The relaxing of your will, however desperate, allows life to proceed. It may not go according to your plan, but whatever it makes will be more secure and ultimately more satisfying that anything you could force into existence. Such are the lessons of a dark night.

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—selfimprovement 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.

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.

In Behavior Design, we’ve named this temporary surge in motivation the Motivation Wave. I’m sure you’ve experienced this before: Your motivation crested, then came crashing down. And maybe you blamed yourself for not sustaining it. You’re not to blame. This is how motivation works in our lives.

Habit 5 is powerful because it is right in the middle of your Circle of Influence. Many factors in interdependent situations are in your Circle of Concern—problems, disagreements, circumstances, other people’s behavior. And if you focus your energies out there, you deplete them with little positive results. But you can always seek first to understand. That’s something that’s within your control.