What’s The Smallest Step?

A small step still counts as a step. Even a baby’s smallest step is a cause for celebration for his or her parents. Every journey starts by taking a single step outside your door. The same is true for making your dreams come true.

Your dreams are big and scary. It’s hard to act on them when you have so much that must be done to get there. Becoming overwhelmed and paralyzed is a real challenge.

The key to avoiding overwhelm is to start small and gradually work your way towards larger and more difficult things.

Instead of looking at your goal as a whole,

• break it into pieces.
• look at each smaller goal separately.
• make an action plan with each goal individually.
• turn the action plan into a to-do list for just that goal.

Are you still feeling overwhelmed??Break it down more. Take the first subgoal and make it into several mini-goals, each with its own task list. Repeat this until you’ve broken it down into bite-size, manageable chunks.

What you have now are a series of baby steps. They might not seem like much individually, but together they add up to reaching your goal and making your dreams come true.?Even a baby step is still a step!

Once you have these plans created, put them in order, from the first to the last, and store them somewhere safe. Take out the first plan. Only the first plan. This is important to remember if you don’t want to get overwhelmed. The rest of the plans don’t exist for now; only the first one does.

You should have before you a short list of small steps you can take. Each one should encompass only one action. If you need more than that to finish the step, you might want to break the plan down further before proceeding.

Find something - a sheet of paper or a book will do - and cover the plan, leaving only the first step showing.?This is all that exists right now. Nothing else needs to be done; there aren’t 500 more steps between you and your goal. All that matters is this one, simple step. It’s the smallest step.

This is going to be your first baby step. Complete this step. Congratulations! You’ve started your journey.

Now mark it off the list. Move the cover down to reveal the next step. Repeat.