Lots of small steps, one at a time
The reason a lot of people fail to reach their goals in the time frame they’ve set is simply this:
Most of us aren’t very good at predicting how long things are going to take.
In other words, if you want to lose 30 pounds in 3 months and 90 days later you’ve only lost 15 pounds, did you “fail” because you didn’t try hard enough, because your metabolism was working against you, or because it turns out that in this instance, 90 days wasn’t a long enough time frame to reach that goal given your strategy and what you were willing and able to do?
via The Hidden Factor in Failing to Reach your Goals – Supercoach.
One of the reasons we unconsciously ‘push away’ thinking about what we want is because we either consider it unrealistic in our (totally made up) time frame or we see the change as too big, too scary, too revolutionary. The reality is though that you only way you are going to find out is to start doing it and that slow incremental change is the most effective over time.
We constantly overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year. Take learning a language as an example. Try to learn ten new verbs a day and you will mostly likely fail or give up in a day or so. Commit to learning one a day though and after a month you will astonish yourself. We are simply not very good at predicting how long things will take or how long things will take us.
Break it down into single steps that are so small they are easy to take. Then take a step towards what you want most days. You’ll get there.
