This is what I tell the wonderful people who work with me at the Center. This idea came from my father, who was an engineer designing power plants before he became an organic farmer. Although this may seem ironic, that a person who is so interested and concerned about the environment: a vegetarian back-packing marathon-running mountain climber, would be out there figuring out a way to burn fossil fuels, he was somehow able to reconcile this in his mind. And whether he was designing a power plant or sketching out lines and acres of organic heirloom tomatoes and garlic, he always made sure he did things right.

From his perspective, if you go off course a bit by a couple of inches (whether a building or a field), you go way off course after a while. So, even at ninety years young, he is still absolutely nit-picky that the farm-help (his kids) measure, lay out the lines and follow through with the prepping and planting and stay on course till the end.

As a therapist who is interested in helping people change, I realized a long time ago that ‘staying the course’ in living our lives is how people get stuck in situations or interactions that are not healthy or happy. But changing our behavior to go towards a place that is healthier, unknown, and away from toxic seems so hard – we look at the far horizon (where we think we want to be) and feel overwhelmed by the amount of changes we see we need to do to get there. So we ‘stay the course’, as if we are parts of steel or lines of seeds.

My way of helping change is to look at the “micro-movement”. Changing one small part is easy, and that sets up a chain-reaction of changes (not only for ourselves, but the people who are around us). It is easier to make a small change: walk for ten minutes, loose one pound, take a long breath before answering a disrespectful person. It is nice to have a goal that can be achieved rather than work on proving the lofty goals set can’t be achieved. Small, successful changes we make move us off of the track we were on. If we keep on that trajectory, then a year down the road, we haven’t sat on our fannies and needed to increase out blood pressure meds, we have speed-walked a 5K race; we haven’t gained ten pounds, we have lost 25; we haven’t lost our love for ourselves because of someone’s nasty comments to us, we have gained self respect by allowing those comments to drop on the floor.

If you want to change your life, even a small part of your life, it makes sense to start with small changes that are perceptible to you, but are, at first, not totally apparent to others. As you move on, others notice that you are nowhere near where you were were.