In order to design successful habits and change your behaviors, you should do three things.

• Stop judging yourself.

• Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors.

• Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward.

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.

And that’s how habit formation works. If you start with a big behavior that’s hard to do, the design is unstable; it’s like a large plant with shallow roots. When a storm comes into your life, your big habit is at risk. However, a habit that is easy to do can weather a storm like flexible sprouts, and it can then grow deeper and stronger roots.

Getting relief from physical, emotional, or psychological discomfort is also a positive experience. It’s three a.m. and you are having another bout of insomnia. You’re restless and thinking about work. There’s a big deadline tomorrow, and everyone is rushing to get a project out the door. You’re the manager, so you’ve got to keep things moving. And as you lie there awake, you’re worried that there will be a productivity bottleneck in your inbox tomorrow morning. The thought of it makes you anxious. So you roll over, grab your phone off the nightstand, and check your e-mail. Whew, nothing urgent. No need to respond to anything. You feel relieved. This is a positive experience that you’ll seek the next time you wake up in the middle of the night. You check your inbox and once again you feel relief. And then checking your e-mail will start becoming a habit. During some of my corporate speaking events, I’ve asked audiences if this sounds familiar. At times, well over 30 percent have raised their hands and acknowledged this habit. Little did they know that relief was the cause.

A much better approach is to design the garden (habits) you want. You identify what vegetables and flowers you’d love to have in your garden (motivation), you choose plants you can easily support (ability), and you consider which spot in the yard is best for each plant (finding a place in your routine).

It takes a bit of planning and care in the beginning to get those delicate little sprouts up and out of the ground, but you’ve made sure the roots are strong by celebrating your tiny successes. Soon it’s time to let your rooted habits do their natural thing—grow bigger.