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Sucess in Small Steps

By Heather Robson

Whether you run your own small business or want to perform better in your career or just want to complete your own personal projects, you can benefit from learning a small-step approach.

The first step to achieving any goal is to define it. If you’re running your own business, a realistic goal might be to increase your client base by 10% over the next six months. If you’re an employee, your goal may be to gain a promotion or a raise. A personal goal might be to keep a daily journal.

Write the goal down along with a sentence or two about why you are setting the goal—this will help you keep your passion for the goal.

Next your need to think about the major steps you’ll need to take to achieve the goal. Think of these as objectives. For a business goal like increasing your customer base by 10%, your objectives might be to attend two networking events each month, hold one workshop every six weeks, start a direct mailing campaign, and to diligently follow up on every lead.

Once you’ve established the objectives that will bring you to your goal, you need to set tasks each day or every other day or once a week (the frequency will depend on the objective) to steadily, step-by-step achieve your objectives. So, if you objective is to hold a workshop every six weeks, one day you might pick a topic, the next day you might outline your material, the third day you might reserve a space, and the fourth day you might research where to advertise. You’d continue completing small tasks each day, so that reaching your larger objective becomes a matter of course.

A good rule of thumb when planning these tasks that will get you to your objective and eventually your goal, is to think in terms of what you can achieve in 15 minutes to an hour.

Achieving success through small steps is much easier and more likely than taking it on in big leaps. Even so, sometimes we find ourselves not completing the tasks we’ve set for ourselves. To keep from getting stuck in a pattern of not finishing your tasks, review your progress at the end of each week. If you’re falling behind, reread your goal and the reasons behind it. Then commit the first task of each day the following week to moving forward with the objective you are struggling with.

By sticking to your small steps, you’ll see your success begin to grow.

Heather Robson is the Writing Director for DragonFly Creative Media, a small company committed to providing the best marketing tools to other small companies.

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