I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s excited about the idea of taking baby steps. Most of us want faster and bigger results. We want immediate gratification. We want to stop or start a habit in 21 days—preferably less. We want to overhaul entire areas of our lives by the end of the month. As soon as we think about something we want to accomplish—a project or a goal—we feel like we’re already behind schedule and disappointed it hasn’t yet come to fruition.
We’re impatient. And easily distracted. Not to mention overscheduled and stressed out.
Never mind that our unrealistic expectations keep producing the same unsatisfying results. Our inner voice insists we need to do—we should be able to do—so much more than take baby steps. Baby steps are just not enough.
Well, baby steps are more than enough. If you take them.
Go Back to Start. Do Not Pass Go.
Like most of us, you probably have a habit you’ve made more than a couple of unsuccessful attempts to change, maybe over a span of years or even decades. When you repeatedly try to change a habit (make a different choice) and fail, you don’t simply remain stuck in place. You actually end up worse off than you were before.
We tend to use our lack of success as evidence that there’s something wrong with us. Perhaps we have less willpower or self-control than other people. Or maybe we’re sabotaging ourselves. Or we don’t really want to change. We think the problem is us rather than the way we’re going about things.
The problem is that the more often you say you’re going to do something and don’t do it, the more you persuade your brain not to take you seriously when it comes to changing your behavior. Those multiple failed attempts reinforce the mental model your brain maintains. As a result, the status quo becomes even more entrenched, which makes it that much harder to change the next time you try.
Attempting to accomplish too much too soon is a recipe for failure because the chance of succeeding is miniscule at best. When you try to do too much or too many things at the same time, you’re giving yourself many opportunities to fail. Instead, you need to give yourself more opportunities to succeed.
Opportunities to Succeed
Taking baby steps puts you in a much better position to succeed. You can see your progress and build on your success. For one thing, it’s easier to take baby steps than it is to run sprints or leap tall buildings in a single bound. For another, it’s easier to add to the foundation you’ve built—no matter how close to the ground it may be—than it is to keep failing and having to start over again.
If you want to put a morning routine into place that includes a sequence of steps, pick one of them to start with. Don’t add anything else until the first one has become a habit. There’s no formula to determine how long it will take before a behavior becomes a habit. You’ll know when it happens because you’ll find yourself doing it automatically without having to remind yourself, and if you forget, a nagging inner voice will remind you to do it. Then you can add the second step. As you proceed building your routine, you’re likely to discover that it takes less and less time for the additional steps to fall into place.
If there’s a project you want to undertake that feels overwhelming, break it down into baby steps. When I was writing fiction many years ago, every time I sat down at my desk I felt like I was writing the entire novel. It was so daunting that I got very little writing done. So I decided I would fill two legal-pad pages every day, seven days a week. If I felt like writing more, I could, but two pages was something I could easily commit to.
Not only did those baby step lead to the accumulation of at least 14 pages each week, they also helped me turn writing every day into a habit.
If you want to develop a habit that involves doing something multiple times during the day, start out by creating an intention to do it once a day—or even every other day. Once you’ve succeeded with that, you can expand on it.
Dream Big. Take Baby Steps.
Lofty goals are great. But the way to achieve them is to break them down into manageable components and take one step at a time. The unconscious part of your brain resists change. When you attempt to make a big or an immediate change, it reacts by mobilizing forces to get things back on track. In fact, it responds the same way it does when your body experiences a sudden change, such as a drop in temperature, by trying to return it to homeostasis (the status quo).
If you want a new behavior to become status quo, you need to work up to it gradually without alarming your brain. Don’t give it anything to resist. The good news is that once your desired behavior does become status quo, your brain will work just as hard to maintain it as it did to maintain the previous status quo.
When you aim to do it all at once and miss the mark, you end up with nothing but a reinforced sense of ineffectiveness or inadequacy. But success breeds more success—and success is motivating. Learn to identify and take baby steps. It’s much easier than the alternatives—and it works.
Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.
The conscious part of your brain may clearly see the benefit of change and may want to make a change, but it’s slow, lazy, and easily depleted. Much of the time, it’s offline. The unconscious part of your brain—your autopilot—actively resists change, and it is fast, vast, and always on. Unless you make a persistent effort to convince it otherwise, your brain’s autopilot won’t take your half-hearted attempts to chart a new course seriously. It will keep “correcting” you back to the same old well-worn path, taking you to work when you want to go to the restaurant and taking you through the entire bag of chips instead of stopping after a handful.
