The Power of Little Steps with Roger Teel

[00:00:00] Greetings, Mile Hiers. You know everybody wants to create change in their life.

[00:00:07] Something within calls them to grow, to reveal more of what's within them and

[00:00:14] just to enjoy a more expansive life. It's interesting though the ways we often go

[00:00:19] about creating change in our life. We get all enthusiastic and we dive in and we

[00:00:25] effort and effort at it and then after a while many just falter and I've

[00:00:29] had to experience myself. And what I've come to learn is that if I want to make

[00:00:34] change especially any significant change it works far better to take little steps,

[00:00:40] little steps and continuous little steps. It's kind of like the difference between

[00:00:46] a sip and a gulp. And a lot of people use the gulp approach when they're

[00:00:52] moving towards some change or initiating some change. The sip method works best

[00:00:58] and that means successive incremental progressive action steps. Successive

[00:01:05] incremental progressive action steps will get you a whole lot further than a

[00:01:10] few big gulps and then maybe falling away and not proceeding. You know in

[00:01:18] a big ocean liner they are so heavy and they get up to several dozen knots

[00:01:24] if they're really trucking and it is humanly impossible to shift the rudder of

[00:01:32] those big ships with just the big rudders alone. There's just too much

[00:01:38] forward energy. So an engineer a long time ago developed what's called the

[00:01:43] trim tab which is a littler rudder that's part of the big rudder. Now

[00:01:49] the little rudder can shift and change and the more they trim tab the more

[00:01:55] they can begin to move the ship and move the rudder. I believe that we need to

[00:02:00] use that trim tab or that sip method in our own life. I took a rider's

[00:02:08] workshop about 15, 16 years ago I believe in Santa Fe really talented

[00:02:16] rider who's also a therapist and there are about 20 of us in this group and he

[00:02:21] told a story about a client of his who lived at a distance who was a church

[00:02:28] secretary and this church secretary was a phenomenal person. She had used her

[00:02:34] spiritual path to overcome heroin addiction. She had reached back out to

[00:02:41] this rider therapist because she had had to have an operation and as a result of

[00:02:47] that she got hooked on the painkillers. Now before that operation the church was

[00:02:52] constantly asking her to get up and share before the whole congregation

[00:02:55] witnessed for her wonderful reliance on God and all the shift the great change

[00:03:01] she had made and now she was humiliated she was keeping it secret but

[00:03:06] how could she tell anybody because she was supposed to be this hero and

[00:03:09] now here she was addicted again so she reached out to this therapist and he had

[00:03:15] written a book about these small changes do one thing different is the

[00:03:19] title and she reread the book and so this secretary decided it was time to use

[00:03:26] the sip method successive incremental progressive change and so she on the

[00:03:31] first day she sawed off one-twelfth of a pill she was taking 27 pills a day so that

[00:03:40] first day she took 26 and 11 twelfths of a pill and she kept doing that day by day

[00:03:48] just a little bit off the pill it took her a month to get down to 26 but she

[00:03:54] kept going and she found that she could cut a little more off the more she

[00:03:59] kept doing this and maintaining her dedication to the little shifts the

[00:04:03] little reduction of what she was taking in until about a year later she was

[00:04:08] entirely clean and then she got up in front of the congregation and she shared

[00:04:12] that and everybody embraced her in their heart and got a lot of great growth out

[00:04:17] of it so the end result is what we really care about and sometimes we

[00:04:25] get over enthusiastic and we want to make it all happen really quickly because of

[00:04:30] course we're instant gratification folks in the society that sometimes and

[00:04:37] sometimes those big gulps seem okay but then after a while they're hard to

[00:04:43] sustain so why not make progressive bits of change cheerleading oneself all

[00:04:52] along the way and realizing that the more we do that the cumulative power of

[00:04:57] that starts moving us along even more fully I teach this in the meditation

[00:05:03] retreat I tell them at the end of our four wonderful days I'd rather have you

[00:05:06] do 15 minutes a day for the next month then have you all enthusiastic from

[00:05:13] this retreat sit down to do 45 minutes or an hour because I'm not sure

[00:05:17] you're going to be able to integrate that into your life with all the

[00:05:19] things you have to face so why not those 15 minutes because regular daily 15

[00:05:25] minute sessions will become more powerful than like once a week hour long

[00:05:30] sessions I've seen that and known that to be true so I offer this to you

[00:05:35] whatever it is you're working on in your life remember this phrase which I

[00:05:40] think is from Philippians this one thing I do letting go of the things that

[00:05:46] are behind me and reaching forth to that which is before me I press toward the

[00:05:53] mark for the high calling of the prize of God so press on take some sips and let

[00:06:02] your life continue to grow into your greatness many blessings