’s the result of the mixed-up way we’re wired.

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I was reminded recently about a topic that U.K. business expert Chris Cooper and I wrote about in the book, The Power to Get Things Done (Whether You Feel Like It or Not). Although the book was written ten years ago primarily for self-employed people who face unique follow through challenges, I think Chapter 2 of the book speaks to everyone who’s faced with having to do work they absolutely hate doing.

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