The Importance Of Small Steps For Big Goals
What’s the importance of small steps?
Well, how is your New Year’s resolution going?
Have you given up on your health and fitness goals by now like the majority of people who make New Year’s resolutions do by the time February rolls around? It’ll be no surprise if the answer is a resounding “yes” because very few people successfully alter their behavior or replace an old routine with a new one.
Without getting into the science, much of the failure can be attributed to the fact that humans are hardwired to resist change. While the brain plays a considerable role in the effectuation of change, or lack thereof, what also doesn’t help is that many of the goals that people make around building new habits and modifying behavior are too ambitious because they think that overnight they can completely overhaul the ingrained rituals and habits they’ve become accustomed to over the course of months and years, even decades. What follows next with people wanting change to happen fast is the immediate switch from doing something they seldom or never do to doing it all the time, which then produces discomfort and inconvenience that more often than not hastens quitting.
Seeing that friction is what often causes people to give up a goal and keep intact the habit or behavior they sought to change, the reduction of discomfort is the key to successful habit formation and behavior modification. And that’s where the importance of small steps can be observed, as a small step is nothing more than a part of the larger goal broken down into micro-actions that are so easy to do that they don’t create a sense of overwhelm or any other psychological resistance that would otherwise be met when a goal is attacked with a full-frontal assault, as is the case when attempting to change your entire life in a single bound.
The advantage of small steps is that they help you ease into whatever new habit or behavior you’re trying to establish without the brain picking up on the fact that change is occurring, which results in little, if any, discomfort or inconvenience felt.
So how do you take a small step?
Easy!
All you do is make one tiny change and do it repeatedly. Once you can consistently carry out that itty-bitty change, build on it and make the next one. By making a series of incremental changes one after the other, you get closer to your overall goal so by the time you get there, it requires less intentional effort to perform and comes about naturally, thus increasing the likelihood of the new habit or behavior sticking.
With this in mind, let’s turn to this woman who I recently video-chatted with that ordinarily doesn’t go to the gym but made it her goal to start going 5x per week. As circumstances would have it, she was only able to make it to the gym once. Not surprisingly, she felt like a failure for falling far short of her goal. To that end, I advised her that although her intentions were good, she set herself up for disappointment with her goal because it strayed too far from her current habits. Moreover, with each disappointment she felt from not reaching her hard and fast number of going to the gym 5x per week, she was more than likely going to eventually throw in the towel.
So what should she have done?
That’s easy!
As I said above, it’s all about making a tiny change.
So instead of aiming for a big change, that of going to the gym 5x per week, this totally anonymous person whose identity I won’t reveal should’ve made it her goal to go to the gym only once per week. Making it to the gym once every seven days is easily feasible for Malinda, so that would’ve set Malinda up for a sense of accomplishment, with Malinda making it to the gym any more than that being a bonus that could further boost Malinda’s feeling of having done something impressive. Once a month went by and Malinda built up the habit of making it to the gym once per week no matter what’s going on in her life, then Malinda could add one more day to the mix. The process of slowly adding gym days and allowing time for the establishment of a routine would continue until this totally anonymous person reached her total desired number of gym days for the week.
Want another example of a small step?
Okay, I had a phone conversation a while ago with an Instagram follower who was having difficulty resuming her fit lifestyle.1In display of my international reach as a trainer of world renown, this person was in the far, faaaaaaaaaarrrrr away land of Canada. She just couldn’t find the spark to stop eating so much and begin working out again after the interruption to her routine that was brought on by the COVID-19 quarantine and social distance restrictions.
Given what you’ve read thus far, can you guess what my advice was?
Yup, that she should worry about getting over the molehills before trying to conquer the mountain.
That’s right, instead of her immediately trying to do all the things she was doing when she originally left off, she should do things in piecemeal, as the completion of one task would help build momentum for the next thing for her to tackle to bring her closer to where she wanted to get back to.
As such, it was suggested that she spend as much time as needed working on her nutrition alone. Because proper nutrition trumps exercise when it comes to weight management, her getting that situated first would get her on the path to her former weight even if she never gets the desire to ever work out again. Once she got back on the ball with logging and tracking her food in however many days or weeks it took, she could then begin working on incorporating activity back into her life, with her going for a daily walk around her block for 10 minutes, 5 minutes in one direction and 5 minutes in the other. That 10 minutes would then become 15…then 20…then *BOOM!!!* she’s suddenly walking 30 or more minutes with no problem. After that, she could then add one or two training days to her schedule for maybe 10 or 20 minutes per. Then she’d gradually increase the number of training days and their length until she was working out for the same number of days and time she was before she stopped.
Doing it in the illustrated manner is a lot more feasible than becoming a gym warrior and paragon of nutrition overnight. And that’s what you should do in almost any situation. So if you can’t find the time to weigh and track your food intake for the entire day, then only worry about weighing and tracking one meal. From there, go to two. Etcetera. Another is if you drink 4 cans of soda every day and want to cut down. In that case, start by limiting yourself to 3 cans of soda for a number of weeks and then go to 2 cans. Before you know it, you’ll get down to drinking only one can of soda per day.
Glossary: COVID-19, exercise, February, fitness, goal, gym, personal trainer, work out
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