Today, at the end of my weekly yin yoga and meditation class, I reached for the affirmation card that my yoga teacher had placed at the foot of my mat, just as she always does every week. As I turned the card over, I was greeted by the gorgeous illustration of a baby penguin bravely trekking up a mountain, while its companions could be seen in the near distance up ahead.

The message, 'take tiny steps forward,' was written on the card and resonated deeply. It reminded me that our biggest aspirations can often feel daunting, like insurmountable peaks looming before us. But just as the baby penguin takes one tiny step at a time, we too can navigate our journeys with grace and resilience.  

After flipping through the pages of the explanation booklet that was left up the front of the yoga studio and that came with the affirmation deck, I landed on the detailed meaning of this card. I realised that I was being invited to re-think the way I approach my goals. It’s not enough to get clear on where we want to go. We need to break down the path that lies ahead, into tiny baby steps.

When we break down our goals into manageable, bite-sized tasks, the seemingly impossible becomes achievable. We no longer feel threatened or overwhelmed by our goals either, since taking just one or two baby steps each day doesn’t run the risk of being all-consuming.

For example, if you were planning to find a new job, your 2 tiny steps for today could include reviewing your resume and making one phone call to a friend for guidance and to act as a second set of eyes to look over it for you. You could break down the task of reviewing your resume even further, allocating some time to looking into new resume templates online, and even asking to read over a friend’s resume to gain further clarity on how you’d like to update yours.

While it’s a less complex and important goal, I recently decluttered my home office and set myself the ambitious and tiring goal to re-organise the entire closet in one afternoon. Looking back, it’s a good example of what not to do, as I see how much healthier and enjoyable it would have been if I would have broken down this clearly non-urgent goal into smaller baby steps spaced out over the span of a week or two, such as; browsing online for storage solutions, making a trip to Target for storage containers, decluttering the top shelf where a lot of junk was taking up unnecessary space, tackling the remaining shelves, moving onto the hanging wardrobe section, and finally listing anything we no longer needed online for sale.

This gentler approach of taking tiny baby steps each day works on the basis that success is cumulative and if we do something each day, no matter how small, we are going to see the results. It's an invitation to practice patience and be disciplined in the pursuit of our goals.

What's one goal you're currently focused on and how can you break down that maintain ahead into tiny baby steps so that you feel a newfound sense of calm and confidence?

With love, 

Jess x