Edel Coffey: 'Small wins' are the key to life's big challenges
Edel Coffey: taking things step by step. Picture: Bríd O'Donovan
I recently bought a smartwatch. While I am surgically attached to my phone, I have always resisted getting the companion piece of the watch, probably because the main purpose of the smartwatch has always struck me as fitness-related, a way to track your exercise, and if I can already track my fitness achievements on one hand, why would I need a watch for that?
But, in a moment of weakness, I relented and bought one. I figured I might as well give the accompanying fitness app a whirl before the novelty of measuring my daily steps wore off.
Don’t worry, this is not a column about how fitness has changed my life. It might, however, be a column about how setting small achievable goals can change your life.
I was surprised to find that the simple act of measuring my progress has been unexpectedly motivating. Where before I have failed or gotten bored or just given up, setting an achievable daily goal and seeing it ticked off on my little watch face (or ‘closing my rings’ as the smartwatch zealots refer to it) seems to have been all that was required to give me my longest stretch of committed exercise in years.
If I notice my steps are below 10,000 before bedtime, you might even hear the pitter-patter of fast feet in the kitchen as I try to catch up on my steps by sprinting on the spot while packing the lunchboxes.
Of course, the success of setting small, achievable goals is news to exactly nobody.
The business world has known about it for years with their practice of setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Tangible) goals, but I never quite understood just how effective this practice could be.
Around the same time, I came across a seemingly related article in the entitled ‘ The Power of Small Wins’, a long-term research project aimed at helping managers to better motivate their staff. (I will honestly read anything.)
What the research discovered was that “small wins” or small progress on any project had a disproportionately large influence on how happy and positive employees felt about their work, as well as how motivated they felt.
It struck me that the satisfaction (smugness?) that I was getting from monitoring my 30 minutes of exercise every day or racking up those 10,000 steps on my watch might have something to do with this theory of the small win.
The research stayed with me, and I started to notice evidence of the benefits of the small win everywhere.
Meanwhile, the best-selling Irish author Andrea Mara wrote last week about how starting a blog 10 years ago changed her life.
The blog led to writing for other blogs and websites, which in turn led to the world of freelance writing and then on to her career as a crime writer of six novels and counting. This was the art of how small wins often snowball into big wins.
I found myself thinking of this again last week. My youngest daughter is learning to cycle her bike. As she launches herself away from me, I let go of the saddle and stay standing where I am, watching her travel away from me.
With each wobbly rotation of the pedals, she moves herself on a little bit further. When she stops and turns around to see how far she has come, she is always surprised that the small act of just pushing one pedal and then another and then doing it again can carry her so far.
And this is how small wins work. We take one step, and then we take another, and then we do it again. And we keep doing it.
Sometimes, there are no shortcuts. It’s not glamorous and it’s not as appealing as the big overnight transformation, but after a year of small wins we are often standing in a completely different place and so different opportunities can present themselves, ones that we couldn’t imagine a year ago.
Then maybe another year passes and we build some more small wins and we do it again, and again, until we can’t believe how far we’ve come.
That’s what I’m thinking now when I look at my watch for my daily goals for steps, fitness, movement. And it’s why I’m trying to apply the small wins philosophy to other areas of my life.
It might be something very small in the grand scheme of things, but I know that if I do six months’ worth of small wins, or a year, when I turn around to look back at where I’ve come from, I’ll be a long way from where I started.
