It's the SMALL STEPS that lead to BIG CHANGES

Hello and Welcome:
This is the first in a series about Change. Successful Change, to be specific. I will post a new article each Friday for the next six weeks, each addressing a different feature of change.

Whether you want to lose weight, increase your productivity, find more time, get more energy, find your focus, change career or any other change you desire to make, research shows that long-term, successful change is the result of small, incremental changes.

The logic is straightforward. If you take a small step and make a small change, two things happen: a) you experience a sense of control over your life, and b) you feel a sense of accomplishment and success, and there's no motivation like success!

It takes 21 days to create a new habit and only 72 hours to lose it, so you can see the wisdom of small steps. You are much more likely to integrate a small change for three weeks than you will a larger change. But even more than that, if you set out to accomplish a large change all at once, anything short of that change is failure. And what happens when we fail? Not only do we revert to what is familiar behaviour, our self-esteem takes another knock, and we miss an opportunity to celebrate a sweet success.

When we set ourselves a course for change, it's important to plot waypoints along the course that leads to our final destination - or desired change. In nautical or navigational terms, waypoints are stopping points along the journey. They break the larger journey into smaller "chunks". Always headed toward your final destination, you get there by navigating waypoint to waypoint. Waypoints are an opportunity to measure how far you've come and also opportunities to celebrate, look around, and get some support for the next leg of the journey. They're the small steps leading to change. Let me give you a personal example.

I want to have a wonderful website that will inform clients and prospective clients about me, and my own unique approach to the life coaching work that I do. A good website can also be a excellent marketing tool. But, as I said in my first blog...I'm a technophobe. There's a lot I have to learn about web design - even if I were to hire someone to do that for me. There's so much to consider and make informed decisions about: content, colour, graphics, fonts, links, resources, etc. And for me, learning is going to take time. To get a site up and running feels way too big for me right now. So, I've broken my goal down into "do-able" chunks.

The first was to start this blog - my first venture into the cyberworld. My goal with the blog was a modified website idea - a place where my clients and prospective clients could get an idea of who I am and how I see the world. Marketing is another area in which I have little to no knowledge. All I know is that whatever marketing I did it had to be authentic and congruent with who I am.

So, trusting that the best way to use the blog would "show up", I simply wrote until it did. I wrote to get into the habit. I wrote to become comfortable. I wrote to wait. And then, this morning, I knew what to do. That's why this is the first of a series I'll be writing about Change.

My goal: to have an amazing, interesting and dynamic website as a marketing tool
First Waypoint: creating a blog
Second Waypoint: creating a series on Change

Where to next? Don't know. I'll continue to learn about website design. Right now, though, I'm thoroughly enjoying creating this series on Change.

Next Friday: Cycle of Change (or the importance of knowing where you are now in order to know how to get where you're going!)