Baby Steps

We’re about 2 months into the new year – about 1/6 of the way along. How is your sense of accomplishment? Are you getting things done and crossed off your list? Do you feel like you’re moving in the right direction?

Or do you feel stuck, frustrated and/or stalled out? If so, there may be a very simple reason – your goals could be too big.

Often, once we figure out what we want to achieve, we want to accomplish it yesterday! So we bite off big chunks of tasks to be done and try to speed through the process. Unfortunately that route can backfire because when we’re impatient and try to rush things they can end up being done haphazardly. At that point things have a way of blowing up in our face or just falling apart. Then it’s easy to get discouraged and feel defeated.

A helpful technique is to break tasks down into small bites that can be accomplished quickly and well. That can give a sense of success fairly easily and then we can tackle more steps – also effectively. I’ll give an example.

No – I’ll declutter my entire house this weekend. I haven’t gone through things in the past 5 years and there’s stuff everywhere! I should be able to get it done in a couple of days.

Yes – The house needs to be decluttered. I’d love to get it all done this weekend but that’s probably not realistic. Instead, I’ll tackle the garage this weekend – and get the family to help. We should be able to finish in a couple of hours and we can go to a movie after. Next weekend we’ll start on the closets.

The second process will undoubtedly take longer but will be much more doable and will prevent any head-banging-against-the-wall-frustration. After all, the point is to get the clutter cleared out while keeping your sanity. So break things down into baby steps – enough small steps will add up to some big strides!