Baby-steps.

Working with my clients these past weeks, I was reminded of an important role that I have as their coach, which I sometimes tend to overlook in the other areas of my life: celebrate progress!

It’s quite easy to only see all the things we still want to achieve, the areas where we are so far from being able to do what we want to learn or achieve. And so we are blind to those baby-steps we do every single day, to how we are able to get more fluent and skillful in dealing with the stumbling stones on our way. We are so busy looking forward that we don’t take the time to stand still and take a look at what we did well and where we made progress.

And, I am guilty of that as well – as a mum and for myself. I’m sometimes so caught up in the busy schedule of my life that I just look at the way ahead. At all the things I want to learn and I think the kids should learn as well, so that I tend to not even notice for a while when my youngest dresses himself (!) or I manage to stay calm in the midst of morning grumpiness and a full day ahead.

It’s when we look back over the last few months that we start adding up all the baby-steps we have taken and that add up to a quite considerable change or progress. We realize that we have built new capacities and that maybe the way to go is not quite that long anymore.

These are two things that I do now from time to time: I try to be present and receptive in any moment to notice when something that used to be difficult for me or others suddenly got easier or lighter. And, regularly, I lean back and reflect on those longer term developments and where I stand with those. Like this website: the first blogpost took me a full day to write and now I am able to write two posts almost every week. Yes, I sometimes struggle and it feels like I have nothing meaningful to write. And still, I do it and it gets easier every time, little by little.

How about you? What are those big projects in your life and how have you progressed in the last 6 months? And where can you see the baby-steps every day, maybe in a specific situation?