HelpKidsChange Post

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Some History and Context to Help You Benefit Even More From the MotivAider

If you've only been exposed to the MotivAider as a tool for helping children make behavioral changes, you might be surprised by how—and how long ago—the MotivAider got its start. And you might be even more surprised by the many uses it has outside the field of education.

When I invented the MotivAider way back in the early 1980's, I referred to it as an "intention arousing device." I conceived of it as a means to automatically keep a person's attention focused on any chosen intention. I was convinced—and still am—that by simply keeping a chosen good intention at the top of a person's mind, you can dramatically improve a person's ability to behave in accord with that intention.

The MotivAider made its debut in the late 1980's in the healthcare field. Today there are more MotivAiders in education than in any other field, but MotivAiders are used in healthcare organizations like the Mayo Clinic, by businesses, athletes, and by tens of thousands of people of all ages in over 50 countries to make a nearly endless variety of desired changes in behavior and habits.

You might be wondering how this simple device could possibly be used for so many different purposes. The reason is, the MotivAider addresses a fundamental problem in the design of the human mind that prevents us from consistently doing what we intend to do. Amazingly, the mind actually has no built-in mechanism to keep good intentions on the front burner. So while the mind does a magnificent job of enabling us to figure out what we should do, it often does a lousy job of making sure that we'll actually do it. For adults as well as for children, good intentions simply get lost in the shuffle. And that's why we often don't follow through.

Yes, the MotivAider is a tool that helps kids make behavioral changes. But it's more than that. And understanding the more might help you be even more effective in using the MotivAider. You can certainly achieve great results without knowing a thing about the MotivAider's history or the theory behind the device and the simple behavior change method that makes it work. But placing the MotivAider in a broader context may help you do an even better job of spotting opportunities to use this tool to solve problems that might otherwise go unsolved.

So if/whenever you have the time and interest, consider taking a leisurely stroll around our website. Hopefully you'll come away with a deeper sense of what the MotivAider does, how it does it, why it does it, and why it works.

And there's no place to start like HOME.

—Steve Levinson, Ph.D., Inventor of the MotivAider