How to Use Small Daily Actions to Make Big Life Changes

Written By Caroline Smith

We’re getting closer to the end of this year and about to enter the new year in just a little over a month. Can you believe how fast time is flying? That alone should tell you that the best time to get after your goals is right now — not next week, not next year, but as soon as possible.

In the spirit of getting closer towards our goals, this podcast episode explores how you can use small, consistent actions daily to make big changes in your life. I’ll talk about a simple 5-step framework you can use to solve any problem in your life, and how doing small actions consistently will eventually lead to you achieving your goals.

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Transcript:

Welcome to The Introverted Misfit Podcast with me, Caroline Smith, where we discuss topics related to the human experience of connection and communication with a slightly awkward, introverted twist.

Today’s podcast episode is about how you can use consistent, small actions every day to make big changes in your life, your relationships, your profession, your productivity, and really in every area of your life.

Almost a year ago, I officially started my coaching business, The Introverted Misfit, but in my 9-to-5 as a software engineer and web developer, I have quite a bit of experience working on very complex, large-scale computer applications.

I’m talking about applications with hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

One thing I’ve learned about extensive programs like the ones I’ve worked on is the importance of the small details;

Every single line of code in a program is important to ensure that every part of the software application works flawlessly, and if even one line has an error in it — even as small as a misplaced character like a comma or a period — it causes a chain reaction that ultimately results in something malfunctioning.

In my job, I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve spent at least 4 hours — half of a work day — staring at some code just trying to figure out what the problem was and why the application was crashing, only to find out that there was a misspelled word or a missing semi-colon.

Essentially, the fact that every line of code among the hundreds of thousands of lines is correct makes the entire program work as it’s supposed to.

This analogy got me thinking about the little every day actions we can take in our lives to make the big changes we need to make, or reach bigger goals in our personal lives, our professional lives, our romantic lives, our health and wellness, our existing relationships, and every other aspect of our lives that we want to improve.

I think this topic is a good topic to discuss generally, but I think it’s even more relevant as we’re approaching the end of 2024 and about to welcome in the new year.

There’s so many examples I could use here, but let’s take financial goals as an example.

If you have a goal of having at least $1,000 in your savings account, you have to be able to make the small, everyday changes that will get you closer to that goal.

Even though those small actions seem unimportant as one-time things, they are going to build up over time, until you’ve reached your goal.

So maybe you look closely at your budget and see that you’re spending a lot on Doordash, so you make a commitment to buy groceries and cook your own food for at least 5 days out of the week, which would be cheaper and probably more healthy than eating out all of the time.

Or let’s say you want to eat less junk food and sugary snacks, so every day, you wake up and make a conscious effort to reach for water instead of soda and to reach for an apple or banana instead of a bad of chips.

Or if you’re like me and you’re an introverted solopreneur or entrepreneur, I have a goal to create a larger online presence for myself on YouTube and the various podcasting platforms, which means that I need to be writing more blog posts, each month, getting interviewed on podcasts, and continue to be consistent when publishing content.

By the way, if you’re not already subscribed to my podcast and my YouTube channel, make sure do that right now so that you’ll always be notified about new podcast episodes and helpful videos.

It’s all of those seemingly small yet consistent actions that you commit to doing every single day that will eventually get you to your long term goals.

If you really think about it, that’s all that life is — it’s a series of everyday actions and commitments that are laying the groundwork for your future self.

I’m going to give you an example from my own life, but I’m almost positive everyone of you listening can probably relate to this problem in your lives, as well.

For a long period of my life — and admittedly even now sometimes — I was wasting hours and hours of precious time on social media instead of being productive in my personal and work life.

I would tell myself that I’m just going to scroll through Instagram or FaceBook for 10 more minutes and then I’ll do something productive, and every single time I would look up only to discover that I had been sitting there and mindlessly scrolling for 4 hours.

At a certain point in my life, I had to just sit back and really think about how much of my life was just passing me by while I was just staring at my phone, looking at people who I would never actually meet in person.

I want to use this problem that we all face to explain how small, consistent actions can help us to improve our lives, and I’m going to be using the 4 steps that I use in my coaching services — both my 12-week coaching program and my 60-minute social confidence booster, which is a single coaching session I offer.

And that 5-step framework is getting to the root of the problem, clearly defining your goals, looking at the reality of your situation and what’s keeping you from achieving your goals, figuring out your best options you have for overcoming your obstacles and achieving your goals, and finally following through on those steps you’ve created every day.

I want to start by saying that way back when I spent a lot more time on my phone than I currently do, I didn’t have this 5-step framework to help me;

I just sorta did it my own way, but even still, how I went about fixing this problem wasn’t really that far away from the 5-step framework I’m demonstrating today.

So I’m going to be putting my situation in the structure of this framework for the purposes of the demonstration, even though it didn’t happen exactly this way.

  1. Getting to the root of the problem.

    In my case, my phone addiction I think started in college, and I was already beginning to notice that I would have a 4 or 5 hour block of time to study for something, and as long as my phone was in arms reach of me, I was tempted to stop every 5 minutes and start looking at YouTube or other social media.

    I didn’t even stand a chance at studying undistracted because I always had easy access to my phone.

    My grades were starting to suffer as a result, and I was making my time in college way more stressful than it needed to be because the end of the semester would come, and I would franticly be trying to study for all 6 of my final exams within 2 weeks, basically trying to do the impossible task of saving my grades and completing a software engineering degree in the final two weeks instead of using my time wisely for the entire semester like was expected of me.

    And even after college, when I would get home from work, I found that when I was supposed to be spending time with family, I was just aimlessly scrolling through my phone while we were sitting at the dinner table.

    Essentially, my problem was I did not like how much control my phone seemed to be having over my entire life.

  2. Clearly defining your goals.

    When you have clear, long-term goals in mind, you give yourself something to be accountable for reaching towards every day.

    My goal was to overcome my phone addiction and reclaim the time I was wasting, and looking back at it, I really do think it would qualify as an addiction because that’s just how much time I was spending on it.

  3. Looking at the reality of your situation and what’s keeping you from achieving your goals.

    Before you can really solve the problem, you have to get some sense of how major the problem is and how it is affecting your life and your ability to reach your goals.

    A good thing to do as part of step 3 would be to look at the digital well-being metrics on your phone to get an accurate metric of how much time you currently spend on your phone.

    Then you could list out all of the things your phone addiction is preventing you from doing in your life that you want to be doing and accomplishing.

    So in my case, my phone addiction was preventing me from completing important tasks in a timely manner, or even if I did do the tasks on time I had to rush through doing them because I had wasted so much time; getting household chores done like folding laundry and vacuuming and sweeping the house; spending time with my family, etc.

    And I kind of touched on this before, but I noticed that whenever my phone was anywhere near me while I was doing something important, I find myself automatically reaching for it every few minutes or so to scroll through social media, even though in my logical brain, I know I’m not missing anything important.

    So that was my reality: what my phone addiction looked like in real numbers and what it was preventing me from doing in my life.

  4. Figuring out your best options you have for overcoming your obstacles and achieving your goals.

    Now that we know the problem and the reality of our situation, we have everything we need to start exploring options and possible solutions to our problem.

    This step is really the meat and potatoes of this episode, because this is where we come up with the action plan, i.e., the small, everyday actions that will eventually create big changes in our lives.

    The solutions I came up with were to turn off notifications for certain social media apps, because even though I think I need to know right away when something has been published, the notifications are always going to be there waiting for me when I do decide to open the app.

    And I decided to turn off my phone or just put it in a different room while I am doing an important task so that I can focus without interruption, and that way I won’t even be tempted to reach for it.

  5. Following through on those steps you’ve created every day.

    This one is a no brainer, because as we are all aware, you can always make a plan for yourself, but a plan is nothing without action.

    Or I heard an ancient proverb that says, “When you pray, move your feet.”

    So you have to commit to doing what you said you were going to do every day.

    Whether you need an accountability partner, or maybe you have a lot of self-discipline and can hold yourself accountable, you need to make sure that you are doing actually doing the work every day to reach your goals.

I’m also thinking back on my journey of overcoming my nearly decade-long battle with social anxiety.

A major help was having my family as a core support system for me, because having someone or a few people in your corner is always helpful, but the other part of that was doing the groundwork, again unintentionally in the form of my 5-step framework.

  1. Getting to the root of the problem.

    In my case, I have Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), which affects my ability to socialize and communicate the way most other people do, and it was a lot worse when I was younger.

    Because of my communication struggles, it was very hard for me to engage in basic social interactions and conversations, let alone make many friends, and I later learned that this was one of the main sources of my social anxiety throughout college and a few years into my first corporate job.

    I had a lot of experience being bullied, excluded and socially rejected, and in some cases, people weren’t trying to be mean to me — it’s just that my lack of social skills made exclusion and social rejection to some degree inevitable.

    So the root of my problem was my autism and the socialization deficits it caused me to have.

  2. Clearly defining your goals.

    Regarding my lack of confidence in myself and therefore my social ability, I had one main goal that was reasonable for me.

    I just wanted to be more confident speaking up in meetings at work, create and maintain relationships in my personal and professional life, and overall stop being afraid of talking to people.

    It wasn’t to give a speech on a huge stage in front of hundreds or thousands of people; it was simply to go through my normal, daily life without the disabling fear of socializing with people.

  3. Looking at the reality of your situation and what’s keeping you from achieving your goals.

    In my situation, I had an intense fear of social interactions and social rejection which was causing me to consistently avoid people at all costs.

    And running away from my fears was keeping me stuck in that same cycle for years.

    What was that fear preventing me from doing?

    It was preventing me from progressing in work and fulfilling relationships, because I just couldn’t stop hyper focusing on myself, my insecurities, and what others may or may not be thinking about me.

    But then I needed to pinpoint what the main obstacle was that was keeping me from facing my fears and moving forward with my life.

    I had come to the conclusion that the primary obstacle was myself — more specifically my mindset.

    Every time I was avoiding social interactions, even small, low-risk ones that would only require a few words, the one thing that was keeping me from facing the interactions was this mindset that people are going to reject me anyway, so why would I even allow them to get to know me?

    What I was telling myself was, “I’ll just save myself the embarrassment of possibly being rejected by completely avoiding the social interaction.”

    I was walking through life already having given up on myself before I had even given other people the opportunity to decide if they liked me or not.

    But then that realization presented a new question I had to explore: Why was I so convinced that people wouldn’t like me?

    And moreover, why was I so afraid of the possibility that some people won’t like me?

    Well it’s like I said before: I had experienced a lot of social rejection — both real and perceived — in my younger years that resulted in me having low self-esteem and a low sense of self-worth.

    My breakthrough came I realized that those beliefs I had about myself were not true, and yet I was living as if they were.

  4. Figuring out your best options you have for overcoming your obstacles and achieving your goals.

    So with this new mindset, I was able to create an action plan that would move me forward in my life and get me unstuck using step 4.

    My small steps in regards to overcoming social anxiety and improving my social skills included finding small, low-risk social interactions that I could engage in daily that would help me get over my fears of talking to people.

  5. Following through on those steps you’ve created every day.

    So, I would go for a walk around my neighborhood or a local park, and I would start by saying friendly greetings to people I passed.

    And I would go to the grocery store and ask an employee where I could find an item.

    I was intentional about doing this instead of running away from the interaction as often as I could.

    At first, I was very timid about it, and I won’t lie to you — there were quite a few awkward moments.

    There were moments when I didn’t speak up loudly enough and the other person was struggling to hear me, there were moments when I built up the courage to speak to someone and they just seemed very uninterested in talking to me, and there were even some moments when I said the wrong thing.

    But what those awkward moments taught me is that the world does not end just because of a few awkward moments or even moments of rejection.

    I would even go as far as to say eventually, the fact that I got through those awkward moments in one piece made me even more confident to try again and less and less afraid of what could happen.

    And the more positive interactions I had with people, the more my self-esteem and confidence grew, until one day, I looked around realized that I was no longer living in fear.

    I was sharing my ideas more in team meetings at work, which would eventually lead to me getting a raise, I was getting invited to have lunch with the boss and the VP of the software company I had worked for, I was starting random conversations with people I had never met before, and I was beginning to create social connections that are still serving me years later.

    I even started dating, which is something I had never had the confidence to do before the age of 24.

    Now that I’m on the other side of those struggles, I can’t believe I let what now seems like a silly fear hold me back from so much in life!

    And I’m not calling social anxiety a silly disorder — I’m just saying now that I’m not afraid of people and social interactions anymore, I now realize that my fears were not really based in my current reality.

So there are two pretty in-depth examples of how you can use this 5-step framework make your small, consistent actions lead to big changes in your life.

And as we get closer and closer to 2025, which is a popular time to start making new year’s resolutions, I challenge you to create your own 5-step framework for yourself with a specific problem in your life right now that is keeping you from reaching your goals.

I know we’ve still got quite a ways to go before the time when people typically make new year’s resolutions, but why wait until January 1st?

Why not just start getting closer to your goals as soon as possible?

The only thing you’re doing by waiting is prolonging your period of self-improvement and delaying reaching your goals.

If you’d like, you can leave a comment underneath this episode briefly explaining your framework because I love hearing from listeners like you. Or if you don’t want to share the entire framework, you can just tell me one of your goals.

If you happen to be an introverted woman who struggles with shyness, social anxiety, and/or social awkwardness and you liked this 5-step framework, you might be interested in hiring me as your personal coach that can guide you through this process of becoming more socially confident in yourself without having to compromise your more introverted personality.

I offer two services at this time:

The first option is my 60-Minute Social Confidence Booster, which is a more lightweight, 1-on-1 coaching service where we can cover whatever is on your mind as it pertains to your social confidence, specifically as an introverted person, for a full hour.

In this single session, we can practice your conversational skills, boost your confidence for an upcoming presentation you have at work, overcoming an insecurity that you’ve been dealing with, or address anything else that may be holding you back from being your most socially confident self.

The second option is for you shy, socially awkward, introverted women who need a more extensive coaching program that will help you become more socially confident, and that is my signature 12-week, 1-on-1 coaching program, Communicate With Quiet Confidence.

It includes 12 weekly 1-on-1 coaching sessions with me, and it will empower you to become a socially confident introverted woman without having to fake being someone you’re not.

To find out of this 12-week program is a good fit for you, you can send me an email at caroline@theintrovertedmisfit.com and we can set up your free discovery call to talk more about your current struggles with socializing and your future goals.

You can find all of that information including both of my coaching services using the links in the description of this podcast episode or by going to my website, theintrovertedmisfit.com, and you can find everything you need to know there.

That’s all for today’s episode!

As always, if you enjoyed this talk, please don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button, leave a review and/or comment whether you’re tuning in on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from, and share this podcast with a friend.

Thanks for listening, and have a great day!

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Caroline Smith

Caroline is the founder of The Introverted Misfit, a community committed to helping socially inept people become more socially confident in themselves.

https://theintrovertedmisfit.com
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