why incremental steps are significant

 

My DIY has been incremental.  This week I got a new carpet fitted in my lounge. I have lived in the house over 30 years and this is the second carpet I have had fitted in there.  I have also had to have the part floorboard/ part crumbling concrete under the carpet all taken up and screeded and levelled.  It has been a big job, including installing a wood burner.

 

When FH first left me back in 2002 I needed some dreams to help me visualise a better future. Once I had established my legal right to the house in exchange for zero child maintenance, I began to plan what I might do with it.  I have always loved the house and still do, deeply.  I created ‘mood boards’ which visualised something out of Home and Gardens.  Pretty much everyone took the mick out of me.  FH liked dark vibrant colours.  One of the first things I did in the house was start repainting everything magnolia.

In those early years I had no money for going out so I had a box of wine and stripped wood. I have a lot of pine doors, skirting boards, architraves, internal windows.  It took me 9 years to strip all the wood in the house.  Every workman who comes to the house comments on it.

Slowly, slowly, a room at a time, a redundancy payment at a time, I replaced windows, built in cupboards, decorated. About 2010 an endowment matured and I got a small bedroom divided into a family bathroom and an en suite and two small rooms downstairs knocked through into a big kitchen.

It has been a complete labour of love from someone with minimalist DIY skills and it is very nearly finished. I need a new sofa and I am thinking of a Romeo and Juliet balcony on the top floor, but it’s eminently liveable in and people love its quirky, mementoes from around the world, style.

It is also testimony to the power of incremental steps.

 

https://michaelhyatt.com/the-power-of-incremental-change-over-time/

Researching this, and particularly the next article, made me think about how this technique should also work for me more in how I tend to do business. ‘In order to accomplish something meaningful, to get a job, or to do anything, you need to drop softly into a comfort zone’. I have a tendency to plan a direct quickest route to the end result I want which I am beginning to see could be terrifying.  I need to be less in a hurry.

‘It is not all about an instant “score” or an instant “offer”; instead, their behavior revolves around a less threatening series of ongoing overtures and so forth to build a relationship’.

‘You start out small and build from there–but always build on what came before. This works with everything’

‘The more you are able to build on what you have done before, the more you pull away from the “average” people in the world, who refuse to take a series of incremental steps before they demand greater results’.

https://www.hb.org/take-incremental-steps/

 

Be empowered.