If you haven’t noticed, I recently launched my first on-line courses. It is something I have been trying to do for a long time, but just have not been able to get off the ground.

I could give you a lot of excuses, and some of them would be valid. I was still recovering from my cancer surgery and treatments and that took a lot out of me. I have only gotten my energy back in the last month. And too, the platform I was using to build it had a meltdown just as I was ready to launch the first time. Hacked and everything lost. In the end, I went to a whole new platform and that had the requisite learning curve. There were pandemic issues. Other stuff. Quite the list.

The thing is, I am not working any harder than I worked the past year. Strangely, what got me, finally, to this place where I am publishing a couple of lessons each week, doing a sermon each week and leading a bible study each week, plus my day job came not from working faster, but slower.

When things were not going well – cancer, pandemic, meltdowns, etc, I tended to try and work fast. To push myself to get more and more done in the lesser amount of time that I had left to me. I can do that. We all can, I think. But the truth was, while I was working faster, I was not working to my best ways of doing things. Slowing down is what worked better for me.

I learned that in doing my sermons, strangely enough. I have done sermons on Zoom for the past year. Actually, I have been doing the entire service on Zoom. It is a very deliberate process, a little tedious, and requires me to go, very methodically, step by step by step, bouncing between my script and Power Point.

That is not how I have worked in most of my life. I have always leapt ahead to the next thing before the in-the-moment thing was finished. I had people to finish things, so it worked.

Today, I work mostly alone. I don’t have people. So I have had to relearn doing things. Step by step, No leaps. Baby steps. One after the other. Slow movement. But steady. And yet, somehow, it has made me more effective, more efficient, and able to get more things done, with less stress (Leaping carries with it an element of risk.) I am pleased with my progress for the first time in a couple of years.

The point of the post is not to tell you whether to leap or take baby steps as you reach for your goals. It is to be aware of what works best for YOU. And that requires being honest. You can’t count on how you feel doing each one. I feel better leaping. But I DO better with baby steps. I accomplish more. No, you can’t count on how you feel, but on what works.

Want to move forward faster? Start by looking at how you work, looking at other possibilities and even trying them, always looking at the results. That time in honest effort, trying and watching, can pay big dividends.

Be well. Travel wisely,

Tom