Baby Steps in Business, Life and Running

There was no other time but the present moment to do something I had planned on doing but hadn’t gotten around to doing yet. You know the feeling when you set a goal, see yourself accomplishing the goal and yet hesitate to get moving towards the goal. Two words reverberated in my mind, “baby steps.”

I had come across those two words “baby steps” three times yesterday. First as I started on an 11 mile run around Onondaga Lake my longest run in preparing for the 2017 Boston Marathon on a Charity Bib for 261Fearless.org, discovering my step mother with Alzheimer’s Disease finally agreed to use a walker, and talking to a beloved member of my organization faced with cancer. All three of us were taking baby steps yesterday.

As I headed out for my first “long run” towards my Boston Marathon goal which was less than 40 days, I told myself I could do my 11 miles if I took one step at a time – baby steps – of sorts to complete the 2 hour challenge. This philosophy took me easily to the half way point in ease and then back almost to the end before I needed to take baby steps the last half mile to get to the finish line. I didn’t mind taking the baby steps at the end because I had accomplished what I intended to do. Who cared whether my steps at the end of the run where large or small? I just wanted to finish the goal.

Sometimes in entrepreneurship or business we find ourselves in the same predicament. We want to grow bigger or take on a larger client or add new products and services to expand offerings but realize it will take many steps to get to the end. Smart business owners understand to accomplish any major feat sometimes it takes baby steps to start with and sometimes even in the middle when we run into problems. We don’t stop because we are faced with adversity, we just slow down, recalculating our pace and setting a new speed to get to the end goal.