Baby Steps

Making a major lifestyle change can be overwhelming, particularly if it affects multiple areas of your life. How can you possibly manage to change everything at once?

The answer is, you don't. Whenever possible, take one thing at a time. Find the most critical aspect of your life that needs to be changed and tackle it first. Perhaps it's getting a budget together so you know what your financial obligations are and where your money is going. Perhaps it's something even more basic like making sure that you have a reliable source of food in spite of a loss of income. But make sure to identify that one thing and focus on it until you at least have a strategy for dealing with it. Then move on to the next most critical thing, and continue the process until you have finished your lifestyle overhaul.

This process of breaking a major project down into manageable chunks goes under several other names: divide and conquer, the salami tactic, bird by bird. But the principle is always the same -- to reduce an overwhelming task into a number of smaller tasks that will actually feel doable.