Acting Incrementally Is Powerful
Are you a big thinker?
Do you dream in expansive ideas?
Do you set goals that are awesome, bold and expansive?
Do more modest aims seem too puny to bother with?
I invite you to reconsider this.
There’s absolutely power and momentum in setting high bars. We reach further and push more. Elevated expectations can fuel us to go beyond the extra mile.
But they also demand more of us. More energy, more appetite for risk, more fuel.
If you are a big thinker and dreamer, what’s happened when you’ve missed the mark? Fallen short. Stumbled on the course and failed. What followed?
Did you encounter a hard slap of self-doubt?
Question the goal as well as your abilities?
Consider quitting entirely? “Clearly THIS isn’t going to work…”
There’s merit and honor in the effort. I find great inspiration in Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote about daring greatly and taking action.
There’s also power in incremental action.
The student who was inspired by your focused attention.
The colleague whose questions were refined by your collaboration
The research that became more nuanced because of your insight
The solution that was so elegantly simple, it had been overlooked…until now.
The single, micro-change you made in a boundary, in self-permission, in speaking up.
You can expend so much in the striving for something monumental, you miss the powerful incremental.
I’d invite you to recalibrate your vision for a moment.
These times we’re in? They’re testing us on innumerable levels.
Sustained, intense stress levels and fear. New obstacles, greater uncertainty.
Set down the telescope and look at the ground ahead of you. Look at the community immediately around you. What’s one step, one action, one new re-action you can take to have impact HERE.
Make your job looking to the next step and taking it. Fortify the ground for a single move into the future. Not only does this focus your energy away from fears that can feel insurmountable and hopeless to solve, but it anchors you in the present.
Behavioral scientists know the incremental is powerful. We don’t look for waves of expansive change. We look for ripples. Modest percentages of changed behavior.
Focusing on the incremental delivers other benefits, too:
It puts you in-agency. You dial into the local, where you’re able to act and flex control.
It grows momentum. A single, modest step moves us from a place of spinning or stagnancy into action.
Taking action relieves fear.
Taking action during times of struggle and uncertainty will ultimately reward us. We build new capabilities.
As Ryan Holiday describes it in The Obstacle is the Way :
The struggle against an obstacle..propels the fighter to a new level of functioning. The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth(57).
We can persist and grow. Look to the next step. Then take it.
One action I invite you to take is joining us in May for Reflect, Replenish, Re-ignite.
This 3-hr program spans 3 weeks during the lunch hour. It’s a small group program aimed at supporting changemakers during this period of upheaval with new practices, replenishment and action planning. So you’re armed with new resources and clarity.
Reach back to learn more.
