We all have the best of intentions to create lasting change and live our best lives. If we find a new tip or tool that we are sure will make us feel better, we want to leap right in and integrate it into our lives. We want to be happier, more grounded, more full of life, joyful, grateful, and every other word that conjures up images in our head of a wonderful life.

And so – with the absolute best of intentions and a heart that’s only filled with excitement about the possibility for feeling better and changing our day-to-day life – we take all of those tips and tools that we’ve heard about and tell ourselves that we’re going to live that way. We’re going to assimilate every single happiness technique and every single meditation tool and every single way to feel grateful into our life today.

So we do our research and gather all of the information that we’ll need to take this leap. We learn about all of the things that we just know we must do to feel better. We race around and draw out charts for ourselves to help us remember our new schedule:

• In the morning, we’ll meditate.
• Five times a day, we’ll say our affirmations.
• Twice a day, we’ll write in our gratitude journal.
• We’ll feel our feelings.
• We’ll exercise at least once a day.
• We’ll eat right.
• We’ll sleep at least eight hours a night.
• We’ll make sure to take time out each day for ourselves.
• We’ll read.
• We’ll do something creative.
• We’ll work on our vision board.
• We’ll plan out our future.
• We’ll make special time for our partner.
• We’ll have a family night.
• We’ll take our kids to the park.
• We’ll play with our pets.
• We’ll organize our house.
• We’ll clean our house.
• We’ll catch up on the laundry.
• We’ll call our friends.
• We’ll take that online class that we’ve been meaning to take for the last year or so.
• We’ll do every single thing that we know we should be doing to make us feel happier.

We’ll create a plan and a system and color code it and put it on our calendar and enter it into our brain so that we won’t forget. And in doing all of these things, we just know that our life will be perfect.

And we really go into this wholeheartedly – believing 100% that this will work, that our life will change, and that we’ll be completely and immediately transformed.

And Day 1 goes really well! We’re excited, fully committed, and ready to take action! And Day 2 goes pretty well, too. Except, maybe we forget to do a couple of things, but it’s okay – we tell ourselves that we’ll just make it up the next day – no big deal, right? And then Day 3 comes, and we’re beginning to see several things slide, but we still feel that it’s okay because at least we’re doing most of the things. And then a week passes, and we find ourselves lower than we were before – in bed with the covers pulled up wondering why we ever even tried at all. We berate ourselves for even trying to change – for even trying to imagine that we could stick to something – for believing, even for one second, that this could actually work.

Does this sound at all familiar? I bet it does. We all have a tendency to do this, and that’s nothing to berate ourselves for. Wanting to make positive changes in our lives is a good thing! Taking action steps to make them happen is a good thing! But setting ourselves up to fail by taking on too much and trying to change too much to fast is where we get stuck. Because then we end up right where we started from. And each time this happens, our self esteem takes a hit.

But there is an easy solution! Instead of trying to change your life all at once, what if you just made one little teeny tiny change at a time? What if you stuck with that one change for a few weeks and made sure it was a habit, and then (and only then) added another teeny tiny thing?

I promise that it is so much easier to make lasting changes this way. It’s so much easier to feel great about yourself, too. It’s so much easier to do something if it’s not going to drastically change your routine, your lifestyle, your comfort zone.

So how does this work, anyway?

Let’s say that your goal is to feel happier. I would suggest that you first break this down into what exactly that means for you and what are the steps needed for you to get to this goal of feeling happier?

Let’s say that you said that you wanted to be more creative and you also wanted to eat healthier and you also wanted to exercise more and you also wanted to figure out your purpose in life.

Okay – these are all wonderful things, but they are also pretty big things. So let’s just start with one, and we’ll even break that down. Let’s start with the fact that you want to create more because you know that makes you happy. I would ask you to define, “create” because that could mean many things. Maybe you want to paint. Maybe you want to decorate your home. Maybe you want to play an instrument. Whatever it means for you, get really clear on that. And then just choose one of the ways you can feel creative.

And from that, choose one teeny tiny thing you can do each day to express your creativity. For example, if you said that painting makes you feel creative. I wouldn’t start by saying that you’re going to create a new piece of work each day. Remember, we’re starting with teeny tiny things. So I would ask you to commit to picking up a brush every single day, dipping it into paint, and touching the canvas with it. That’s it. You don’t even have to paint anything special – nothing more than one stroke. What will most likely happen, is you will create much more than one stroke, and your creativity will take off! But it’s also perfectly okay if it doesn’t take off, as long as you’re touching the canvas each day, your self esteem isn’t going to take a hit on the days when you’re just not feeling it.

Baby steps lead to bigger steps which lead to leaps which lead to a life lived fully.

Let’s try taking teeny tiny steps today toward living our best lives. This is something that we can all commit to. This is doable. Let’s let go of trying to do it all at once. Let’s stop setting ourselves up to immediately fail. Let’s actually make it easy to make lasting changes – changes that we will actually stick to. Yes, let’s do that. Are you in?