It's When We Let The Small Things Go That The Big Things Change

First published on April 5, 2019

It always starts small, the little change which, in the end, leads to the whole thing coming crashing down.

You've been really good, giving up sugar for a whole month. The most important thing was kicking chocolate, which you eat like a fiend. And then the month ends and you think, I'll just keep it like this. I feel better, so I'll stay off the sugar.

And then, one day, you know you're not on your sugar free month any more, so you have something sugary. Just once, just a bit. And then another day it's more, and another day it's more, and a few months later your habits are indistinguishable from how they were before that sugar free month.

It can be same with habits you have, which you have held for a long time. You go to the gym regularly. Then you miss it, perhaps you're injured a little. After a week or two off, because of the injury, you think you'll get back into it. But then that week there's a reasonably good reason - perhaps the dentist, or a visit to the in-laws - which means you can only go once. And you make it once the next week, too, and the week after that. But then one morning you realise you haven't been for weeks or months. The habit is gone. Entirely absent, now. And you didn't decide it would be. It's just gone.

Someone once told me the story of Enron was like that. No one sat down in a meeting and strategically said, 'Let's all just agree to act outside of any normal measure of integrity and break the law and screw this all up for a lot of people.' Instead, people compromised their values, their integrity, just a little. Then that became the norm. And then people compromised their values a little bit more. And in the end, we came to a place where the whole business was sustained on fraud.

These are things we need to be careful of, in ourselves, and in the world at large. Small changes, that compound, and lead to outcomes no one ever chose.

Jordan Peterson - in his book 12 Rules for Life - uses the children's story There's No Such Thing As A Dragon to make this point about our relationships. Billy Bixby notices a baby dragon under the table, and tells his parents, who say 'There's no such thing as a dragon, Billy'. And the dragon grows a little. The next day, the same thing happens, and the next, and the next, as the dragon grows until it flies away with the house on its back and Billy and his mother inside it. Only when the mother and father acknowledge the dragon exists does it shrink back to a normal size. 'Maybe it just wanted to be noticed,' says Billy. Maybe it just wanted to be noticed.

In our relationships, we need to name and speak about the small things, before over time they compound into the giant, dragon-sized resentments which lead to our marriages breaking down and our homes breaking with them.

But it's not just there. It's everywhere. Every time we see the small transgression, we have the opportunity to notice the dragon, not just pretend it doesn't exist. As someone plays fast and loose with the truth, as someone uses a word a little freely, changing the meaning just a little. As someone is prejudiced in a pub or in an office, we have the chance to speak up.

And we have the chance to do it in a way which helps, not one which shuts down. We have a chance to do it with compassion, with the assumption that the person is doing their best, and deep down is a good human being, just like, deep down, we are, even though we don't always behave like it.

This assumption is what changes things. It is what - as Brené Brown describes in Rising Strong - allows us to hold our boundaries when people are overstepping them, for our good and theirs, without slipping into judgment or resentment, and whilst seeing things as they are, not as we wish they were.

We can do it without making the conversation into a struggle of good (which always seems to be us and people like us - strange, that) and evil. We can do it without making it into us vs them. We can do it by living as our best selves, but by gently, firmly and with courage saying 'No'. This is the line. We don't slip any further. You don't slip any further. I don't slip any further.

It ends here. And I am going to stop it.