I want to talk a bit today about how to accomplish something difficult. For most people and me included, it is quite difficult to deal with a large task and know exactly how to pull it off. The secret that I’ve found is in these 3 steps.
1) Identify and write down what goal you hope to accomplish
2) Break down the goal into a series of steps and put them in order (working backwards from the end can be helpful)
3) Tackle the steps one at a time until success and do this until you arrive at your goal
That’s it! It’s sounds simple, but sometimes it is difficult to put in practice. For most of us, we try to tackle the whole task at once and grow frustrated, become overwhelmed, and may eventually give up.
I remember last year, I was teaching someone how to swim. There are some people who get many years of swimming lessons, but for others it is quite limited. This student of mine had only a few months of lessons. So what we did was apply these 3 steps.
Swimming
1) Goal: Learn to swim with no assistance
2) Steps:
–Master breathing (blowing out underwater and taking a breath in above water)
–Head turn in rhythm
–Arm motion of front crawl (right arm to left arm to right again with elbow bent out of the water)
–Leg kick
–Put it all together
3) Finish each step and then move to the next until all complete
So what we did, was spend time on each step and then integrated everything together as the final step. At the end of teaching, she learned to swim! We went from one task to the next until she succeeded with all of them and put them all together in swimming a length on her own. And did this take many years of swimming lessons? Not even close. She was swimming in 1 hour. That’s the power of breaking things down.
Now, go try it yourself for a big task you’ve been trying to tackle. Let me know how things are going.