How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

THE SMALLEST FIRST STEP
You’re now clear on what’s most important. But if it’s a complex or daunting

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task, you can still feel stuck. So the next simple question to ask is this:
What’s the smallest first step you can take to move things forward?
This deceptively simple question soothes your brain for a couple of different
reasons. First, it guides you away from worrying about the scale of the challenge
you’re facing, toward something that you know you can do. Your brain
anticipates the reward that comes from success, which helps to move you out of
defensive mode and toward a discovery state of mind. The “smallest step”
question also reduces the load on your brain by redirecting effort from
something it finds difficult (conceiving of an unknown future) to something it
finds easy (thinking about an immediate action to take).
Angela, an attorney, works for a firm where managers are elected by their
peers rather than appointed. It’s an approach that rewards candidates who have
great ideas and people skills, and Angela had plenty of both. But every time she
thought about putting herself forward for a management election, she ground to
a halt. Almost every day, she had an item on her to-do list called “start prep for
election.” It was always her “most important thing,” but the task felt too large
and complex to tackle in the middle of her busy days.
So we talked about the smallest first step. Angela says, “I realized that the first
thing was just to have coffee with my boss, whom I know and like, to talk to him
about my ideas. So I wrote that on a yellow sticky note. Then I called his
assistant, and went and did it. After that, I took the same approach for the next
step, and the next. It was very freeing.” Moreover, it worked. After her
colleagues elected her to a managerial role, Angela used the “first small step”
technique to attack all her difficult tasks. “It 
always
works. There’s always
something tiny you can do to feel you’ve made progress. It’s an infallible way of
keeping things moving forward when things feel unmanageable.”