So it finally struck me yesterday the bottom line of what I’ve been trying to say here about taking baby steps. Here it is!

When you start out, your actions can’t be about losing weight or writing your first novel or whatever. If you’re coming from a place of inaction, of inability to get started and/or keep going, what you need first is to become the type of person who can achieve those things.

Let me repeat! First, you need to become the type of person who can achieve those things.

Bit by bit, step by step we need to build our confidence in our own abilities to undertake something and complete it. To achieve what we set out to. To reach those goals. Psychologists call it ‘self-efficacy’ and as Wiki says:

The experience of mastery is the most important factor determining a person’s self-efficacy. Success raises self-efficacy, while failure lowers it.

So: succeeding at things makes you feel like can succeed at other things, while ‘failing’ at something makes you feel that it’s quite likely you’ll fail at the next thing too.

If you have a history of ‘failing’ at various projects or goals, your sense of self-efficacy might be quite low. What to do? Try again. But this time:

• Pick easy things.
• Pick quick things.
• Pick things you think you’ll enjoy.

Set up a non-intimidating schedule for them – exercise for 5 minutes three times a week, write for 10 minutes a day, or, pick something totally unrelated to your ultimate goal. Just get started with something you’re pretty sure you can do. It’s not about it being the fastest way to a goal, it’s about changing your mindset. Let the goal go for now, and concentrate on building confidence in your ability to undertake, to commit, to complete.

Then as time goes by and those little things become easy or second nature, crank it up a bit – try 10 or 20 minutes of exercise or writing or whatever, or add in something completely different, to keep the feelings of success and achievement coming.

And be kind to yourself, be understanding about slips, about off days. They happen, they’ll always happen. The quicker you get over them, the quicker you move on and get back to it.