Guides and Worksheets

Big Change Happens in Little Steps

In my decades of failed attempts to redirect my life toward bigger goals, I finally saw what was missing in all the self-help guru content. I tapped into the change management consulting practices I used on my corporate clients to nail down all the micro decisions needed to drive macro results for billion-dollar global companies.

Guru inspo makes us believe we should catapult ourselves across an abyss and leave our kids, loved ones, and existing financial commitments to perish in the chaos.

That is not a recipe for success; that is a lifetime sentence for regret. And it is our intuitive awareness of this potential regret that keeps us frozen.

Instead, I made regret-free change possible by parsing out each micro-decision the same way I did with business clients. Just like corporations, each of us knows that too much is at stake for us to change too much too fast. But we can get unfrozen and see visible progress by breaking down each element of change into small achievable steps that serve as safe experiments, enabling us to test, evaluate, and redirect as needed along the way.

On any given day, the perfect plan never plays out In my life, even if I secured three hours of “me” time on a Sunday to work on plans, those hours would inevitably be eaten by a visit to the hospital to address one of my active children’s latest sports injuries. Yes, those medical visits were important, but I needed a way to pile-drive my goals forward through all of life’s hijackings.

So I created worksheets that only took a few minutes to complete, perfect for killing time during while awaiting a triage evaluation in the ER. At the end of each worksheet, I’d assign one tiny action to serve as a hook to my next step, ensuring there was always an unbroken chain of progress connecting each of these little steps.

This bite-sized approach to taking action toward big change also afforded me the time needed to fairly renegotiate commitments and assumptions with all my outside contacts and commitments. When you are secure in your choices, you do a far better job of standing up against all the outside forces and demands that could otherwise sabotage your goals.

All of this is the more successful, less regret-filled antidote to the “quit your job in a day” dream that too many guru’s sell us.