Baby steps aren’t always easy. But they work.

By far, the hardest part of this whole “recovery” and “personal growth” thing for most people is taking baby steps. 

It’s enormously frustrating to have to take baby steps. 

We want to take bigger steps. 

We want to get this process over with. 

We’re impatient. 

Or at least I am. 

A lot of the time it’s hard to be motivated by baby steps. 

Why should we get fired up, excited, enthusiastic about taking one teeny, tiny step? 

After all, advancing by one little step doesn’t seem to be much improvement over where we are right now. 

Why bother? 

We take baby steps because baby steps are not overwhelming. 

Baby steps are doable. 

We can realistically see ourselves taking baby steps. We can wrap our brains around those teeny, tiny steps. 

We do things that we think we can do, and we avoid things we don’t think we can do. 

By thinking of our journeys not as these huge leaps, but rather as a collection of one baby step, then another, then another…we can start to really believe that we can, and will, make significant progress. 

But a lot of people struggle with the very idea of baby steps. 

They want to recover now. 

They take a baby step, and they think, hey, that wasn’t so hard! How about I try to take, I don’t know, fifty more of those steps, RIGHT NOW? 

And then they get overwhelmed. 

Holding ourselves back and taking our recovery or our growth slowly is not as easy as it seems. 

It requires patience. 

It requires faith in the process. 

It requires a great dal of maturity. 

You do not want your life to change all at once. 

If your life changes all at once, you’re likely to freak out and do everything you can to change it back— even if the way it was before was painful. 

For change to happen and “stick” in the real world, it needs to happen in stages. 

Change needs to be given time to breathe. 

We need time to get used to the change. 

It sounds counterintuitive, but many people stick with what is familiar rather than tolerate a sudden, drastic change…even if the familiar is painful. 

We solve that problem with any steps. 

Small changes, day by day. 

Little changes change everything, over time. 

But in the meantime, we have to calm down, take the long view, and learn to wait as we adjust and adapt to the changes we’re making. 

It’s not easy. 

It’s often not interesting or fun. 

But it’s how change happens in the real world. 

 

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