#116: Take A Starter Step
Good morning friends
If this is the first time you’re reading this letter, you can subscribe here and learn more about my coaching practice here.
This week The Doc, a documentary about one of the pioneers of rap, D.O.C., was released at the Tribeca Film Festival. This interaction between DOC and Eminem is priceless. His smile will make you smile. It is infectious! It is the joy of being your best. It is the joy of having your uniqueness recognised and celebrated.
/ STRATEGY
I received many messages after last week’s letter on compassion and performance thanking me for the reminder that compassion and connection create the context for sustained performance.
I emphasized the compassion part of the equation because I know how easily it is forgotten when the need for performance becomes so acute.
Today, we zoom in on performance. After years of sustained pressure, it feels increasingly difficult to get started. So, what do we do?
Often our default is to set a big target – a stretch goal. But a target is just the score at the end of the game. Sometimes we might declare the problem ‘this needs to be fixed’. If you’re analytical, like me, you might want a few pages of data to be sure. Again, it’s all part of the equation, but what ultimately makes the difference are intentional actions repeated consistently. It is behaviour that creates performance.
It is one thing to know that it’s another thing to get going, another thing to do so consistently.
In his book Tiny Habits, director of the Stanford Behaviour Design Lab, Brian Fogg encourages us to find a ‘starter step’.
He says “The Starter Step is a kind of mental jujitsu—it has a surprising impact for such a small move because the momentum it creates often propels you to the next steps with less friction. The key is not to raise the bar. Doing the Starter Step is success. Every time you do it, you are keeping that habit alive and cultivating the possibility of growth.”
What is a starter step? A starter step is the first step in a longer sequence of behaviours that result in a desired outcome.
For example, you might be experiencing declining revenue. The temptation is to berate the sales team. Or to set a stretch target and attach extravagant bonuses to its achievements. Both might help a bit. In all likelihood though, a more useful start would be to simply list the names of every customer you once had who hasn’t bought from you in the last two years. Then, what is the next behaviour that will make a difference? And on, and on, until you have a sale. And remember, keep doing the starter step.
Fogg notes that “While small might not be sexy, it is successful and sustainable. When it comes to most life changes that people want to make, big bold moves actually don’t work as well as small stealthy ones. Applying go big or go home to everything you do is a recipe for self-criticism and disappointment.”
Intriguingly, my physiotherapist has a similar formulation “No pain. Lots of gain”. Her, science-based, view is that you find movement that you can do easily with little to no pain, and you steadily increase that. As you do that the rest of your body strengthens. And then, miraculously the pain disappears.
Best-selling author Anne Lamott advises aspirant authors to tackle writing books by setting short assignments. She keeps a one-inch picture frame on her desk to remind herself that “all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being”.
One inch at a time, she has written 18 books, 15 of them bestsellers.
Apply these analogies to your business. What are your starter steps?
Before you start to think this is all one big fuzzy cop-out of performance remember, you’re wanting to get started. To get started find something small and painless to begin with. Do it consistently and the whole system strengthens. You’ll be amazed at the momentum you unlock.
In his groundbreaking book, Good to Great, Jim Collins describes the ‘flywheel effect’. He uses the concept to describe the compound effect of hundreds of consistent intentional actions. He invites us to imagine pushing a flywheel. Getting that first rotation is nearly impossible. Thereafter each push is a little easier, causing it to move faster and faster. It’s the same as pushing a car. It is impossible to identify the one push that made a difference because there isn’t one. It is the cumulative effect of all the actions.
His research shows that great companies achieve excellent performance through consistent application. Mediocre companies, in contrast, “frequently launched new programs—often with great fanfare and hoopla aimed at ‘motivating the troops’ —only to see the programs fail to produce sustained results. They sought the single defining action, the grand program, the one killer innovation, the miracle moment…”
Small actions repeated consistently yield magical results. If you don’t believe me read Collins’ tongue-in-cheek “The Remarkable Revolution of the Egg!”
Fogg cautions us that “If you start with a big behavior that’s hard to do, the design is unstable; it’s like a large plant with shallow roots. When a storm comes into your life, your big habit is at risk. However, a habit that is easy to do can weather a storm like flexible sprouts, and it can then grow deeper and stronger roots”.
Remember, we are planting in a storm.
/ SELF
Esteemed neurologist Oliver Sacks, in his autobiography On the Move, writes “Ninety sixty-six was a grim year as I struggled to give up drugs – grim too because my research was going nowhere and I was realizing that it would get anywhere, that I did not have what it took to be a research scientist”.
Sacks was thirty-three at the time.
Seven years later, he published his first book – Awakenings. It was a hit.
He went on to write sixteen books, most of them neurological case histories. Many of them were best-sellers.
If we only looked at Sacks’ life through the lens of his success, we’d miss that he struggled, that there was a point in his life where he was addicted to drugs and failing in the profession he had chosen.
If we only looked at his moment of despair and stopped there, we would miss all that he became, all the lives that he influenced, and all the joy that he brought.
In 1985, he published his third book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It was a tremendous success and established Sacks as a public figure.
Despite this success, he says that his “fellow neurologists, however, remained somewhat remote and dismissive…there were some colleagues who saw Hat as solid, detailed neurology embedded in a fine, classical narrative form. But by and large, the medical silence continued.”
Sometimes, even when we experience tremendous success, there are some people who we want to acknowledge us, that don’t. It is painful.
Critique and indifference can be useful signals as we shape our strategies. As important is protecting the praise.
If Sacks had only listened to the silence, he would not have written thirteen more books. The world would be a poorer place.
/ SOUL
In On The Move Sacks writes that “Individuality is imbued in us from the very start, at the neuronal level. Even at a motor level, researchers have shown, that an infant does not follow a set pattern of learning to walk or how to reach for something. Each baby experiments with different ways of reaching for objects and over several months discovers or selects his own motor solutions.”
The implication is that “we are destined whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life.”
It is such a liberating thought. We are all unequivocally unique and are therefore free, indeed obligated and required, to find the path that works best for who we are.
In his poignant final essay for the New York Times, Sacks repeated this theme.
“When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”
I hope that this week enables you to be a little more of the best you that you are.
Karl