The invisible change or the big science of small steps

*This article was first published in Romanian leadership magazine Cariere, here.

I’ve never been the kind of guy who wakes up early in the morning and goes for a jogging session. Yet, I do love to take long walks and go skiing. It’s just that sometimes that’s not enough to be in shape. It was last summer that I realized I started to add some weight and petulantly started to look for alternatives to intense sports.

I ended up by finding this guy on Youtube, extremely passionate about healthy food, who stated that the RIGHT JUICE can do MIRACLES. I watched a few videos and he CONVINCED me. In a few days I bought a blender and started to buy the stuff I needed from the local market.

So I had it ALL prepared!

But at first, it wasn’t easy at all. Some of the juices had bad taste. Sometimes I just DIDN’T FEEL like shucking the fruits and vegetables, and make all the preparations. I was often tempted to postpone, to skip it this time, to say yeak! to this, and boo! to that.

In almost a month I only tried it for several mornings.

Then one day I woke up with this arguable emotion inside, which might have been a true fact or just an illusion, that I was feeling better and had more energy than before.

The next month, I made some progress. I started to watch more videos, vary the recipes, drank more often, and imagine what great benefits this was bringing to me. I was beginning to really enjoy it. And the good feeling inside turned out to be true. In six months I lost 6 kilograms and my whole body started to feel healthier.

This is what I call the INTANGIBLE PROGRESS. Others call it the SCIENCE OF SMALL STEPS or the INVISIBLE CHANGE.

The thing is that I don’t believe in BALANCE. Things are in a constant change, even though we’re not noticing it. And it’s often the REPETITIVE LITTLE CHANGES that make things move or reshape. Like rain drops erode stone.

Coaching is first of all a discipline and you have to wake up and change YOURSELF before ever wishing to help others. If you don’t reach the DEEPEST POINT of your being, how can you understand who you are and the core elements you are made of?

I am very surprised sometimes to see how people suddenly change. From time to time there are these moments when a friend or acquaintance pops up in my attic and there is a NOTICEABLE CHANGE in his posture, his voice, his will, his actions. And at first I am tempted to wonder what led to this sudden shift. But it’s usually just the REACHING POINT of a change that started long before.

Understanding and awareness rarely come as a sudden change, but rather as INCREMENTAL EVOLUTION that is hardly perceivable.

As a coach, when you work with a client, it is not the big changes you are looking for, but the small ones, that are important for him. Let’s say you wanna lose 10 kilograms and at the second meeting you’re revealing that you couldn’t avoid bread, as you committed. But you didn’t give up either. Instead, you cut 2 slices out of four and moved to rye flour.

Let’s say you wanna write and finish a book in three months, without any previous experience, but after one week you barely managed to write one page a day. In my opinion, this still is a great change, and you should first be grateful for it.

The change is in terms of awareness, of KNOWING THYSELF. That’s why you should support the small changes by both ACKNOWLEDGING them and by resisting, questioning, being present and by going further on with them. These small changes are crucial because they happen deep inside and at some point they become very obvious and help you to move on.

Although it seems pretty natural to evolve this way, the intangible progress is a real CHALLENGE. We’re often educated to RUSH our learning and reach the objectives. To grow through the invisible changes it means that you accept the actual situation and who you are now. It means you learn to manage YOUR EXPECTATIONS and focus on a single important thing at a time.

The invisible progress builds up until you become capable of making the next BIG STEP. This is one of the reasons why coaching is a hard thing to do. Before the big step, you need to be satisfied with what you have, feel involved and develop.

The invisible changes aren’t invisible. You just need to turn your attention from what you’re missing towards what you ALREADY HAVE.