The Horizon Can Be Huge. The Step Cannot.

You can see it. The thing you want.

Maybe not in detail, but you can feel how you want it to look. The work that would matter.

The relationship you're quietly aching for. The version of your life that’s more you than anything you’ve ever done up until now.

And then you try to move toward it, and something happens. A cavern opens up in front of you. 

You see the whole thing at once. Every step between here and there, stacked on top of each other, all due now. And it's so big that your body does what the body does when it’s facing a mountain.

It stops.

You decide you’ll do it later. Next week. When things settle down, when you have more time, when you feel more ready. This is you standing with your toes up against the cavern edge with no idea how you’re going to cross it.

The real danger here?

You’ll stuff the wanting down because it's easier to not want a thing than to stand at the edge of it and freeze.

Yes, I’ve been here at the edge of so many caverns. 

Newsflash (and you're welcome for confirming this): You were never meant to leap.

The size of the want is not the size of the step. 

Here's the truth: the horizon is supposed to be big.

The horizon is what you want. The far side of the distance between who you are now and who you're meant to become. And if it doesn't scare you a little, it's probably too small to pull you anywhere.

So keep the horizon enormous.

But the step toward it is allowed to be almost embarrassingly small.

Not because small is all you're capable of. Because small is the size you can actually take while you're still afraid. Small enough to do on a tired day. A day you hadn't planned on being brave. A day the fear is loud.

That smallness isn't a compromise. It's the whole design.

The voice that gets loud the moment you get serious

There's a voice that shows up right when you decide to move. I call mine Fred. (He's the little dragon guy you see in my pictures because it helps me to talk to him if I can picture him.)

Fred is fear. Not a villain. A protector. He's the part of your brain, your amygdala, that has walked with you through everything. 

Every hurt. Every time you were criticized or laughed at or watched something fail. Every conversation you overheard about someone else who tried and got burned.

He kept all of it. Faithfully. For decades.

And the second you reach for something that looks like risk, he opens the files and reads them back to you. 

You'll look foolish. You've been hurt before. Who do you think you are.

He means well. He's trying to keep you from a pain he still remembers.

But what he doesn’t know is that you can grow. Your past doesn’t equal your future.

So you don't argue with him. You look that little dragon in the eye and thank him for the warning. Then you lift him up under his arms, gently, and set him over there.

And you say: I hear you. But I need to do this. I need to see where it goes. I need to grow. If I don't take this step, I'll regret it for a long time.

Then you take the step. Small. While he's still talking. You're the one driving now.

None of mine looked brave from the outside

I know how this works because I've done it more times than I can count, and not one of the steps looked like courage to anyone watching.

When I decided I wanted to be a coach, to do the thing my heart had been asking for, the horizon was my whole future. The Tiny Brave Steps were:

1. Set a date. A real date.

2. Fill out the retirement papers. 

3. Push send on the email.

And it meant the end of my income, not to mention the end of my identity, as I had known it.

Fred had a great deal to say. But I took the steps anyway.

When I decided I wanted to know real love, all the way through, once in my life, the horizon was enormous. The steps were:

1. Make a profile on a dating app. (it was a good way to plant my flag & declare my intention)

2. Type the words. 

3. Choose the photos. 

4. Decide who to say ‘yes’ to.

5. Go!

None of the steps were big. They were scary. But the size I could take while I was shaking.

There were others. 

…Applying to a networking group where I'd have to stand in a room full of entrepreneurs and call myself a coach out loud, before I fully believed it. 

…Sitting down to research how a person even builds a website, because the business I wanted meant being seen, and being seen started with one afternoon of not knowing and looking anyway.

Small steps. Scary horizons. Every one taken with Fred nattering in the back seat while I was driving.

Smaller, not bigger

A step doesn't carry you the whole way across. It hands you one piece of evidence that you're a woman who moves.

So if you're standing at the edge of something, frozen, the answer isn't a bigger push. It's a smaller step.

Ask the shrinking question. 

• If the step feels too big to take, what's half of it? 

• Still too big? Half again. 

• Keep going until it stops making you freeze and starts to feel almost too small to bother with. That one, the one with a little flutter still in it, is yours.

Keep the risk. Shrink the size.

Then look Fred in the eye, thank him, set him over there, and move while your hands are still shaking.

If you want help finding the step that's small enough to actually take this week, bring it to the Tiny Brave Steps Generator. Tell it what you want and what's stopping you, and let it shrink the step down with you.

And if you'd like to take it in a room full of women doing the same thing, come find us in Creative Spaces. We meet on Zoom, and we cross our bridges together, one small step at a time.

You don't have to leap across the cavern or to the top of a high mountain.

You just have to lift your foot.