Tiny Steps

A client sat opposite me this week, hands wrapped around a mug of tea and said the words I hear more than almost any other in this job: "I know what I should be doing but I just can’t seem to start."

She isn't alone. I've heard versions of this from Sixth Formers staring at a blank revision timetable, the widower who hasn't opened his wife's wardrobe in over a year, the client three weeks into a bereavement who can't face answering the phone. All of them are waiting for something to arrive before they act. A feeling. A readiness. The right day.

It doesn't come, because that’s not how it works.

We've got the order backwards

Most of us believe that motivation comes first and action follows. Feel like it, then do it. Except neuroscience and thirty years of watching students and grieving clients tackle essays, admin trays, gardens tells me the opposite is closer to the truth. Action comes first. Motivation, energy and even a flicker of hope follow behind it. Sometimes within minutes.

This is the whole engine behind solution-focused practice, which is the approach I use with almost everyone I walk alongside or sit with across the kitchen table during a coaching session. Instead of excavating why the revision timetable feels impossible, or analysing every reason the wardrobe stays shut, we ask a much smaller, much kinder question: what is the tiniest possible version of this that you could do today?

Not the essay. One paragraph. Not the wardrobe. One drawer. Not "process my grief". Ring one person on the list.

Why tiny works when big doesn't

A task the size of "sort my life out" or "get ready for my exams" is too large for an already-overwhelmed brain to get a grip on, so it does the sensible thing and looks away. A task the size of "open one folder" or "write three lines" is small enough that even a nervous system running on empty can manage it. And here's the useful bit: once it's done, however small, the brain registers completion. A tiny hit of dopamine arrives. The next tiny step looks slightly less impossible than it did five minutes ago.

I see this constantly with A Level students. Ask a Year 13 to "revise Hamlet" and you'll get a closed laptop and a long scroll through their phone instead. Ask them to just find and copy out three quotations, nothing more, and more often than not they're still at the desk forty minutes later, because starting was the only genuinely hard part.

I see the same thing, gentler and slower, with bereaved clients. Grief is not solved by tiny steps, and I would never suggest it should be. But the paralysis that so often sits alongside grief (unopened post, unmade calls, overgrown garden) responds beautifully to it. One envelope. One phone call. A few weeds pulled out. The task itself is almost irrelevant. What matters is that doing something, however small, proves to an anxious mind that movement is still possible.

The solution-focused shift

What I love about working this way with both groups of clients is how it changes the conversation. We stop asking "why can't you" and start asking "what's the smallest next step". We stop treating the absence of motivation as a character flaw and start treating it as ordinary and expected. Nobody feels like doing the hard thing before they've started it. That isn't weakness or a lack of resolve. It's just how the sequence runs for almost everyone, in exam halls and hospice gardens alike.

So if you, or someone you're supporting, is stuck waiting for the feeling of readiness to show up before they'll move, stop waiting. Pick something absurdly small. One paragraph, one drawer, one phone call, one weed. Do that, and notice what happens next. It usually isn't nothing.