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.

Once Juni understood a key maxim of Behavior Design—simplicity changes behavior—she refocused her personal efforts to create a constellation of habits, tiny in size but big on impact, that helped her to kick her sugar habit for good.

Behavior Design recognizes this reality: A key to lasting change is matching yourself with behaviors that you want to do. In your quest to exercise daily, for example, you’ll find plenty of options. If streaming Beyoncé and dancing for five minutes while you make breakfast is the exercise you want to do, then make dancing a daily habit. And forget about the treadmill at the gym.

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.

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.