Over the last few weeks, I’ve been speaking with one of my coaching clients about how hard it is to make a change.
If you are anything like the two of us, then you probably love to think about the change you want to make…you enjoy imagining what it could be like…you relish in the ideas of the change.
But, (again, if you’re anything like me and this client), actually taking steps toward the change feels daunting. Nearly impossible, really.
The motivation and excitement are there when playing with the idea of the change. However, they seem to completely evaporate when it comes time to take action.
This is something we want, right? It’s not as if we’re trying to implement something we really don’t want to do. If that was the case, it’d be easier to justify why we’re having a hard time actually doing it. But, if this is something we want, if this is a change we are motivated to make in our lives, why is it so difficult to move forward?
For one thing, we often try to swallow the thing whole.
We want the change to happen now. We want the project to be completed. We want the new habit to be formed.
We want it to be easy. We want the transition from here to there to be seamless and streamlined.
As you probably know, that isn’t usually how it works. And, it’s overwhelming to try to do it all at once. It doesn’t feel easy. It doesn’t feel streamlined. Where do we even begin?
This is the conversation my client and I had about the new habit he wants to develop.
We started to break it down. I asked him, “What is the smallest step you can take today to move this forward?”
Because it’s a journey of steps that moves us toward change. Even when some of those steps may feel like giant leaps, sometimes we have to start with the very smallest shuffle.
"What is the smallest step you can take today to move this forward?"
And then we can take another small shuffle forward. And another.
But if we try to move from where we are now to the change we’re trying to implement all at once, chances are we’ll feel overwhelmed and our desired goal (the change) will feel entirely out of reach.
And that’s because it is. Until we move ourselves forward, bit by bit, until that which once felt impossibly out of reach becomes graspable.
You might have suspected by this point, but often, this doesn’t just apply to making a change. This one small step at a time approach is something that can help us move forward with all sorts of things.
This is something I’ve had to remind myself of constantly during my PhD. Even right now, I’m working on a few projects that, when I step back and look at them as a whole, feel big and unfathomably complex.
I have to ritualize their dissection; I pick apart the small tasks that will move forward this one piece of the much larger project. I start with one small task. If that still feels too daunting, I break it down further.
"...it's step by manageable step that moves us forward."
One Small 5-Minute Step
Another way you could ask this is, “If I just committed five minutes to this today, what could I do?”
(Instead of five minutes, maybe it’s 10 or 20 minutes, but you get the picture.)
Maybe the project as a whole requires hours and hours of work. But those hours and hours are made up of five minutes and ten minutes and so on.
Again, it’s step by manageable step that moves us forward.
So, I suppose I’ll ask you, for whatever you’re grappling with today, what is one small step you can take (the smallest, simplest step you can think of) to move forward?
What small step can you commit to today?
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