“To Meet Big Goals, Think Small…”
From the New York Times recently - a journalist talks about taking steps to run her 10th marathon. "To Meet Big Goals, Think Small -- Focus on the incremental steps that are in your control."
TL:DR Creating outcome goals are important; however, it's the process goals that will get you there step by step.
It's a cornerstone strategy used in CBT, counseling, and with social work clients and a strategy used with professional coaching clients.
Thinking about creating your New Year goals or your new month goals or your goals for next week? Start by determining your overall outcome goal (refreshing your resume, sorting through your closets, digitizing those family albums, starting a creative project, etc) and creating small process steps to get to that goal.
For example, if you want to refresh your resume some small, measurable steps could be updating your most recent job, updating your most recent achievements, looking at your font choice, Googling current resume styles/standards for your industry, looking at resume templates in Canva or Word, reviewing your resume by section for where you could tighten or highlight, reviewing your action verbs, uploading your resume *with personal info scrubbed* to ChatGPT to assess, or have a friend copy edit and proof.
As Charles Duhigg said in the The New York Times article about writing a book in small increments: "If you just spend enough time sitting there doing these little bits and pieces, you end up with a book,” he said.