‘The Amazing Power of Incremental Steps’ – Sean D’Souza’s Article

It’s not that I can’t swim, but I’ve only ever learned the
breaststroke. And if you’re a swimmer, the breaststroke doesn’t get
you anywhere in a hurry. And so I went to learn freestyle. Except
that’s when I ran into a whole lot of trouble.

Why would you run into trouble, you may ask?

There’s nothing to freestyle. You move your arms in sequence
through the water and use your legs to propel you forward. Except
that it wasn’t so easy for me at all. There I was clinging to a
float, trying to get the sequence right, not kicking my legs–and
generally failing miserably. So I was asked to stop swimming and
told to walk in the shallow end of the pool instead.

First I started with the walk and moved my arms.
Then I swam and moved my arms and my legs.
Then I was miraculously swimming.

And the reason for this ‘miracle’ is obvious

It’s called incremental steps. So yeah, we all understand the
concept of incremental steps. We all feel the need for incremental
steps and yet the moment we give out information we get sudden
amnesia. Your presentation for instance, won’t cover one point in
great detail. Instead it will kangaroo-hop all over the countryside.

If we’re dealing with a client one on one, we try to ram down
everything in that one consulting session. If we’re teaching a
course, the information comes out like a freakin’ firehose. And as
we’ve already established, we utterly detest being treated in this
fashion, when we’re customers.

Or do we?

No we don’t. But yes we do. And let’s find out the reason for this
paradox. When we sign up for something as customers, we want the
maximum knowledge/advice we can get. So the more bullet points we
encounter, the more features/benefits we read, the more excited we
get. But then something weird happens.

We can’t consume all of this information, no matter how simple. The
information becomes a curse. And so it’s at this point that we want
the ‘teacher’ to take us ahead one step at a time.

Which is why you need to map out your information to have
incremental steps

And the way to have incremental steps is to literally take one step
at a time. So if for instance, you wanted to get folks on a forum
in preparation for a course, you’d actually follow steps like this:

Day 1: Register in the forum.
Day 2: Read instructions.
Day 3: Post your photo.
Day 4: Introduce yourself.
Day 5: Meet your group.

Sounds inane? Sounds like these steps are too small?

Well, you’ll be surprised how many people get stuck at the first
few steps themselves. It’s incredibly important to have very tiny
first steps. If your client slips and falls on the first steps,
then any further progress is at risk. But if they move ahead, a
sense of achievement is created, enabling them to stay on course.

But every situation is different

A course is different from a presentation. A presentation is
different from a consulting session. So how do you go about
creating the steps? The way to do the breakdown is to list all the
possible steps. Then list all the possible sub-steps. And then get
your client to go about the every step, then every sub-step, before
moving to the next step.

In swimming terms this would mean getting the arm movements right
step by step. Then the leg movements. Then the head under water.
Then the breathing–and so on. Every step would need smaller
sub-steps and inane as it may sound to you, this is the fastest
method for the customer to learn a new skill or concept.

Fastest? It sounds deathly slow!

It is slow, but think about my swimming lesson. If I consistently
goofed up for every one of those 30 minutes, what would I feel at
the end of the lesson? You got it: I’d feel lousy. I’d feel like I
wasn’t capable of learning to swim freestyle. And I’d do what all
of us do on a consistent basis: I’d waddle right back to my comfort
zone. And I’d never develop that particular skill.

At Psychotactics we teach clients to develop complex skills

One of our courses is cartooning. Another is article writing.
Another is copywriting. If you take apart these courses, you have
hundreds of moving parts for every skill. And you have great
resistance, because often people think they need to be born writers
or born artists. And that’s utter nonsense. If you are able to
break up a skill into hundreds of parts and get the person to
master one part at a time, they just master it. And they magically
become talented (just like I magically learned the freestyle).

There’s another advantage to this incremental system of teaching

If a student follows incremental steps, doing just one step at a
time, they can’t go very much off tangent. If they go off track,
you can pull them back and they’re back on track. If they attempt
to do seventeen things at a time, you’ve got real trouble. And if
you’re teaching seventeen people at the same time, then you’ve got
a Category 5 hurricane blowing your way! What’s worse is that the
students don’t learn as well. And they blame themselves, blame you,
or worse believe it’s a lack of talent.

It’s not talent at all.
It’s a lack of teaching ability.
The ability to teach with incremental steps.
One splash at a time.