The First Step: Keep it Short and Successful

You’ve heard the old adage: “The first step is the hardest to take” or “The first stride is the longest”. I’ve heard these for years and even believed in them because of what so many of us do. It’s not so much what we do as much as it is how we try to do it that makes these sayings true.

When starting a new plan, it seems that we all want instant results. Not only do we want to see results right away, but we want to be doing EVERYTHING right from day one. If it is an exercise program we are starting, the first week involves a trip to the gym that lasts longer and includes more exertion than we’ve had in the last year. If it is a nutrition program, we throw all our food away and replace every food item with foods that we have never eaten before in our lives.

This is a very ambitious approach. Things start out going great, but what happens? Maybe it’s a week down the road or even a month into the new routine, it all falls apart. Eventually, this happens to everyone that takes this approach. It is the “all or nothing” mentality. It is the mindset that we are going to change everything and we are going to change it now.

Although it is important to make changes, we often take an approach that sets us up for failure. By taking on too many new habits or making such drastic changes, we have trouble sticking to it. We partially accomplish many things rather than fully accomplishing a single thing.

Goals are good. We’ve talked about goals a lot. In fact, setting and reaching goals really translates into all areas of life. Let me clarify, the right goals are good. The wrong goals lead us to failure and make it more difficult to set new goals.

Think about this scenario:

Judy wants to start a new weight loss program. It has been years since she focused on her health. Over the past decade she has steadily gained weight and now wants to stop that. She is going to completely change the way she eats and get more exercise. She joins a gym, starts a new diet plan and is feeling good about her chances for success.

Getting started (first step)

The first week is a whirlwind for Judy. She is going to the gym every day, she are eating completely different foods and feeling like she is on track.

Hitting a roadblock (first challenge)

The first weekend comes along and Judy has a party at a friend’s house. When she gets there, she quickly realizes that there is no food that is “on her list” and doesn’t know what to do. She has to eat, so the food that is there will have to do.

The other side of her routine suffered early on too. Judy was also feeling sore from the first week of exercise. She hadn’t ever been to the gym every day of the week, so her body was seriously feeling the effects of the workouts she got in the week before. On Monday, she figures that she should take a day off because she is so sore. She plans on going again on Tuesday, but keeps thinking about how the diet has been difficult to get back into after the weekend problems. Judy has now missed another day at the gym.

The next week (following first step)

Judy feels guilty because she couldn’t stick with her routine. She had such a great first week, but when the weekend came along, she wasn’t able to keep things going on her diet plan. Judy was also struggling with her exercise plan by the beginning of the second week. There were some circumstances beyond her control on the diet side, but she didn’t take that into consideration. On the exercise side, she simply didn’t take the adjustment from years of inactivity into account. Overall, she didn’t give herself any slack and couldn’t live up to it. Instead, she looked only at her goal and felt like a failure.

More specifically, Judy looked at the first step as the whole routine. She tried to start her routine from day one as if she had been doing it for years. She tried to go from no activity and poor diet to exercising daily and eating a perfect diet. Not many people have success following something to a T period. Even fewer people are able to jump into a routine in one step and stick with it.

Judy was trying to change many habits that she had been forming for years in just a few days. That doesn’t sound very realistic does it? Despite this unrealistic expectation, we have all done it. I have worked with hundreds of people that have done it over and over again. Every time they get started, they try to do it all in one big step. Surprise, surprise, it doesn’t work for them. And that is why they are always trying to take that step again…and again.

When you have trouble getting started (or better yet, before you get started), stop and think about how big that first step is. Is it too big and unrealistic? The solution is to make the first step shorter and more realistic. It sounds appealing to change everything and “get healthy” as quickly as possible, but it doesn’t last. Even if you want to do something, it will be difficult to sustain without the habit being formed. The key to health is that no matter what you do to get results; the results go away as soon as you stop doing it.

In other words, take a small step that you can keep doing until it becomes natural.
Once you get there, take another step. I like to use this analogy:

Take one step forward each week. In ten weeks we will be ten steps ahead of where we were when we started. Take ten steps forward on day one, but take a step backward each day for the next ten weeks. Where are you? Not only are you not where you want to be, but you feel frustrated and defeated because you have been taking backward steps for the past ten weeks.

Take a small step forward to get things started. Every journey begins with one step- the first step. That first step doesn’t have to be the longest or even the most difficult. As long as you are focused on taking many steps and only trying to take one at a time, you will eventually get where you want to go. So take that small step forward toward your success.