All right, welcome back or welcome to the Pursuit of Calling podcast, where my goal
and purpose is to provide you with the strategies and tools needed to successfully discover
and pursue your God-given calling.
I'm your host, Thomas Kearney, and today we're talking about small wins.
Okay so whenever I was a little bit more physically able, and maybe one day I'll be able to do
this again, I would go on runs in my own neighborhood, and I would go maybe a few days a week, and
the hardest part of my run was when I would get about to the halfway point, which is like
the furthest point from my home, and I would start to get intimidated by how much distance
I had to get from where I was to where I wanted to be, which was at home.
And I decided what I ended up doing was breaking that up into small bite-sized pieces, breaking
that big goal into something small.
I think you can already get where we're going.
So what I would do, I would look at, for instance, every mailbox.
I would look at the closest mailbox right in front of me, and in my head it would be
like, okay, I just got to get to that mailbox.
Then I pass that mailbox, and that's a win.
Then look at the next one, I just got to get to that mailbox.
That's a win.
I would take two or three mailboxes down, and I was like, I just got to get to that
mailbox.
Then if I can do that, I can do the next one too.
So I just keep running to the next mailbox, and I keep doing that, doing that, and doing
that the whole way home.
And before I know it, I'm home.
And the time it took to get from where I was to where I wanted to be, one, didn't seem
like it took as long, but it also caused me to endure the journey longer, since I wasn't
just sitting there intimidated by how long I still had to go to get from where I was
to where I wanted to be.
So you guessed it already, we're talking about small wins.
I guess you didn't have to guess because I said it in the intro, but small wins are
extremely important when you're pursuing your calling.
And what we're going to be talking about today is about how to get them set up in order for
them to be productive, realistic, and measurable.
This concept can be translated to pretty much any goal that you have in any area of your
life.
It can be financial, personal growth, relationships, career, and all of those wrap up into the
goals you have for your calling.
Another word for a small win is a milestone.
You might've heard that one before.
I like how George Campbell puts it for paying off debt using the Ramsey Solution Debt Snowball.
He says this, he says, the quick wins you get with a debt snowball help you to believe
you can actually pay off your debt.
And if you believe it, you'll start behaving like it.
Now, one, what is a debt snowball?
And what does he mean by if you believe it, you're going to start behaving like it?
Why is that important to what we're talking about here?
Let me explain.
So you're paying off, the debt snowball is this.
You pay off the smallest debt first.
A lot of people disagree with that, but I did it and it makes a lot of sense.
You pay off the smallest debt first.
You get that quick win and then you gain financial in this instance and mental momentum to hit
the next larger debt harder than you did for the last one.
Now how does this apply?
Let me explain.
So you get that part where the quick win gave you momentum.
It gave you that, not just validation, but it gave you the satisfaction, this knowledge
that yeah, I can do this.
Yeah, I can do this thing.
This is I can pay off this debt, which means I can pay off the next one.
Instead of looking at all the debt you have all chunked together into one pot, being like,
wow, I have $100,000 of debt left.
You're like, wow, that's intimidating.
Or you just take the smallest debt, which maybe is like a medical bill of a few thousand
dollars.
You're like, okay, I got that one.
So with what we're talking about, small wins is the same thing.
Same idea.
Every time I hit a mailbox when I was running, it gave me that mental fortitude to go to
the next one.
So now let's dive into making these small wins, these milestones, productive.
And all it means to make it productive is making sure that the milestones you're setting
are actually going to get you closer to your ultimate goal.
For instance, I have this in my notes.
If you want to write a book, what would a good first milestone be?
It could be as simple as start writing.
Maybe you didn't start yet.
And maybe it won't be any good, but the point is to start.
Or reaching out to maybe, maybe it's reaching out to someone that is ahead of you of where
you are and learning some things that you don't know.
Maybe you have a certain list of specific things that you want to learn.
You know somebody that can help you out, or you figure out who you can ask and then ask
them and reach out to them and hook up with them and then learn the things that you're
looking to learn.
Maybe that would be a win too.
To get you closer from where you are, to not having the knowledge, to having the knowledge,
to get you closer to writing the actual book.
And you didn't see me, but I just made a motion that was like, duh.
But it's not actually as obvious.
I shouldn't do that.
And I also want you to remember that productivity, it does not equal being busy and it does not
equal perfection.
No, you want to make sure that you're not just making yourself busy in order to feel
productive.
You don't want to try to do five different things, try to hit all these five different
small wins all at once just to make yourself busy, just to make yourself feel like you're
being productive and getting closer to your goal because realistically you might not be
in that instance.
The point of these milestones is that you work on one at a time.
So they incrementally will grow.
Just like when paying off your debt, it makes way more sense to pay off one first and pay
off the next one to pay off the next one because your financial power will ramp up as you go.
So then I also want to go back to perfection.
Perfection is a myth.
You're going to mess up and your goals most likely will change.
But if you're going from where you are to where you want to be, like I said earlier
about writing a book, you need a start.
You just need a start.
You're going to mess up.
Your goals are going to mess up.
You're going to learn from your mistakes.
But the point is to start.
And maybe you'll have some more milestones along the way that you didn't see before.
That's okay.
Okay.
But you want to be realistic.
We just want to make sure that the milestones or the small wins that you're setting can
actually be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time.
Or at all, actually.
We want to make sure that you're actually able to accomplish these goals.
I like how John Maxwell says in his book, 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, he says, there's
a difference between having a dream that propels you to achieve and pulling an idea out of
thin air that has no connection with who you are and what you can actually do.
You must have some kind of criteria for knowing if the desire you have matches the abilities
you possess.
Do you have the abilities?
Do you actually want to do all that it will take to even do the smaller part of the bigger
goal?
Because the answer is no to either of those questions.
You may need to do some introspective work.
And I highly recommend getting the 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth.
Put that link into the description so you can pick that up for yourself.
It's not a promo code.
It's just, I really love the book.
I want to go back to say, I want to reiterate what John said.
He said, you must have some kind of criteria for knowing if the desire you have matches
the abilities you possess.
Maybe you're the small win that you need.
If you're not able to do this small win, maybe your big goal needs to change.
But then, but like if you're, if you get to come to that point where you're like, man,
this small win maybe isn't realistic right now, but all these other ones are.
For instance, this could be true too.
Maybe with a small milestone I set isn't realistic.
Maybe I'm not actually, don't have the ability to do it.
And maybe you can actually gain that ability.
Maybe this milestone is actually one that you set further down the line and there's
some steps that you have to do before that.
Let's make sure you're staying realistic.
And finally, like I said, your goals need to be measurable.
Your wins, your small wins, your milestones need to be measurable.
How you know when you've actually accomplished your goal.
I recommend each, like I said, I recommend each one being measurable.
For instance, for me last week, I decided I was going to reach out to people and get
two coaching clients to coach for free.
And this week I'm doing the same thing.
I'm reaching out to people and my goal is to get two more coaching clients for free.
And I'm pretty sure I already got one.
So we might ramp that up to three.
I love the power of one more, Ed Mylett, look that up.
But there's a, I want to use the same example as before.
If you're writing a book, each milestone could be how many pages you write in a day.
Maybe it could be 10 pages, it could be five.
It's all up to you and when you actually want to accomplish the final product by.
You get to set that pace.
And I just thought of something as I was saying this.
I get some of these goals aren't actually going, maybe some of them aren't actually
measurable.
Or maybe I should say they don't seem like they could be.
Like I said earlier, like maybe you're reaching out to somebody to learn something new.
Well, how many, like let's take that into consideration.
How would you make that measurable?
Well, how many things do, how many new things do you want to learn?
Two, three, five, 10?
Is this the only person you're going to reach out to?
How many people should you reach out to?
Two, three, 10?
Like everything can be measured.
All these things can be measurable.
There's a whole thing I was just learning about recently that these would all be considered
performance goals.
Things that you're actually going to do.
But then there's another thing called growth goals.
Now that's a whole other episode that I have actually just been learning about recently.
And those growth goals are goals that you set for yourself that help you gain the ability
to be able to actually achieve these performance goals.
It was just like the root of all of this.
So that's definitely an episode I want to make pretty soon.
So let's just do a quick recap and then we'll wrap it up.
So we talked today about how to make your small wins.
Well, actually, first we talked about what small wins were, and then we talked about
how to make small wins, your milestones, into being productive, realistic, and measurable.
Being productive does not mean perfection.
It does not mean just being busy so that you feel productive, making them realistic and
make sure that you can actually do them at all.
And being measurable, it just means adding some sort of quantitative value so you know
when you have actually accomplished this goal.
So there you go, guys.
I hope this helps and I hope you're able to take this and apply it to your goals today.
So thanks for listening to this episode of the Pursuit of Calling podcast.
If you enjoyed it, I'd love it if you shared this episode out on Facebook and Instagram.
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Again, I'm going to say it again, like Dave Ramsey says, if you've got nothing nice to
say, don't say anything at all.
It's not nice.
All right.
Keep on pursuing your calling and I'll see you in the next episode.
I'm going to say it again.
Keep pursuing.