Grab a tea or coffee and a notebook. Forget about what you ‘should’ be doing for half an hour. Jot down what you would LOVE to do. Play the guitar, travel, write a book, change jobs. Next to each one of these come up with the smallest step you could take towards this goal: make it something specific and concrete and something small enough you could do it today if you wanted to. Now ask yourself: what’s stopping you?
Too big, too complicated, no time
Do you find yourself wishing you could do the thing you love? Or daydreaming about achieving something that seems too big and too complicated? Do you feel like you never have time for the things that you really want to do? It could be that you need to change the way you think about it.
I first wrote about the small steps method in 2012 when I published a book on time management. My partner and I wanted to buy a house, but we had no idea how we would manage it. I decided to break the process down into tiny, doable actions, and I ended up writing a book about the approach. The book came out before we bought our house, but the small steps method worked. A year later, we moved into our own home.
The Small Steps Method is inspired by:
- Susan Jeffers’ advice to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’
- the often-cited time management adage that you’re much more likely to do something if you schedule it and
- the concept of fractal planning – for our purposes, it means you can keep on breaking something down until you get to the smallest details.
What is a small step?
So, what do I mean by a small step? Well, you can take a goal and break it down into its component parts. You keep breaking it down until you get small enough. The first small steps on your list should be free or virtually free. Once you’ve done that, you’ll end up with small steps that:
- are concrete and specific – you’ll know whether you’ve done them
- you could do today if you wanted to.
What is a signpost?
Just like a real signpost, these metaphorical signposts are markers along the way to achieving your goal. They show you that way to go or reassure you that you’re on the right path. Signposts are bigger than small steps, but they can still be specific. It helps to visualise them. For example, if your goal is to write a book, imagine yourself halfway through writing it.
Ask yourself: “So what are the steps?”
Take the thing you’d love to do and keep asking yourself “so what are the steps?” until you know what the smallest steps are. That might be easy with something you’re not scared of! Say your goal is ‘learn the guitar’ (and that goal is within your comfort zone) you might decide the small steps are ‘research guitar teachers online this afternoon’, and ‘phone three guitar teachers on Monday morning’. But if the goal is either fear inducing or too general, you’re going to need to keep asking ‘so what are the steps?’ until you get to something you can do today.
What’s your first step?
The first answer that comes to mind is ‘well, anything you want it to be’. But one person’s small step is going to be huge for the next person, so we need to get more specific. That’s why you need this vital ingredient: YOU. Let’s take the guitar example again. We’re not after the small steps required to learn the guitar. We’re after the small steps it would take for you to learn the guitar, and that takes into account your context: how much time have you got? What sort of budget? How do you feel about guitar playing? How much do you know about it already?
It’s not enough to know (objectively) what you’d need to do to learn the guitar. Your small steps are about what it will take for you to learn the guitar – or do whatever it is you want to do.
We’re not all starting from the same place
If my goal was ‘run the marathon’ then I would be starting with the basics, quite a bit further back from someone who already went out jogging every morning. I need another goal first: get fit! My small step might be ‘research personal trainers on Saturday’ or ‘pick up a leaflet about swimming times on my way home from work today.’ For someone who’s already running, their small step might be ‘download training programme from the London marathon website this evening’. These small steps are all concrete, specific, and small enough to do today, but they’ve got to start with YOU. Start where you are.
Let go of ‘dreams’ that aren’t serving you
Making a goal concrete like this enables you to confront it. You might have been holding on to a dream that actually when you look at it face on, you’ve grown out of. That allows you to say goodbye, without guilt, to whatever it is. This is a good thing, because you’ll feel a sense of relief and it makes room for the things you really want to do.
Research
One thing that holds us back is not knowing enough about the thing we want to do, OR not knowing enough about one of the steps. This can feel like procrastination but it’s actually down to lack of research time. Depending on the goal, it may be that going on a short course will teach you the basics so you start to get a feel for the steps, or that your first step is a visit to the library, or an hour spent researching online.
Lots of different kinds of research
If your first small steps are about research, remember that there are lots of different kinds of research and one may be more suitable than another. These include:
- Library research,
- Museum visits,
- Networking groups,
- Searching online,
- Short courses,
- Talks,
- Training events.
Your aim is to gather enough information, and to organise it, so that you can work out what the small steps are. If in doubt, find someone who has done it before.
Asking for recommendations
You might also need to ask for recommendations. If so, according to Persuasion by Robert Cialdini you’ll get better quality results if you ask someone specific for help, rather than putting out a general call. According to Connected by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, you’ll also be better off asking for recommendations from friends of friends. This because you’re already tapped into your own network, so have a similar knowledge base, whereas friends of friends will be in other networks, so will have access to information that you don’t.
Visualise it and work backwards
Say you want to write and publish a novel. What do you see when you visualise the end results? Do you imagine yourself winning a big prize to literary acclaim? Or do you imagine yourself viewing the sales reports from your publishing business? Or reading to a roomful of avid fans? It can help to work backwards from the final visualisation to work out the signposts and the small steps.
What would the stages be along the way for YOU? Keep imagining this, until you get to something you could realistically achieve in the next few weeks: say, commit to writing in a regular place at a regular time, or find and enrol on a writing course. (If visualisation doesn’t come naturally to you then write these down instead.) Now work out what the small steps would be to the first of these signposts.
What don’t you know about yet?
If you don’t have a clear idea of what the small steps would be, then this visualisation exercise still helps. Picture the final stage of the goal: giving a presentation at a conference, playing guitar round the campfire with your kids, harvesting your own vegetables, welcoming your first customers into your shop. Then ask yourself which stages or steps you can’t identify – which aspects don’t know you about yet? That’s what your research is going to be about.
Here are some actions you could take today:
- Spend your coffee break writing down the thing you want to achieve and why.
- Work out what the first small steps are towards your goal. Remember these are free or virtually free, concrete and specific and small enough to do today. They should be low commitment or low risk at first.
- Start to take these small steps even if you don’t know what’s going to happen next.
Here are some actions you could schedule over the next few weeks:
- Workout what the signposts are likely to be along the way.
- Do some research so you know a bit more about the thing you want to achieve. Remember that what you think is procrastination could be down to lack of research.
- Make time to review your plan regularly so you can introduce more small steps. The more information you gather, the easier it will be to work these out.
- Find and connect with at least one person who’s done it before.
If you like this post why not read, 12 ways to re-connect with you or 17 ways to build your confidence and self-esteem.
Bio
Louise Tondeur is a freelance writer and tutor, novelist and short story writer. You can check out her author website here www.louisetondeur.co.uk/blog. She blogs about finding time to write here. www.smallstepsguide.co.uk.
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash.
