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Hi, change agents.
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I was told you like stories.
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So here's one.
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I once dated a guy who told me he really liked me.
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And then he told me he needed me to know up front that he also really liked the Philadelphia Eagles.
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Perhaps to all of our surprise, that guy is now my husband.
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And the Philadelphia Eagles are now my football team.
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That is especially surprising given that I grew up in Germany where football is played with your foot.
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I had zero understanding of or interest in American football.
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But my future husband was very clever.
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He reeled me into the game of football one small step at a time.
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Every season he gave me a rookie to follow.
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For my inquiring fellow Eagles fans, my very first rookie was Brian Westbrook, followed later by Trent Cole and Brandon Graham.
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And so I went from bringing a book to Sunday football.
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The horror of me doing so may actually have inspired the rookie gifting idea to being interested in watching because I had a foot in, something to follow and care about.
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Every time my rookie was on the field, I was excited, I was invested.
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I had one player whose story I cared about, and that was enough to want to watch the game.
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And once I watched the game, I started asking questions, and then I started learning more.
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And because I loved getting my new rookie, I actually even started looking forward to football season.
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Now, I'll be honest, football where you're allowed to touch the ball with your hands is still really not my thing.
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But I like it enough to cheer when needed.
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I know the Eagles fight song, and I can follow the American football metaphors that somehow become part of the language of corporate strategy.
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Although I do sometimes throw in a cricket metaphor thanks to my India team, partly to remind us what it feels like when everyone else seems to understand the reference and you don't.
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I might still need a rooked cricketer or two to get them really sharp.
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So, why did the rookie thing work?
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My husband didn't try to teach me the whole game of football.
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He gave me one person to care about, one step that was small enough to take and meaningful enough that I wanted to take the next one.
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The only thing moving faster than change right now might be my relentless curiosity about the possibilities it creates, the new world it opens, what to watch out for, and how we get more comfortable with discomfort and uncertainty.
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I'm Gabrielle Kohlmeyer, and this is Technically Joyful.
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A space for us to build change capacity in the AI era, explore hard questions, find unexpected connections, useful ideas, and create the energy to shape what comes next.
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Let's get Technically Joyful.
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Well change agents, our recent guests, the transformation work I'm doing, and a lot of conversations I've been having have my mind on momentum, the first step, and then all of the next steps.
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How do you break through inertia and take a step when the thing in front of you is still unclear, or shifting, or feels enormous?
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And how do you know what you're actually moving toward?
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Before we go further, consider sending this episode to the person making you watch sports with them or refusing to watch sports with you or anyone else that comes to mind.
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Follow the show, leave a quick review if it's been useful, and keep sending me your fun, surprising, tragically awful, or other AI attempts.
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I've got a share episode with a special guest coming up, and I would love to share yours.
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Back to the next step.
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It turns out the rookie wasn't just a football thing.
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It's how I've approached many of the hardest, most overwhelming things.
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As a systems thinker who can't stop seeing interconnections and dependencies, second, third, fourth order effects, the threat of overwhelm is real.
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And let's be honest, even trying to tackle several kids' sports and school schedules can make a grown parent cry.
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Sometimes even more so than managing bet the company cases or global organizations with moving objectives, budgets, targets, geopolitical risks.
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Anyway, over time I've gotten better at choosing a first step and building from there.
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But I have to tell you, it starts with a lot of humility and grace.
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Humility because a first step often means admitting what you don't know yet.
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When I started as Market General Counsel, I inherited a team, a lot of acronyms, and a lot of meetings.
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In my first week, I jumped on a call while I was still trying to figure out what the acronym stood for and what the meeting was even about, only to find out it was my meeting.
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The next step on that one, leading with
Load full transcript
vulnerability and asking, so why are we here?
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And what is ACP, if not attorney client privilege?
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Apparently, it was about affordable connectivity programs.
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Although the acronym search I did beforehand had suggested American College of Physicians, Airspace Control Plan, Aluminum Composite Panel were all solid, likely topics.
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For me, asking the first question is often the first step to building the right momentum.
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Early in my career as a newly minted law firm associate, I got the impression, probably based on all of the accounting 101 sessions we were being given.
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I'm really good at reading between the lines, that I should understand the basics of accounting.
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I wanted to.
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I wanted to be able to read a business through its numbers, profit and loss statements, balance sheets, financial reports, financial calculations, derivatives.
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But it was just not sticking.
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Even after my fourth or fifth accounting 101 session, it was just too much.
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Fast forward a few years when I started in-house in a company with new businesses, new acquisitions, and I wanted to understand really why we had acquired them, what the financials were telling us, to understand the real story.
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So I confessed my accounting woes to a mentor of mine who suggested I get myself a finance friend.
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And she introduced me to just the right person.
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So I did.
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I got myself a finance friend.
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Her name is Sandra.
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We met every week for the next five years.
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I learned about finance, but I also learned about a part of the business I needed to understand.
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And I built a relationship with someone who was interested in understanding my part of the organization too.
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I would bring her real questions, the ones that came up in my work about unit economics and accounting, and she would ask me about policy and legal and the bigger questions on her side.
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Those conversations became strategy conversations.
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And that's what finally made it stick.
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The accounting had something to hold on to, and it was anchored in strategy and in the decisions we were actually talking about understanding making.
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It even led me to take the non-financial accounting exam.
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My next step wasn't to understand all of finance.
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It was to find someone I could start learning with.
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And it wasn't a magic step that solved everything.
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It was a step that built momentum.
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That momentum became a practice over years and relationship and then substantive depth over time.
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And the best part was I didn't have to become self-sufficient before I could become capable.
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Eventually I worked with a finance director.
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Shout out to Susan Kim, who is a number whisperer and turns data into stories like no one I've ever met.
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She could look at a store's results and a zip code and understand that a neighborhood needed more Portuguese-speaking employees.
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The numbers told her a story about people.
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And suddenly accounting wasn't this abstract subject anymore.
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It was another way of understanding people and the business.
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And I couldn't have started there.
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I needed Sandra first.
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Sandra and Susan then took me from that first step to jogging through PLs at a respectable clip.
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So what's the pattern here?
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And why does it matter for anything big you're facing right now?
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Well, for me, sometimes I'm overwhelmed because I don't know what to do.
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And sometimes I'm overwhelmed because my brain sees so many things that need doing.
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The picture is clear, it's just enormous.
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You know the old question.
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How do you eat an elephant?
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One bite at a time.
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I do take that to heart in much of my life, from organizing our house one room at a time, to building an organization.
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Be thoughtful about the pieces and then pick one and just do the one thing.
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But what I've learned is that the step that works is one that's manageable and meaningful, even if it's tiny.
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For me, meaningful usually runs through a person in their story, a rookie, a finance friend.
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So it's worth asking yourself, what brings things to life for you?
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That's probably your way in.
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And then when I can, I tried to pick the story that leads to the step after that.
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When I was deploying AI across our legals or organization at Verizon, I had great ambitions to do all of it at once.
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And I scaled back to what was manageable and would have the highest immediate impact: focused messaging, a real focus on people, including who would carry the
message and compound its impact.
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Steps that would give us data to make the next steps smarter and that would earn enough recognition to keep the funding and keep people's energy.
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So here's my point.
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My rookie didn't just teach me one thing about football.
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Caring about one player made me watch, which made me ask questions, which taught me the game.
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Sandra didn't just teach me accounting.
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She gave me a relationship and context where accounting started to make sense.
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And she learned from me too.
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And those first AI steps weren't just a smaller version of the big plan.
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They gave us data, credibility, funding, and people's energy.
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And that made our next choices better.
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Sometimes the point of the next step isn't just that it gets you somewhere, it changes what you can see from that new place.
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You know more, you've met people you didn't know before, you've built a little capacity, maybe you've earned some trust.
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And now you can make a decision you weren't equipped to make from the starting line.
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So you don't need a perfect map of the steps one through 20.
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Step one may give you information that changes what step two should be.
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Executive change leader Caroline Keeley has a phrase for leading this way that I love: be a compass, not a roadmap.
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The compass gives you direction.
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Each step fills in more of the map.
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And a step is better than no step.
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Brad Stolberg, who writes about performance and well-being, puts it simply: motion precedes motivation.
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The more you move, the more capacity and energy you build, and the more strategic your next steps can become.
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Without that momentum, you don't get to the place where you can be strategic at all.
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And there isn't one right next step.
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There are lots of them.
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So take one, learn from it, then decide what you can see from there.
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And maybe this is why those early steps can feel so disproportionately hard.
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You're doing a lot of work before you have much evidence that it's working.
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Whitney Johnson, who wrote the book Disrupt Yourself, which I love, has a picture for this that really helped me.
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She calls it the personal S curve.
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At the bottom
of the curve, growth is slow.
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You're putting in effort and it can feel like nothing is happening.
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That's where all of our first steps live.
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If you keep going, you hit the steep part of the curve where everything starts to accelerate.
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And that part feels amazing.
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Eventually, it flattens out as you reach mastery.
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And if you want to keep growing, you have to find your next curve.
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Whitney Johnson worked closely with Clayton Christensen, who initially saw that same S curve in how organizations and technologies grow.
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And in both people and organizations and technology, the top of the curve is where it gets interesting.
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Starting a new curve can be even harder than the first one because we liked that feeling of being good at the thing.
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Now we have to begin again.
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Another humbling, slower first step.
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So be kind to yourself about those first steps.
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Give yourself grace and honestly give yourself some praise because the first steps are the hardest.
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Crawl, walk, run.
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I think remembering that matters so much for all of us, especially as leaders of ourselves or others.
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When we get comfortable at the bottom of our own curves, we're becoming more patient, more aware, and more strategic when we're leading our teams and organizations through change.
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We remember what the bottom of that curve feels like.
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So let me ask you, what's your current rookie with AI?
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You don't have to learn the whole AI game or even the whole new models that are coming out or some new technology that is incorporating all kinds of AI.
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Just find your rookie.
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Pick one thing you actually want to understand or try, maybe because it connects to people or work or something else you already care about.
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And then take one step and then the next one.
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So our transformation gym rep this week comes from something I've learned a lot about through accessibility and neurodivergence work with colleagues and family.
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Sometimes the hardest part of a big task is simply initiating it.
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So we're going to find our step zero.
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Open whatever AI tool you already use, give it the thing that feels too big, and ask, what's my step zero?
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Give me one physical action I can take, no additional planning required.
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And once you've got it, ask one more question.
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What might I know, have, or be able to do after I take this step that I can't do right now?
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Not because every tiny step has to be strategic, but because taking it might change what you can see next.
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And if breaking something down into manageable pieces is particularly hard for you, there's a tool I love called Goblin Tools.
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It was created with neurodivergent people in mind.
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And it has this magic to do that does exactly this.
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You give it something overwhelming and it magically breaks it into smaller pieces.
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It even has this chili pepper slider for how much breaking down you need.
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So one pepper means you get two, three, four steps.
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Five peppers means you might get 30.
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Whatever it works for you to make this feel doable.
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So this week, find your rookie, take step zero, and give yourself credit for taking it.
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And that change agent is technically joyful.