Whenever I read self-help articles, the hardest thing for me is what to do after I read it. A ton of articles out there say “start small”, may give a few examples, but not entirely useful. What is starting small, damn it?!

So here’s my example.

I’m preparing to move countries over the next few weeks and I’m bringing along 2 cats. We’ll be traveling for 36 hours, and they will unfortunately have to be in a kennel for the entire duration. When I initially thought of moving with 2 cats, I was frozen with my imagined one million things to do to take them with me. The more I thought of this to-do list, the longer and harder it seemed to become.

Luckily, the decision to move coincided with my writing of the Living Accidentally series.

In Part 1, I write that you must live with purpose. When it comes to moving, preparing and actually moving becomes the “purpose.” So now, every single day until the point I move and settle into my new home, I have a single purpose.

In Part 2, I said to start small and do one thing that would mark the day as a success. It was difficult to do this at first because the list of to-do’s seemed SO long and I didn’t know where to begin. Do I buy the flight first? When do I go to the vet? How can my cats fly? Can my cats even get to the country I’m moving to? Do I have enough time to get them vaccinated before my visa expires? Do I have to extend my visa? Am I even allowed to extend my visa?! When I was just thinking in my own head, the questions and thoughts were never ending. I was having arguments with myself. I felt like a crazy person having crazy conversations.

But one evening I asked myself “what is the one thing I can do tomorrow that would make it a success?” I wrote that thing down, which happened to be “cat travel preparation.”

So the next day, I wrote out what “cat travel preparation” meant. It turned out to be a long list. But it was a list of small things that I could actually do. Over the next few days, I eventually made a schedule to put the cats into their kennels every day, incrementally increasing the length of time. This also got me to create a plan to alter their eating schedule so that they will get to relieve themselves one last time before we start our 36 hour journey. Working on my cat travel plans also made me start to work on my own stuff, like what I am packing, throwing away, selling, and giving away.

The tiny act of asking “what will make today a success” gave me the nudge I needed to get things rolling. Now I have a much better picture of what my next few weeks will look like as I prepare to move myself and my cats to another home.

I know that “cat travel plans” is not the same as “life plan”, and I don’t expect a life plan to unfold from scheduling my move. However, what I will take away is the feeling of being successful and satisfied of my day. I believe that our bodies and minds will start to naturally work towards feeling like this, and as we take each step, we’ll have a little more clarity towards the place we are going. It all starts from starting small.