Little things make a big difference
Newlyweds Aisling and Trish Leonard Curtin spent their honeymoon working on a new self-help book, writes Victoria Mary Clarke
IDON’T trust self-help writers. I never believe they are actually living the stuff they tell you to do. I especially never trust selfhelp couples who tell you how to have a perfect relationship, they just always seem so annoyingly smug.
Aisling and Trish Leonard Curtin are a married couple of psychologists who have just written a book together called The Power of Small.
Aisling was wearing a bright yellow body-hugging dress and red spectacles when we first met, at a businesswomen’s network in Cork where she comes from. At these networking things you can often meet showy women who want to tell you how to run your life. But although Aisling was bright, she was warm and she asked a lot of questions and you could tell by her eyes that she was not only listening, but listening respectfully and with genuine interest. She was bright in a way that lights up the room, but not in a way that wants to steal the limelight. Trish is darker, more shy and more understated, and she exudes compassion and concern for humanity. So I was intrigued to read The Power of Small.
“Why small?” I immediately demand to know. “Why not go big or go home?” Aisling, who has come to meet me to discuss the book, laughs a raucous kind of a laugh. I join in. It is disconcerting, this mixture of serious psychologist and down-toearth human woman.
“Your laughter probably signifies why we went for small,” she says.
But people have big dreams, I argue. We want stuff.
“I want big dreams for everybody that I work with,” she says.
“But working as a psychologist for the past 10 years, I have noticed that when people want to go big, what they usually do is set the goal so high that they either start off all guns blazing and get exhausted, or they think they will start tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow and they just never do it.
“The way The Power of Small works is if you want to do it and if it is in line with your values, you just find one small thing that you can do right now to take you in the direction of your goal. What is something that you can do every day that you are confident that you can follow through with? It might be just starting off with walking for 15 minutes a day.”
If something seems like too small a step, we might just not bother? I argue. We might not think it is going to make any difference?
“I think it is important to ask what happens when you buy into that belief ?” she says. “The reality is that if you start off with 20 minutes it will actually bring you closer to your goal. Your mind will try to keep you on old patterns, but our idea is to start doing things differently and see what happens, let your experience be your guide.
“For me, organisation is not my forte so I would let our home get really messy and then I would blitz it and it would all look great for a little while and then it would get messy again. So I picked one small thing to work on each day, I started with the dining room, then the next day I did my make-up and then the spare room. The thing is to build on it by adding one small thing each day.”
It makes complete, logical sense, I agree. But is it enough to really get us motivated if we are not making immediate, massive changes?
“People have different goals, like maybe wanting to write a novel and thinking they will take a load of time and do it in one go,” she says.
“That happened to me with The Power of Small. Trish and I took a month and we went off together to work on the book. It is a great idea in theory but in practice it is often different.
“A lot of the stuff that we wrote in that time didn’t work and didn’t make it into the book, and in fact it was the small things that we had worked on at home regularly that got in. It had felt too big, too unmanageable.”
What really motivates people to make changes? I ask.
“We can sometimes be motivated by other people’s opinions. But in my experience, if we can find a value within ourselves that we want to move towards, that is going to keep us motivated.” I ask her what motivates her. “I have struggled with anxiety my whole life so a key value for me was giving people practical, no bulls**t tools to help them if they are also struggling with anxiety.”
She asks me to tell her something that I want to achieve and I tell her that I want a TV series. She asks me to identify what qualities I want to feel from the experience, I say things like adventure, excitement, curiosity.
She suggests that if I aim to start experiencing those feelings now, as I go about pitching my TV series, I am far more likely to feel motivated to achieve it because I will enjoy the process as much as the end result.
We shouldn’t expect things to be too easy, she warns.
“Any goal that is worth pursuing is not going to be fun every step of the way. It is absolutely fine to want it to be fun, but it is likely to be a stretch!”
Aisling and Trish got married last summer. It is evident that Aisling is utterly enchanted with her wife. She is almost reverential when she speaks about her.
“I believe so much in Trish, she is the best person I have ever met in my life and I am just so proud of her.”
The couple spent their honeymoon working on the book, which Aisling admits was challenging, because they have very different personalities and styles.
“Trish is so much more organised and structured than I am and she can see the bigger picture.
“And she is great at asking me ‘what is the point of that, Aisling?’ over and over again and there were times when I just wanted her to say what you have done is great!”
The combination of the different personalities is what made the book happen, she says.
“Trish is the brakes to my go and I am the go to her brakes. I think that she can hold herself back by analysing everything that she does. But I think I help her to see the value of what she has to offer the world.”
Having read the book, and having begun to implement the advice by tacking the overwhelming tasks in 20-minute chunks, I am finding that I not only get the stuff done, but I also get less stressed, and I am finding new and far more enjoyable ways to enjoy getting to my goals, which is no small thing. ‘The Power Of Small’ is published by Hachette books