A “small victory” is a powerful personal development tool that can help you form a new habit, break a bad habit, make a lasting change in your life, or simply try out something new.

In a previous article, I wrote about why the Kaizen approach, which consists of taking small steps in a spirit of continuous improvement, is a great way to stretch out of your comfort zone and make lasting changes.

The small victory tool combines several Kaizen techniques into a powerful package.

For example, let’s say that you want to develop a new habit, like exercising regularly, eating healthier, saving more money, cutting your spending, or writing in a journal.

You’ve probably heard that it takes 21 to 30 days to form a new habit. Once you get over this initial period, the habit takes hold and your new behavior starts becoming almost automatic. After a couple of months, it becomes so natural that you feel strange when you don’t do it.

The key is to get through those first 21 to 30 days and then let the force of habit carry you through. Sounds simple enough, but it’s definitely not easy. You probably know from experience that forming or changing habits can be hard work.

As I pointed out in the previous article, a lot of it has to do with our comfort zone and our natural resistance to change.

Overcoming Resistance to Change

The power of the small victories tool comes from the fact that it’s not the change itself that causes resistance, but your perception of the size of the change: The bigger the perceived change, the stronger the resistance you experience and the harder it becomes to sustain the change over the long-term.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s film about global warming, he uses the “boiling frog” story to illustrate the point that gradual change is sometimes hard to notice.

In case you haven’t heard the story, it goes something like this… If you try to boil a frog by throwing it into a pot of boiling water, it will react immediately and jump out. If, however, you put the frog into a pot of lukewarm water and slowly raise the temperature, the frog will not react in time and will boil to death.

While the story is probably an urban legend, it illustrates that gradual change is more difficult to notice than sudden change because it gives us time to adapt and acclimate to the new conditions.

While this principle can be bad in the case of global warming, or the slow erosion of civil liberties, it can also be put to very good use through the small victories tool.

Taking Small Steps to Success

There are two main ways you can make a change seem small: You can make the size small or you can make the duration small.

For example, if I ask you to exercise for 2 minutes each day by marching in place, do you think you could do it? Most people would say yes, they could easily do it.

Now, let’s say that I ask you to walk for 20 minutes each day, but only for the next four days. That would be a slightly bigger commitment of time and energy, and you would most likely feel a bit more resistance to the change, but it would be much easier to accept than if I asked you to commit to walking 20 minutes each day for the next 10 years.

The limited duration makes you perceive it as a smaller change that is easier to accept and deal with.

When you combine these two ideas, limiting both the size and duration of the change, you have a winning formula for taking small steps, overcoming resistance to change, and making it sustainable over the long-term.

In practice, 4 to 7 days seems to be the most effective duration range for the small victories tool. It’s long enough to get you started on the path to habit formation, but short enough to make the change appear small and doable.

At this point, you may be thinking “This sounds great, but how is it going to help me get to the level of change that I want to make?”

The way you do this is to create a “chain” of small victories, one after the other, with each link in the chain gradually increasing the amount of change over the previous one.

If you think about it, that’s exactly how you can go from bench pressing 30 pounds, to 50 pounds, to 90 pounds, to 120 pounds and so on. You don’t start off trying to bench press 200 pounds right off the bat unless you want to injure yourself. You start small and progressively increase the weight as you become stronger.

The small victories tool works the same way.

I’ll talk more about these victory chains later in this article, but first we need to discuss a very important principle that makes it all work…

The Pain/Pleasure Principle of Motivation

The pain/pleasure principle is one of the most powerful motivational tools you can use to help you take action.

We all have an inner drive to move toward pleasure and away from pain. It’s something that is built-in deep within our brain. In some cases, this drive may be out of our conscious awareness, but it is still there nevertheless.

While it’s possible to override this inner drive with your willpower, it’s much easier if you take advantage of it rather than fight it. It’s like the difference between swimming with the current rather than struggling against it.

Most events, changes, and actions that you want to take have both pleasure and pain associated with them. When this happens, your brain acts like a scale, weighing in both the expected pleasure and expected pain you’ll feel for each of your choices. Whichever choice wins the pain/pleasure battle is the one that you’ll feel most motivated to take.

The important thing to note is that your expected pleasure & pain control your motivation, not any real pleasure/pain you may experience.

Your expectations are heavily influenced by your beliefs, thoughts, and previous experiences. In fact, you can easily change your expectations of pain/pleasure by the way you think about the choices facing you and consciously associating more pleasure or pain with some of the alternatives.

The small victories tool works so well because it tips the pain/pleasure scale in your favor, without you even having to think too much about it.

Pain/Pleasure Matrix

A pain/pleasure matrix is a useful way to see how pleasure & pain affect the changes that you want to make.

Pain / Pleasure Matrix

You’ve probably heard that people don’t change unless they want to change. This pain/pleasure matrix is what determines whether you want to change or not.

If the pain/pleasure scale tips in the favor of “not making a change,” then you won’t feel motivated to take action, even if you think or know that the change is a great idea and will be good for you. Your rational brain may be saying ‘Yes,’ but your emotional brain is saying ‘No.’

If you want to get motivated to make a lasting change in your life, start by tipping the pain/pleasure scales in your favor.

You can do that by any of the following means: increasing the pleasure of making the change, decreasing the pain of making the change, decreasing the pleasure of not making the change, and increasing the pain of not making the change.

If you can do all four, your motivation for taking action will skyrocket.

Let’s take a closer look at each one…

Pleasure of Not Making the Change

At first, this quadrant may seem a bit strange to you. Why would you get any pleasure from not making a change you want to make?

Dr. Phil McGraw likes to say that people do what works. If you are doing something now, it’s because you are getting something from it, either because of some pleasure your are experiencing or some pain you are avoiding.

If you can identify what this ‘payoff’ is, you can take steps to eliminate it, or at least move it from one side of the scale to the other so that it starts working in your favor.

In the example of wanting to exercise more, these are some of the pleasure payoffs you may get from not exercising:

• You can be lazy all day and not have to exert any physical effort

• You get to keep all your current friends who don’t want to exercise either

• You have an excuse about your current health & fitness - I could exercise if I wanted to…

You can’t always eliminate the payoff, but being aware of it will help you avoid self-sabotage and find other ways of getting it.

Pain of Not Making the Change

You can use this quadrant to create some extra leverage & motivation for taking action by increasing the amount of pain you  associate with not getting started.

For example, if you want to get motivated to exercise, you can associate the following pain with a lack of action:

• My health will continue to deteriorate

• I won’t look or feel as good as I could

• I could gain more weight

• I won’t have energy or vitality during the day

• I’ll let down people who love me and want me to be healthier because it’s good for me

Remember that the goal is to make the change, so you want to associate pain with keeping things as they are now.

Pain of Making the Change

The pain of making the change comes from the time & effort that you will need to put in, the things you will be giving up, the fear/doubt that you may experience as you stretch out of your comfort zone, and what could happen if you fail.

Avoiding this pain is also a ‘payoff’ that you are getting by keeping things as they are now.

Let’s take the example of exercising more, these are some of the things that might be painful about it:

• Actually doing the exercising requires time, effort, and dedication

• You’ll have to leave your nice & cozy comfort zone

• More exercise could mean physical pain as your muscles get sore, etc.

• Fear of failure if you don’t stick to your exercise program

• Maybe you’ll face rejection & lose some friends who won’t support your healthier lifestyle

• Psychological payoff in that you’ll no longer have an excuse for being unhealthy

The small steps approach is designed to reduce the size of this pain because you automatically expect smaller changes to be less painful than bigger ones. You don’t even have to think about it. That’s just the way your brain works, and it’s partly why this technique is so effective.

Pleasure of Making the Change

The final quadrant is the pleasure you will get from making the change you want. This represents all the benefits that you will experience as a result of the change. The more benefits you can come up with, the bigger the quadrant becomes and the more motivation you’ll experience.

In the example of exercise, the benefits could be:

• Improved health

• Feeling better about yourself, your health & your looks

• Endorphins from exercise

• Potential weight loss benefits

• Satisfaction from knowing that you got started

You will find that, for many types of changes, most of the big benefits tend to happen in the distant future. This can create a motivation problem because delayed benefits are less motivating than immediate ones.

That is part of the reason why so many people struggle to make changes that have really good long-term consequences (delayed pleasure) but require making some initial sacrifices and effort (immediate pain).

It’s also why delayed gratification, which is giving up a small pleasure today in exchange for a bigger pleasure much later, is also difficult.

Creating a Victory

The second part of the small victories tool is to create a short-term “victory” to give you a motivational boost and help you get started. What is the victory? It is simply doing whatever you need to do each day to make your change take place.

For example, in the case of doing more exercise, your victory would be doing your 2-minute exercise routine each day for an entire week. Another example could be writing in your journal for 5 minutes every day for a week.

The victory increases the “pleasure of making the change” quadrant and gives you some immediate short-term benefits to tip the pain/pleasure scale further in your favor.

In addition to the inner satisfaction associated with a victory, keeping a commitment with yourself, and accomplishing something, you can also boost the pleasure by using the small rewards technique.

Small Rewards for Added Motivation

Psychologists have known for many decades that “positive reinforcement” through rewards is a powerful method to shape behavior and help you take consistent actions.

While many people assume that big rewards lead to more motivation, small rewards spread over time can actually be more motivating than a much bigger reward that is far away.

The small rewards technique consists of using small, inexpensive treats to recognize & celebrate your victory, efforts and accomplishments.

Here are some examples of small rewards you can use: going for a walk in the park, seeing your favorite TV show, spending 30 minutes reading a novel, lounging on the couch for an hour, indulging in a treat, renting a movie, going to see a friend, eating a chocolate bar, etc. Be creative with your rewards.

For extra motivation, you can also celebrate every time you take a step toward the change you want to make. Instead of a formal reward, you can just celebrate and feel great about taking your next small step.

For example, if your goal is to exercise more, you can celebrate every time you complete your exercise routine by doing a fist pump and saying “Yes!” like Tiger Woods after holing out, or by playing a favorite music CD and dancing around for a few minutes. Anything that get’s you psyched up will work.

Creating a Small Victory Chain

Creating a small victory chain is a great way to gradually increase the amount of change that you make until you get to a level that you want.

Think of small victories as part of a cycle. You go from making a small change all the way to celebrating a victory, then repeat the cycle building up on the change you already made. You keep doing this until your new habit is formed and well established.

So what are the best lengths for these cycles? In practice, it turns out that 4 to 7 days seem to be the most effective durations for these small victory cycles. They are long enough to get you going but short enough to make the change seem small.

For me, 7 days seems like the more practical duration just because it matches our weekly calendar system. It’s just easier to get into the rhythm and track things that way. Feel free to experiment with the other durations until you find one that works well for you.

Rebounding from Setbacks

A critical component of the small victories technique is to understand that no one is perfect. You may experience some setbacks as you work on making changes, but that’s just a normal part of the change process.

Instead of using your victory/reward as a punishment for messing up, use it as motivation to get back on track quickly.

Give yourself a ‘mulligan’ or a ‘do-over’ if you mess up, as long as you promise yourself to get back on track the following day.

For example, if your current goal is to do 10 minutes of exercise each day, and one day something completely out of the ordinary shows up at work and you miss your routine, don’t worry about it. Just start it up again the following day and you still get to celebrate your victory at the end of the cycle.

This is much better than beating yourself up, feeling terrible, and going back to your old habits.

Your consistency will improve over time as you keep doing this.

What’s Next

So far, I’ve introduced the small victories tool and shown you why it works. But what can you do with it?

Here are some examples of changes you could make using this tool:

• Drink more water starting with half a glass 2 x per day
• Watch less television by eliminating one show you don’t really like every month
• Switch from a sugary breakfast cereal to a healthier alternative
• Start writing in a journal for 5 minutes each day
• Start saving a small amount of money every day
• Get started on a new fitness and exercise program

In fact, this last one is exactly what we are doing with the fitness & weight loss challenge.

In future articles in the series, we’ll explore…

• A PDF/Word template for the small victories tool
• How to use small victories to develop a new habit
• How to use small victories to change/break a habit
• A simple tweak to supercharge your motivation
• How to use small victories to try out something new
• How to use small victories to make sustainable long-term changes