The Industry Secret
A father takes his son outside for the first time to experience snow. The night before a few inches have fallen so each step for the small boy are gigantic leaps compared to the much taller dad. Seeing the fear in the boys eyes, he invites him further out; "one step at a time, focus only on the next step.". The boy with great challenge leaps, hops to his opposite foot and climbs over to the other leg. With a disheveled grunt he goes again to the other leg and this process carries on over and over. Audibly you can hear the boy grunting under his breathe "left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot....".
The father instructs, "again, don't give up!". But now with so many steps the boy has become fatigued, is exhausted and doesn't think he can go on. The father looks at his son and says "Son, look back at how far you've come. You've had to have taken at least 30 steps to get where you are and to get where you need to be it'll only take 10 more!". The boy looks back at the track of foot prints in the snow seeing his journey realizing his own accomplishments and decides to carry on instead.
That's the secret! No one ever tells you every single step feels bigger than the last when it comes to building a healthy lifestyle but when we look back at the cumulative total, I believe the people who are successful can look back and appreciate their work along the way as active motivation. When I'm building programs for my clients I'm weighing all the variables and asking "how can we be just 1 tiny step better today?" Is the answer an extra 1000 steps? Could it be 1 extra glass of water a day? Perhaps tonight I"ll get one extra hour of sleep tonight.
Regardless of what your goals are you can't walk 10,000 steps if you haven't made it to 4000 yet. Each step needs to be just a little bigger than the last and when you get scared or demotivated instead of focusing on the size of the step; let us focus on how far we've come and focus on what really matters, not giving up on ourselves. "Left foot, right foot, left foot..."
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