Olympic Gold in Baby Steps

You may have heard about the success of the British Cycling Team this Olympics. If not, they got 7 track cycling gold medals. Pretty good, eh? So good, that the talk from the rest of the world was ‘how are they doing it’ with the implication that GB cycling had some kind of magic advantage over the other teams. In every interview I saw about this though, it was put down to one thing:

The Aggregation of Marginal Gains

Now you may say, as I did when I first heard this phrase, “What?” It’s quite simple, really. They’re talking about Baby Steps. Changing small things in several areas that add up to HUGE differences. For example, if you wanted to lose weight, you could: change your portion sizes, eat one less chocolate bar a day, walk an extra 5 minutes every day, add in one extra exercise class, replace one ‘unhealthy’ meal a week with rabbit food, use the stairs instead of the lift, take up a sport, cut out fizzy pop, do more gardening…etc.

One thing alone will not make much difference, but when you put them all together, you find yourself getting slim and trim and fit and healthy. In the case of GB cycling, they found themselves with 7 golds by making small changes to a lot of elements of the sport – the start, endurance, fitness, hot shorts (honestly! I don’t think that’s their proper name though), aerodynamic helmets, tactics, mindset etc etc. Each change perhaps took a fraction of a second off their time, but put them all together, and you have a winning margin.

We often don’t notice the impact of our Baby Step changes immediately…but over time, we find we are happier, more focused, further forward, more successful, whatever it is we are going for. Remember this ‘Aggregation of Marginal Gains’ in your life, and remember that making small tweaks, small improvements in your life could add up to GOLD!

Love

Donna.x