One mistake we often make is putting all our eggs in the motivation basket.

Motivation is often unreliable for home improvement and self–improvement topics like diets, exercise routines, job–hunting, and opening businesses

Motivation alone is not the true engine of behaviour change

Motivation is one of the three elements that drive behaviour. However, motivation is not enough due to the following reasons:

• Motivation is complex: There are three sources of motivation; what you already want, the benefit or punishment you’ll receive from doing the action, and your context. These sources, often classified as Person, Action and Context, are fundamental to identifying human behaviour, and motivation can come from one or more of these sources. This complexity of our motivations can result in an emotional tug of war

• The motivation wave: When motivation surges, you can do hard behaviours. However, high levels of motivation are unsustainable

• Motivation fluctuation: Motivations are not stable; they shift in predictable and unpredictable ways. These shifts make you unable to take full control of your motivation

• Motivating towards an abstraction doesn’t yield results: People often believe that motivating themselves towards an aspiration will lead to a lasting change so they focus on aspirations and motivations. However, that combo doesn’t work. Dreams and aspirations are good things, but investing time and energy to motivate ourselves towards abstraction is wrong

• Motivation is not the winning ticket for long–term change: If you focus only on motivation when building a habit, you ignore two key components that drive behaviour. This is wrong because motivation alone doesn’t get you there.

While motivation is key in behaviour design, it could also be a trap. To outsmart it, one needs to:

• Clarify the aspirations

• Explore behaviour options

• Match with specific behaviours