Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(14)

When it came to their backyard dreams, the problem is that Sandra and Adrian put all their eggs into the motivation basket.





Motivation Is Unreliable


Motivation is often unreliable when it comes to home improvement. And it’s also unreliable with diets, exercise routines, creative projects, filing taxes, opening businesses, searching for jobs, planning conferences—self-improvement of all types. The Motivation Monkey’s traps are stealthy and numerous. They catch you whether you’re facing a big project or attempting to change your habits.

Here’s the unfortunate thing—most people believe motivation is the true engine of behavior change. Words like “rewards” and “incentives” get thrown around with such regularity that most people think you can create whatever habits you want if you find the right carrot to dangle in front of yourself. This kind of thinking is understandable, but it also happens to be wrong.

Yes, motivation is one of three elements that drives behavior. The problem is that motivation is often fickle, and this chapter digs deeper into the challenges it presents.

Motivation is like a party-animal friend. Great for a night out, but not someone you would rely on to pick you up from the airport. You must understand its role and its limitations, then pick behaviors that don’t rely on such a fickle friend.

In order to do that, we first have to break down the Motivation Monkey’s game trap by trap. Then we’ll learn how to navigate around them to get what we really want. No dangling of carrots or self-imposed guilt trips necessary.





1. MOTIVATION IS COMPLEX


Let’s start with the basics.

What is motivation?

Motivation is a desire to do a specific behavior (eat spinach tonight) or a general class of behaviors (eat vegetables and other healthy foods each night). Some psychologists talk about extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. No offense to all those psychologists, but I’ve found this to be a weak distinction that is not very helpful in the real world. In my own work, I focus on three sources of motivation: yourself (what you already want), a benefit or punishment you would receive by doing the action (the carrot and stick), and your context (e.g., all your friends are doing it). To help you visualize this, I created a little guy called the PAC Person. You’ll see him pop up again and again—it turns out that Person, Action, and Context are fundamental for understanding human behavior.





As the PAC Person graphics show, motivation can come from one of three places. First, motivation can come from inside a person: You already want to do the behavior. For example, most of us are motivated to look attractive. This is built into us as humans. Motivation can also come from a benefit or punishment associated with a behavior. Let’s talk about taxes. Most of us don’t wake up in the morning wanting to pay taxes, but there are punishments for not paying. That motivates us. Finally, motivation can come from our context (our current environment). Suppose you are at an art auction that supports a charity. If the cause is worthy and if people are drinking and if the auctioneer creates a lot of energy, all of this—the context (which is carefully designed)—will motivate you to pay a lot for a simple painting.

There also could be more than one source of motivation for doing a behavior. I look at these different motivations as forces pushing you toward or away from an action. Maybe it’s the desire to be accepted by a group, or maybe it’s the fear of physical pain. Maybe your motivations are moving you toward an action, or maybe they are moving you away. But motivations are always there, pushing you up and down—above the Action Line or below—depending on their strength at any given moment.

Sometimes the complexity of our motivations amounts to a psychological tug-of-war. For instance, Sandra and Adrian may have had competing motivations. They wanted to take a rest and enjoy their newly scrubbed house, but they also wanted to tackle the backyard and cross that project off their list. These competing motivations were driving them toward different behaviors.





Competing Motivations


Our friends may have also had conflicting motivations, which are opposing drives related to the same behavior. Conflicting motivations can be a source of psychic pain—“I want to eliminate refined sugar from my diet but, man, I want that chocolate cupcake.” These conflicts can seesaw depending on what’s happening around us.





Conflicting Motivations





Even more problematic is the fact that we’re blind to at least some of our motivation much of the time. We may not fully understand where the desire to eat a certain food is coming from. Do I really love the salty taste of popcorn, or does my daily popcorn habit stem from nostalgia for the days when my family and I used to eat it during movie night? Changing, invisible, competing, and conflicting motivations make this element of behavior hard to pin down and control. This makes us even more frustrated when we fail in our efforts to motivate ourselves or others to make lasting change.





2. THE MOTIVATION WAVE


Big spikes of motivation are awesome for doing really hard things—once.

Rescuing your child.

Quitting your job.

Throwing away all the junk food in your house.

Sprinting through the airport to catch a flight.

Attending your first AA meeting.