Go Team 2026: Start VERY Small

Hey Team!

While I have long been an advocate of starting small when in comes to new things, I often find it tricky to implement.

I mean, I understand the importance of having a low bar for success.

Intellectually, I know that I am placeholding the new habit while it grows.

In practice, though, I have had a lot of trouble with it.

I thought that it was because, left unsupervised, my brain defaulted to labelling the small task was ‘too small to count’ and hence not worth remembering.*

BUT!

I think that might only be part of the problem.

I think I might have been misjudging the size of the fitness tasks I have been taking on.

You see, I am pretty good at judging a small writing task or a small creative task to do on a regular basis and I suspect I was using similar criteria for choosing fitness tasks.

I mean, that doesn’t sound like a terrible approach but I didn’t look at the big picture. I was forgetting that I have a harder time starting a fitness task, that fitness tasks feel more like ‘interruptions’, that they are different from the rest of my day-to-day so I require more energy to switch from other tasks and start moving, and, speaking of energy, the energy cost to actually do them is going to be higher than the energy cost for writing or drawing tasks.

And that doesn’t include the fact that when I misjudge a “small” fitness task, I could end up needing more time to recover and not necessarily be able to keep to the plan I had hoped to follow.

Now, I’m not saying that all of that came to bear on every single small fitness task I have chosen in the past but all of those factors made regular occurrences. They happened often enough that my brain was getting more and more wary of ‘small’ tasks.

I started to figure all of this out in November when I tried a strength training program that I really liked. I wanted to be able to check ‘tried program’ off of my list so I told myself that I could reduce any one exercise to just a single rep and it would count.

I did all the first set of reps for my upper body exercises and all of the first set of reps for most of the lower body ones but then I came to lunges. I HATE lunges. I know they are important and helpful and whatnot but I still hate them. I was supposed to do a set of 12 but I did a set of 3. And I did the same for my second set.

It was suddenly quite clear that I could keep that part of the workout small until I was ready to expand it. I wouldn’t have to dread the whole workout because of that one part. I wasn’t going to require extra recovery time because that part of the workout was so hard for me. I could do what was right for me and not have to feel like I was doing the workout incorrectly.

(Yes, I know how ridiculous that sounds. There is such a difference between knowing something and KNOWING something, isn’t there? Brains are so weird!)

And since then, it has become clear to me that lots of my fitness-related “small” tasks weren’t actually all that small. In fact, they were way too big – either in duration, scope, energy-requirements, or in the mental space they were taking up – no matter what size they seemed on paper.

So, Team, today I would like to invite you to use my realization to save yourself some time and energy.

Please minimize your stress, downsize your frustration, and make it easier to move towards the life you want by making your tasks VERY small.

No. Smaller than that.

Smaller.

Ok, about that size.

In fact, when you are starting out, when you are just creating room in your life for the possibility of doing this thing, go for something incredibly small.

Something that would be ridiculously easy for you to include on your most difficult day.

You won’t stay at this stage forever but it is a great place to start.

And here is today’s gold star for your efforts.

Whether you are already working on your goals, refining your plans, just trying to get your mind around them, or you are figuring out how to make your small step even smaller, your efforts matter and I celebrate you and your hard work.

Go Team us!

PS – I have been following Ruthanne Reid‘s excellent advice on writing for a while now and while I give my coaching clients similar advice, I really love the way she phrases things and I admire the fact that she has been showing up daily for AGES with encouragement and reassurance. In fact, I wish I could team up with her to do more cool encouragement-related things. 🙂 In the link above she is talking about creating a ‘low bar’ for daily habits – you may want to check it out.

*It’s only when I investigate why I couldn’t do the thing and that thought to the forefront that I realize what happened. Sigh. ADHD requires me to do an exhausting amount of thought-monitoring.