Every year, many thousands of people resolve to live more healthily, work more effectively or take more control of their lives. If you are one of them, you may recognise the pattern in which a strong start is often followed by a rapid relapse. To reassure you: not because you lack willpower and not because you are lazy. Your good intentions often come to nothing because you want to change your behaviour without knowing what drives that behaviour.
You keep fighting against yourself
Behaviour is the visible consequence of your invisible drivers. Even behaviour that you yourself experience as awkward, inefficient or limiting serves a purpose. Procrastination, for instance, can offer you safety. If you always avoid conflict, mutual harmony is preserved. And if you hold on to fixed routines, you keep control. But what it comes down to is this: if you are not aware of your drivers, you keep fighting against yourself. Then you will never change.
Every person has their own personal drivers
Only when your behaviour connects with what drives you from within does the road to lasting change open up. In fact: as soon as people have sharp insight into their drivers, their behaviour often develops almost by itself. They then no longer have to motivate themselves constantly. Only: every person has their own personal drivers. That is why a single universal approach to achieving behavioural change does not work either.
Tension always beats motivation
On top of that, many development programmes focus solely on what you should do differently. They tell you that you should show more initiative, for example. That you should collaborate better or that you should be more assertive. But when you display new behaviour that clashes with your personal drivers, tension arises. And tension always beats motivation. That is when you hear statements such as: ’This does not suit me’, ’I cannot keep this up’ and ’I keep falling back into my old pattern’.
You do not have to work harder
If you genuinely want to change, you do not have to work harder. That does not help. Gaining more insight into yourself does help. Discover, for instance, what gives you a boost of energy and in which situations you lose energy. Discover too how others see you. Get to know their drivers as well. Once that insight is there, you are able to develop behaviour that is as durable as it is successful. Individually, within a team and across an organisation.
Conclusion
If you want to get the best out of yourself in 2026: examine your drivers. Because they determine your behaviour, and your behaviour determines the result. Does that interest you? Then getting to know the seven-colour theory of MyDrives is a good resolution at any moment of the year.
Rather experience for yourself what drives you?
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