5 Simple Steps to Benefit from the Beauty of Baby Steps
Posted on October 27, 2010 by Derek Sleater Cook, One of Thousands of ADD ADHD Coaches on Noomii.
How do you achieve your goal, even when you don't feel like it? When your motivation seems non-existent, how do you manage to muster up motivation?
Most of us have at least one task or goal that just seems to keep dragging on from week to week, month to month, and even year to year. So what is that all about? “What’s my problem?” I might ask myself.
There could be a plethora of reasons why you don’t do what you want to do and do it when you say you’re going to do it. My purpose here is not to delve into all of the reasons “why” which may or may not have a need for therapy. I am not a therapist. I am a life coach who helps empower (you really have to empower yourself!) people to crystalize their vision, make a strategic plan, discover their passion to take action, and develop their SuperPowerz to Get Results.
So here’s today’s simple tip:
Just BEGIN! Get STARTED! Benefit from the Beauty of BABY STEPS!
Let me preface by saying this is not anything that you haven’t heard of before. This is not my idea. We’ve all heard it said many times by many people. My intent is to be counted among those who can witness that it works!
Sometimes we feel like we need to get motivated. I understand-I feel that way all the time. I encourage you to discover ways that can help you get motivated to take action when you encounter those moments of “Stuckedness!” (Like my new word?) For me, music is very key to move past those moments and take the action necessary. AND, it is often only an enhancement that can increase my chances of beginning. The bottom line is that I have to JUST START doing the task!
And guess what happens? I almost always REALLY get motivated and sometimes even enjoy doing a necessary task to achieve my goal that isn’t very fun.
So here’s the part of today’s blog that is my personal and unique contribution to this age-old wisdom. I’d like to share a simple example that I hope will illustrate how you can apply this common knowledge to your life and encounter an uncommon success!
Do you always feel excited to exert great effort, sweat, and be short of breath for an extended period of time in doing cardiovascular exercise when you first put on your workout clothes at home or the gym? Do you EVER feel excited to do it? If not, you’re not alone. Healthy, fit, and fabulous-bodied people are not only those who are ALWAYS motivated!
For me, it is a rare thing to be excited before I start. In fact, the first five minutes are a crazy mental battle where I find myself arguing with my “higher self” about how I have better things to do and this is not really what I want to be doing right now. Acknowledging this experience of rarely feeling the motivation at the onset was the first step to resolving the problem.
I also figured out that after that first five minutes (time may be different for you-you’ll have to discover what works), I felt much more motivated to continue. Sometimes I might even think I could do 30 minutes of cardio instead of the 20 minutes that I set on the machine. “Wow, what a change in feelings and thoughts,” I would say to myself. Recognizing the value of pushing through the negative arguments with myself as I got my blood pumping and built up some minutes towards my goal for the session, got me to a much better place to make a decision I would be happy with later on.
At this point, I often decide that I will just do five more minutes. It seemed so reasonable because I was already halfway there. I would then simply say, “I’ll just do five more minutes.” At that next checkpoint of ten minutes, I couldn’t help but do the math and realize I was already halfway done with my original goal of twenty minutes…and I usually kept ongoing. At 15 minutes, I would sometimes find myself thinking that I’m halfway to 30 minutes and start readjusting my expectation to exceed the original goal of just 20. When I got to 20 minutes and reached my goal, I could stop and feel great, do just one more minute to prove to myself that my fitness dream is bigger and more powerful than my body’s pain or my mind’s negativity. And sometimes, I would go on and do a full 30 minutes and experience how amazing I am on any given day; at any given moment!
5 Simple Steps to Benefit from the Beauty of Baby Steps
1) Just get started and take action (just a Baby Step) towards your goal regardless of how you feel at the moment.
2) Commit to reaching your “DECISION POINT” before deciding whether you will complete the entire task or not. You must be willing to discover just how much you have to do to reach YOUR “Decision Point” where you can make a better decision that is consistent with your dream and what you really want.
3) Break down your task into a bite-size piece, Benefit from the Beauty of Baby Steps! Create checkpoints that will allow you to “tease” yourself, if you will, into doing just a little bit more, and a little bit more, until voila, you’ve achieved your goal and maybe even exceeded your expectation-even on a day when, as is common for me, you didn’t want to do anything at all!
4) Connect your LOVE for your Dream to the goal at hand.
5) Utilize your SuperPowerz to Get Result!
