Welcome back! In Part Two, we’re taking Tiny on the road to explore what interesting things can happen on our journey of all things small.

But first, a quick recap. In Part One, we embarked on a novel way of embracing our New Year, upending conventional views of it as the start of a race to bigness. Instead, we started by going very, very small because…it works. We saw how tiny starts can evolve into big results – but they don’t have to have that destination to be highly worthwhile. Tiny is an awesome little powerhouse all on its own.

And in Part One you might have set up your own tiny goal with the guidance of two questions: What does your heart tell you could be the most meaningful ways you’d like to feel and be in your New Year? And what three tiny things might you begin with?

Tiny starts have two things in common:
an idea and a decision.

So, now that we know Tiny is the key to any beginning, in this second installment of the Tiny is Mighty Series, we will explore implementation, do some problem solving around any obstacles that appear, learn about the concepts of Habit Stacking and the Ripple Effect, and how they can fuel our journey. We will also see how Tiny and mental health pair beautifully together.

On we go.

Getting around roadblocks

First, let’s check-in and see if we’ve encountered anything standing in the way of our tiny New Year start. Have unforeseen circumstances or illness made you hit pause? Is your tiny goal feeling either not-so-tiny, or perhaps it’s not as interesting to you as you hoped it might be? Are you frustrated that it’s “too tiny” and thus questioning its worthiness? Any or all of these can happen. Not to worry, I’m here to help. See if any of these suggestions might feel right to you:

• • • If you hit pause due to external circumstance or illness: Repeat after me: “I am not behind.” I promise, you aren’t. This is your year, to start and live (and enjoy) your way. We are human, we live in bodies that sometimes stop working perfectly. Give yourself the gift of rest and recovery. Nobody’s going anywhere, you can start on your timing. (Email me at sarah@thrivingbravely.com and I will lovingly remind you that you are not behind.)
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• • • If your tiny goal is actually much bigger than you realized: break it down into pieces, like chapters or categories. List all the parts of the goal that you can think of until you find one (or more) things that you could start right now. Then, what next step would make sense, or be the most fun, or the fastest?
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• • • If your tiny goal is suddenly feeling less interesting, a couple of things might be happening.
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• • • • • One, even though it’s tiny, it has such big potential that it’s scaring the pants off you. As in “What me, achieve that? No way. That’s impossible.”
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• • • • • Ok. First, if your tiny goal is scaring you a little or a lot, that could be a great sign that you’ve chosen something that will get you out of your comfort zone. Being stretched is awesome and stimulating – however, if we take on too much, too fast and thus start avoiding taking any action, it might be time to rein things in a little. Just for now. How about picking one itty bitty piece to start? A phone call, write a page of notes about what you’d like to do, do fifteen minutes of research, tell a friend what you are setting out to do and ask for suggestions?
    • • If you wanted to drive from Los Angeles to New York, you’d map a route based on time, your interests, weather, good food, sights, etc. Do the same with your tiny goal: what is the first landmark or town you’ll reach on your journey? That’s all you need to think about right now. The first leg. Not the whole trip.

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      • • Second, maybe as you thought about it some more, your tiny goal is indeed not quite right for you. If it turns out it’s not so compelling after all, or doesn’t feel as relevant now – ditch it and pick another. (Your life is much too valuable to use it on things that don’t feel meaningful.)
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• • • If your sweet tiny goal now feels too tiny, as though it’s perhaps not challenging enough, or you in fact reached it already and want more challenge, then see what happens if you widen the scope. For example, if your tiny goal was to create a handmade collection of your poetry as gifts for friends and family, maybe your heart’s desire is to keep that tiny start, with a view of expanding it by starting to research how to find a book agent.
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We bring our whole selves to everything we think about, care about, and do. And when we’re struggling with difficult feelings such as anxiety, sadness, depression, overwhelm – Tiny can help with those vulnerabilities too.

Tiny starts, habits & changes
support our mental health

In this section we’ll take a closer look at ways that Tiny can help us feel better. Remember how Tiny took on creating land where there was none before? Watch Tiny take on these common features of depression, anxiety (and really all mental health challenges):

Challenge: Feeling easily overwhelmed
Tiny connection: Take any task and break it into as many tiny pieces as necessary. For example: “I can’t face the stack of mail” becomes “I’ll open one piece of mail right now. The rest can wait.”

If, and only if, it will help, do a quick scan of each, separate them into two stacks. Label one stack DO THESE BY FRIDAY (or whatever day) and the other stack DO THESE BY X DATE or WHEN I WANT TO. This strategy can help loosen the grip of overwhelm by eliminating worry about what’s actually in the pile of mail.

Challenge: Feeling stuck in a negative feedback loop
Tiny connection: “I can’t/don’t want to X because I’m feeling stuck and am disappointed in myself” becomes “I will do this one small thing (throw out the recycling? Send one email or make one phone call?) And for heaven’s sake, show shame the door: “I do want to do X but it’s ok to have an off day. Instead I’m going to have lunch and give myself a break. And that will be my win today.” (Yes, that would be one hell of a tiny yet big win!)

Challenge: Depression makes it hard to reward myself. (Yes, depression and other conditions disrupt the brain’s reward pathways.)
Tiny connection: After any positive habit, action, decision – even if it’s making your bed or cleaning up the kitchen, activate your dopamine response by saying something nice to yourself (e.g., “Good for me, I finished that”).

Challenge: Feeling unmotivated
Tiny connection: One small action builds confidence. Want to get to the gym? Make it tiny, tiny, tiny: go to the gym but instead of working out take a sauna. You got there, right? Motivation can appear more easily when we give ourselves credit for simply showing up. (Plus, the sauna will coax your brain into viewing the gym as rewarding.)

Challenge: Routines are really difficult right now
Tiny connection: Pick one tiny thing to do after you’ve woken up and put your feet on the floor. Could it be a short statement starting with either “I’m looking forward to…” or “I did well yesterday when I….” Could it be a 30-second breathing exercise where you inhale calm, exhale worry?

Challenge: Feeling Burnout
Tiny connection: Burnout is not healed by doing more (that’s akin to whipping an exhausted horse; please don’t do that to yourself!). Burnout is healed by rest, engaging in something different, and tapping into feeling pleasure again.

Speaking of pleasure, last week I did an experiment in Tiny. Almost every day, for years, I’ve had a salad for lunch – some combination of greens, protein, maybe some beans…quick and easy. Healthy, too. But good gracious it got boring and I was hungry again an hour later. The antithesis of pleasurable! Last week I’d had enough. Just couldn’t do one more salad for lunch. I still wanted to have the greens, but I changed the timing and had the salad for breakfast. It includes two fried eggs cooked over-easy, making its own delicious, warm dressing. And then I went all out and had what I really wanted for lunch. A grilled cheese sandwich with tomatoes and…wait for it…crispy bacon. What’s the big deal, some might ask.

Well, the big deal for me was two-fold: I gave myself the gift of looking forward to a delicious lunch AND felt fed. Nourished. That little bit of extra pleasure cascaded into feeling satisfied and re-connecting with the enjoyment of food. I had been in a food rut of unnecessary self-denial which included tolerating unnecessary hunger. (That it took me so long to make the connection that my hunger came from not eating enough is wildly comical, in hindsight! Read on for more on the obvious hiding in plain sight.)

Food is a necessity. It’s not just for survival, though. It’s meant to be relished and enjoyed. I know that this tiny shift I made, and the big result I experienced, also improved my stamina and focus on my writing projects. Who’d have thought a grilled cheese sandwich could have such power!?

I’m sharing this example with you because it was both tiny and transformative. And as I reflect on what made it transformative, I realize it is a perfect illustration of two key features of just about any change you’d like to make, whether it’s a behavior (a habit) or a mind-set (a pattern of thinking), or a feeling (an emotional state).

Habit Stacking + the Ripple Effect =
tiny and transformative

These two key components are Habit Stacking and the Ripple Effect. (Habit stacking is discussed at length in books by BJ Fogg and James Clear.) For our purposes, we will keep the focus on how these powerful concepts intersect with both Tiny and Mental Health.

Habit Stacking

Habit Stacking leverages our brain’s natural tendency to stick with the familiar, to follow our own well-established routines. Habit Stacking is just that: connecting a new habit or behavior to one we already do automatically.

Let’s say one of your routines is making coffee first thing in the morning. You might have “stacked” this with reading the news, or checking your email. But now you’ve decided instead you want to have your coffee while listening to some music, because the news and email are creating needless stress. So, you’ll set up a morning playlist for whatever effect you’d like – maybe energizing, maybe soothing,  maybe meditative, and so on. Your cue is coffee, and as it brews, you stack on your new habit by hitting PLAY. Voilà!

Here’s another example. I wanted to change when I tidy my desk (until recently, I did that first thing in the morning while having coffee). But I wanted to do that routinely at the end of the day, having discovered that when I cleaned my desk at night, it gave me such a boost to return to it early in the morning and not have do one thing before doing what I really want: to write.  I am a very early riser and I want to make the most of the couple of hours I have before other parts of my workday begin. So here’s the habit stack: At the end of my workday, right after the automatic, established routine I have of checking tomorrow’s schedule, I clean up. It takes 4-6 minutes. Then in the morning, I have my nice inviting, clear desk (and thus clear mind!) to do what I want, immediately.

This may seem like a mind-numbingly obvious (tiny) change to make, but it’s amazing how not-at-all-obvious our routines, automatic patterns and ways of doing things are. They live in the invisible world of our brains’ neural pathways which are so accustomed to the way we’ve usually done things, that automaticity takes over. We just don’t notice doing them anymore. Like a train going along the same tracks that were laid down years ago, no decision is necessary…just stay on the same tracks. With Habit Stacking, we are making use of this well-worn track to introduce a new habit that wants to go along for the ride. Thus, automatic, reflexive behaviors have an oft-overlooked value: they allow us to piggyback the new habit onto an established one.

This is much, much easier than starting from scratch, I assure you. And further, we can scale up this little habit stack by adding other habits or behaviors to the sequence. This makes change incremental (Tiny to the rescue, again!) and thus more sustainable.

Here’s the fast-track way
to create an effective Habit Stack:

A. Choose a habit you consistently have
B. Choose a new habit or behavior you want
C. Anchor B (new habit) to A (existing habit) by saying “After I (current habit), I will (new behavior/habit).”
D. Reinforce with repetition

Example from my breakfast/lunch habit:

A. I eat breakfast every morning.
B. I want to eat salad at breakfast because I want greens every day, and I need something different and more satisfying for lunch.
C. “After I have my coffee, I’ll prepare the salad, and eat it before starting work.”
D. I’ve done this everyday for two weeks (so far). I also discovered an unexpected reward: for unknown reasons I’m less uncomfortably hungry by the time lunch rolls around.

Three examples of mental health Habit Stacks

Note that D: Reinforce with repetition, is always the fourth step

A close cousin of Habit Stacking, the Ripple Effect metaphor describes how tiny actions, choices and decisions create chain reactions, spreading outward far beyond the point of origin, as when a pebble is thrown into a pond.

The Ripple Effect

The Ripple Effect is a non-linear concept of change, growth and empowerment; ripples don’t go in a straight line and neither do we. The Ripple Effect also emphasizes the interconnectedness of all aspects of ourselves. And how our own selves engage with and potentially help change the world around us.

A smile to a stranger passing us by could have a Ripple Effect; he might feel a boost from it and say something nice to the next person he encounters. One tiny instance of goodwill can build at an exponential rate.

Here are some more examples of the Ripple Effect in action – starting tiny yet radiating powerfully:

• Deciding to spend 15 minutes a day learning Mandarin (tiny) could lead to conversational fluency
• Research shows that when people start working out regularly, their diets often quickly improve because they’re drawn to food that fuels activity
• When we set a boundary with someone, it changes how they relate to us
• One act of kindness can create a domino effect
• When someone inspires me, I can’t wait to share it with others
• The Ripple Effect is cumulative: small changes add up over time
• We don’t need leaps to make progress, we need intentional steps
• Starting a conversation about transgender rights, or any value and belief, can lead to community and even national conversations

The Ripple Effect means that
no action is too small to matter.

Which means, without a doubt, that every tiny step we take, every load of soil, rock and cement that is added to the pile, every kindness to ourselves and others, every breath, every loving choice, every tiny beginning, every generosity, and every piece of love we’re offered – matters. More than ever.

Tiny is incredible. It can create land that never existed before (and construct massively heavy buildings to go on it). It can take you across the country. It can get you published. It can help you find your life partner. It can change your life.

And still, Tiny is just as amazing being its tiny self, without a destination in mind. Such as the sweet little white lilac I wrote about in The New Year Effect, which made me smile whenever I walked past it. Such as resting when we’re tired. Such as starting your day with a kind word to yourself. Such as watching my dog run at breathtaking speed at the park and then collapse into sleep. Such as having a salad for breakfast.

Keep your big heart focused on small and Tiny,
and all kinds of beautiful things will come into focus.

See you again soon for Part Three, where we will look closely at Resting and Refueling, to ensure that in whatever form you’ve invited Tiny into your life, it continues to enrich your New Year.