The power of micro shifts

How changing one tiny thing this week can redirect your entire year.

Gary Bloomer | SHAKING THE TREE # 281

Tiny changes make for interesting outcomes!

Did you know? One tiny shift this week could steal your year back!

Let’s begin with an inescapable fact that ought to jump start you into immediate action: your current trajectory is perfect just as it is.

That is, it’s flawlessly designed by your current habits and behaviors to deliver you, 52 weeks from now, to a destination you’ve already visited. It’s called Next Year’s Regret.

I’m sure it feels familiar. A little more tired I’m sure, a little more “what if?” as yet another years ticks quietly by. But familiar nevertheless. I know because I’ve lived it.

We’ve been sold a lie, a lie many of us have bought into over the years, myself included that transformation requires massive, seismic change. A new software application, a complete rebrand, a 5 a.m. routine of cold showers, a radical diet.

As dramatic as these things may sound they’re also exhausting. Added to this is the fact that they usually fail by February for the simple reason that for most of us as we go about our daily lives, they’re completely unsustainable. We burn out trying to lift a weight or shoulder a burden our existing habits simply aren’t built to carry.

Here’s the thing: the most powerful force in business and life isn’t revolution. It’s redirection. And redirection isn’t achieved by yanking the wheel violently to the left or to the right.

It’s not about putting your boot down when the lights are read and all the signs say SLOW DOWN. It’s achieved by adjusting our direction by tiny, almost imperceptible degrees each day. One small change after another. Each one building on the momentum of its predecessor.

Welcome to the world of micro shifts.

A micro-shift is a change so small it feels trivial, almost silly. On day one or two its power is all but invisible. But on Day 60, or by Day 90?, these small shifts have quietly rewritten your entire mode of thinking and rerouted your whole operating system.

Think of a schedules commercial flight leaving London, Heathrow headed for New York, JFK. Most of the time these sorts of flights are direct: there’s no layover in Dublin or Iceland. You go from point A to point B in about 7 hours.

However, a one-degree course correction shortly after takeoff north or south won’t put you into JFK, it will land you 215 miles and 3.5 hours away in either direction in Boston or in Washington, D.C.

Although it’s only a one degree difference, it’s a micro shift that could easily explain the mathematics of your year. A micro-shift now doesn’t change things right now. It changes where you are later, or tomorrow, or next season.

Your job this week then is not to overhaul where you’re going. It is to intercept your trajectory. It’s to insert one tiny, frictionless deviation into your everyday, autopilot routine. Here’s how, in brutally practical terms.

The micro-shift framework: the 1% intercept

Forget about grand goals. Most of them are too big and too much to wrap your mind around: lose 50 lbs; train for a marathon, make a million dollars. I mean seriously, Who are we kidding?

Instead, ask this: “What is a simple, 1% action I can attach to one of my already existing 99% habits?”

The existing habit is the locomotive.

The micro-shift is a single new boxcar you’ve hooked on to the train of your daily habits, a boxcar that goes wherever the train goes: neatly, seamlessly, effortlessly.

Here’s a list of simple real-world shifts that compound over time:

• For content and creativity:

  • The shift: After you check your email in the morning, open your notes app and write one sentence. Not a post. A sentence. “The thing my most time-consuming clients always misunderstand about my business is …” (fill in the blank), or “Today on my way to work I noticed …” (fill in the blank).

  • The cumulative power: In one month, instead of a big fat nothing you have 30 raw, authentic sentences with the potential to change the course of your year. That’s 30 social posts, or 5 newsletter intros, or the core of an extended article, or the basic framework of an online course. You’ve defeated the blank page by making it microscopic.

• For leadership and connection:

  • The shift: In every meeting, before you state your view, ask one person: “What’s your take before I jump in here?” The more often you ask someone who’s least inclined to contribute, the more of a wild card response you’re likely to get. And while wild cards don’t always play out, all you need is one brilliant response.

  • The cumulative power: By year’s end, you will have collected dozens, perhaps hundreds of unvarnished opinions, you’ll have identified silent experts on your team (still waters and all that), and you’re likely to have made decisions informed by data you previously ignored, overlooked, or worse, that you muted. You will have become a leader who listens first before stating their own opinion.

• For sales and outreach:

  • The shift: When you see an article that reminds you of a client, forward it with one line: “Saw this and thought of your work on X. No reply needed.”
    If it’s a printed article, clip it out, stick it in an envelope with a Post It note, and mail it.

  • The cumulative power: This is not an attempt to relentlessly pitch your services or products. It’s a “Hey, how’s it going?”. Over the course of a year, instead of being seen as a sales person, you become more of a consistent, value-giving presence in their inbox or in their mailbox, and all without the agony of “checking in.” And when they have a need, who has top of mind in their world as a helper, not a hustler? You!

• For personal clarity:

  • The shift: Each Friday at 4 p.m., set a 5-minute timer take the time to write down your answer to the following question: “What is one thing I need to stop doing?” These are not “shoulds”, these are needs, these are time wasters.

  • The cumulative power: Applied consistently over the course of a few months let alone a year you will identify the energy leaks, the time vampires, the pointless reports, the “always done” tasks that serve no one, least of all you. Quarterly, you’ll have a list of 13 things to eliminate and in doing so you engineer margins by subtraction.

• For your digital sanity:

  • The shift: Delete one app—ideally the most addictive one—from your phone’s home screen. That’s delete, not move, not shift to a folder on the third page. Delete.

  • The cumulative power: Over time, that tiny friction of search reduces mindless opens by as much as 70%. I did this about two years ago with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Apps, gone! Peace, restored! This one small action reclaims valuable shards of attention throughout the day that, over a year, add up to weeks of recovered focus.

Why this works when grand plans fail

We are creatures of habit, which means if we’re honest, big changes frighten the living daylights out of us: moving house; getting married; switching jobs; deciding to lose 50 lb.

However, because it’s a smaller shift, something that’s seemingly of no immediate consequence, a micro-shift bypasses your brain’s resistance department. It’s too small to trigger fear, doubt, panic, or procrastination.

In this way, micro shifts are not about motivation, they’re about minor modifications. You’re not trying to be a dramatically new person overnight. All you’re doing is tweaking the script of the person you are at the moment.

The magic then isn’t in the action. It’s in the proof.

When you execute that tiny shift for seven days straight, you get a tiny but important hit of neurological evidence that says, in essence: “Behold! I am someone who follows through.”

That new identity of you as change agent—you as the the person who can change one tiny thing—that new identity then becomes your foundation for everything else. You build trust and belief in yourself as someone how makes decisions and who follows through, one degree at a time.

This week, instead of setting out to be better, set out to be different in one microscopic, almost meaningless way.

Hook that one new boxcar to your daily train. Then forget about it. Just run the route, up and down the line, changing the points and the rail you wind up one as you move along.

A year from now, you won’t be looking at the same scenery. You’ll be in a different city. Not because you fought the journey, but because you were brave enough to nudge the tracks in your favour.

As always, thanks for reading.

—Gary

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Next time on Shaking the Tree: Reframing your energy portfolio

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from the U.K., Gary Bloomer is a writer, branding advocate, marketing specialist, and an award-winning graphic designer.
His design work has been included in Creative Review (one of the UK’s largest design magazines). Since 2009, he has answered over 5,000 marketing and business questions in the Know-How Exchange of MarketingProfs.com, placing him among the top 3% of contributors. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.