You may be tempted to race towards your whole-life goals and try to achieve them as quickly as possible. Sometimes that’s the right approach and you gain lots of momentum. However, most people find that lasting change comes about through small, incremental progress to your goal.

Taking baby steps means that:

• You can fit your goals into the rest of your life without sacrificing other things that are also important to you.
• You can make small and significant adjustments to your route as you go along, instead of finding that you have to do a rapid U-turn at speed if something doesn’t turn out as you wanted.
• You enjoy the journey much more because you have time to build in rewards and celebrations.
• You build habits that stay with you for longer and become part of who you are, making the change much easier to sustain after you’ve reached your goal(s).
• You take out a lot of extra stress and pressure from your life that could have undesirable effects on you.
• You are more likely to sustain progress because you aren’t behaving in an extreme or uncomfortable way for your natural preferences.