The Baby Step Method Of High Productivity

High productivity is something everyone wants. It is wonderful when we find our efforts and results connecting in a positive way. It feels rewarding and nourishing.

So why does it often elude us?

How Living In Your Head Gets You In Trouble

High productivity comes with a requirement: we have to engage with reality. So often we work from an idea or ideal without considering the reality constraints that we are working with. Inevitably, then we will fail in some way or suffer a setback because we were not in touch with the issues and requirements to achieve our goal. We lose our productivity.

There is nothing wrong with having an ideal or idea for what we want in life. The problem comes from how we relate to reality.

If you wanted to play professional basketball, but were a 5 foot tall man, unless you were exceptionally hard-working or gifted the odds would be against you. If you wanted to created a new fashion line and had no training in tailoring, or design and wanted the line to be available in one week, you would also be guilty of unrealistic expectations. Unrealistic expectations cost us our not only our productivity but over time can damage our spirits.

The problem is not to make you “realistic” in the sense of assuming you can never succeed. The idea is to understand reality so that you can then create a way to succeed based on reality not in defiance of it.

How Baby Steps Help Your Productivity

Baby steps are a great model for learning how to succeed. Like the baby in the image, each step is an engagement with the present and present reality and one follows and succeeds another. The baby cannot jump too far ahead, but delights in taking each step.

That kind of thinking lets you see each step in your process to achieving anything as something precious to be honored and treated well. Honoring each step is a great way to increase your productivity.

When you do that you consider each step in full context and with all the information you need to make the best of it. You are not rushing to a conclusion. You are joyfully creating your success.

Honoring The Creative Process

As Robert Fritz, author of The Path Of Least Resistance, has written, each time you honor each step of the creative process you are allowing real hope to enter your life.

There is a gift to each of us in honoring our work in all of its aspects, by being thorough and attentive to the work, that gives us a quiet joy and leads to our feeling hopeful. Taking one step successfully, being centered in our work, lets us know that we can take the next step.

Once we know we can do it we have real hope that comes from our own efforts. Our hope is not wrapped up in anything but our own effort, and that puts it under our control and not at the mercy of others.

That is a wonderful gift to give to yourself. So increase your productivity and take a chance on yourself by taking baby steps.