The term “baby steps” may seem laughable, yet it’s worthy of our attention. The smallest increment of movement is still movement. Bigger changes in our lives, whether it is our employment, our housing, our relationships, our health take time to build momentum and make the changes we seek, much less make them sustainable.
As I’ve deepened my project management practice while pursuing my PMP certification this summer, I’ve discovered something unexpected: the principles that guide successful projects overlap my experiences with spiritual growth. Both require faith in one another and processes we can’t see, trust in incremental progress, and the wisdom to know that sustainable change happens through consistent, intentional steps rather than dramatic leaps.
Quick Fixes vs. Small Fixes
There’s an old saying: “An inch is a cinch; going a mile, you’re in denial.” More than once, I’ve often thought I could take on more than is realistically possible, then wondered why I felt overwhelmed. With time I’ve come to appreciate the power of attention to the small things that are easy to overlook if we’re moving too quickly.
Quick fixes and small fixes are not the same thing. Quick fixes bypass the foundation-building that real change requires. Small fixes, however, are about creating sustainable momentum that honors both our vision and our capacity.
This principle shows up constantly in project work. Teams that try to transform everything at once often create chaos and resistance. But teams that implement small, consistent improvements build trust, demonstrate progress, and create conditions for larger shifts over time. The same is true in our personal lives.
Thinking big, long-term, and visionary comes naturally to me, and it’s been a long journey to become grounded in the present — those basic yet crucial A → B movements that get us where we want to go. Beyond meeting the immediate demands of my days, weeks, and months, making progress on building systems to support me and others sustainably is a continual challenge.
Why Small Steps Create Lasting Change
In project management, we understand that sustainable change requires buy-in, adaptation, and integration. The same is true for personal growth and community building, and here’s why this matters:
We affect each other. Every action we take — whether in a team meeting, a community gathering, or our daily routines — creates ripples that touch the people around us. When we make small, intentional shifts in how we show up, others notice. Our patience creates space for others’ patience. Our vulnerability invites others to be vulnerable. Our commitment to incremental progress gives permission for others to take their own small steps. As Grace Lee Boggs reminded us, “transform yourself to transform the world” [1]. Our individual practices become the seeds of collective transformation.
Systems resist dramatic change. Whether we’re talking about organizational culture, community dynamics, or our own nervous systems, big sweeping changes often trigger defensiveness and resistance. Small steps allow systems — and relationships to those systems — to adjust gradually, building new patterns without the threat that comes with upheaval.
Trust is built through consistency. In collaborative work, trust doesn’t come from grand gestures — it comes from showing up reliably and following through on what we’ve agreed to. As Stephen Covey teaches in The Speed of Trust, trust is built through consistent demonstration of care over time, not isolated, dramatic moments. The same applies to trusting ourselves: we build self-trust through keeping small promises to ourselves, not through what we hope for, but what we can work to sustain.
If you can see a long-term vision for yourself, but you aren’t sure where to begin, the following prompts provide a framework to guide you. These concepts are adapted from the work of Candice D’Meza [2].
Plant a Seed: A Framework for Sacred Planning
Ask for discernment: What action does this require of me?
Assess your environment: What do I need to set into motion for this to be possible? How is my environment supporting my vision or not? How can I make space within my life, and the environment I live within, to foster alignment with my vision?
Release what no longer serves: What am I holding onto that is no longer serving me as it once was? What would it look like to lovingly let go, stop grasping, or otherwise release the patterns and tendencies that feel heavy?
Identify your support systems: Can I identify pillars of support that I can lean on as I am changing, knowing that it will feel uncomfortable to enter into a zone of unfamiliarity and not have what I’m used to relying on?
The Ripple Effect
The beauty of small steps is that each motion sends out ripples of momentum through our lives. We can count on this, despite the fact that we rarely get to see the full impact of our actions. This is what faith is made of — being able to trust that the work we set into motion will take us to a better place than we are now, perhaps better than we can yet imagine.
Author adrienne maree brown calls this “emergent strategy” — the understanding that what we practice at small scale sets the pattern for the whole system. In project work, we see this constantly: one person’s willingness to try a new approach inspires their teammate. A small process improvement in one department gets noticed and adopted elsewhere. A moment of honest communication in a meeting shifts the team’s entire dynamic. We cannot always trace the full path of our influence, but we can trust that intentional, consistent actions create change beyond what we can measure.
Small steps make it easier to adjust to the unfamiliar, including settings and groups that could feel threatening. Change can feel dangerous to the parts of us that cling to an outdated way of life, even when it is suffocating our ability to grow. We have to keep in mind that we are part of ecosystems that are constantly changing; the more we resist the inevitable, the more energy we have to focus on intentionally transforming what needs our attention.
In Part 2 of this series, I’ll explore how to build the trust needed to act before we feel ready, especially when external circumstances make faith feel challenging. For now, what seed do you feel called to plant?
Sources:
[1] Grace Lee Boggs, PhD, activist and philosopher whose work emphasized transforming ourselves to transform the world. See more at www.boggscenter.org/thinking-for-ourselves
[2] Candice D’Meza, www.candicedmeza.com/
[3] Stephen Covey, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything (2006)
[4] adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017)
Leave a comment