The Stepping Stone Approach: The Research-Backed Path to Lasting Change

There's a version of personal growth that looks like this: you wake up one day fully committed, overhaul your diet, start waking up at 5am, meditate for an hour, exercise, read, journal, and transform yourself from the inside out – all at once.

It’s like a “cutover” approach where one day you’re your old self and the next day you “cutover” to your new self – just like that.

You've probably tried something like it. Most of us have.

And most of us know how it ends.

The reason it typically doesn’t work out isn’t because we're lazy or undisciplined, or because we didn't want it enough. It happens because that's not actually how human beings change. That approach isn't ambitious – it's just wrong about how change works.

Real change works like stepping stones across a river.

You don't leap from one bank to the other. You plant one foot on the first stone, find your balance, look for the next one, and step again. Sometimes you step sideways because the direct path is slippery or submerged. Sometimes you pause on a stone longer than you expected to. And sometimes, from the middle of the river, you realise you want to aim for a slightly different river bank than you thought.

That's not failure. That's how incremental change can work.

Dr. BJ Fogg, behaviour scientist at Stanford University and author of Tiny Habits, has spent over two decades studying how people change. His research comes to a counterintuitive conclusion: the biggest mistake people make when trying to change is thinking that bigger effort produces bigger results.

It doesn't.

What produces lasting change is a sequence of small behaviours that become anchored in your life – each one making the next one easier.

Fogg calls this the Maui Habit experiment. After years of research, he started testing whether tiny, ridiculously small habits could produce real change. And his finding was clear: when you make a behaviour small enough to be easy and wire it to something that already happens naturally in your life, it sticks. And once it sticks, it becomes a platform for the next small behaviour.

So according to his research small steps don’t just work, each step creates the conditions for the next step.

That's what I like to think of as the stepping stone principle.

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, builds on this research with what he calls the 1% improvement framework. The idea is: if you get 1% better at something every day for a year, you end up 37 times better than when you started.

The important insight here isn't the maths – it's the direction.

Clear argues that most people focus on outcomes (lose 10 kilos or pounds, get promoted, become more confident) when they should be focusing on identity (I am someone who moves their body, I am someone who keeps commitments, I am someone who faces challenges).

The stepping stone approach connects these two things. Each small step isn't just a behaviour – it's evidence you gather about who you're becoming. Every time you follow through on a tiny commitment, you cast a vote for a new identity. Every stone you successfully step on tells your brain: I am someone who moves forward.

The accumulation of those small votes – not the grand gestures – is what changes how you see yourself.

And here's something that most change advice skips over: the sideways step.

When you’re trying to reach your desired destination (like who you want to be), you don't always step directly forward. Sometimes the next stepping stone forward is too far or too slippery, and the smart move is to step to the side – to find firmer footing, reassess, and then continue.

In personal growth, sideways steps can look like:

We tend to label these as setbacks or failure. But they're not. They can be more like navigational intelligence.

Carol Dweck's research on growth mindset from Stanford confirms this. The hallmark of a growth mindset isn't relentless forward progress – it's the belief that challenges and setbacks are information rather than verdicts. People with growth mindsets don't succeed because they never stumble. They succeed because they interpret stumbles as data about what to try next, rather than proof that they can't change.

The sideways step is the growth mindset in action. You don’t have to give up. You can re-assess your path and find a new way across the river.

There's also the neuroscience of why the stepping stone approach works in a way that leaps don't.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) identified something called the "chunking" mechanism in the brain's basal ganglia. When you repeat a sequence of behaviours consistently, your brain begins to encode that sequence as a single unit a – habit. The mental effort required to do the habit drops dramatically. What once took conscious effort becomes nearly automatic.

But this encoding process has a critical feature: it requires repetition within your current capacity. Your brain can only chunk behaviours that are manageable enough to repeat. When you try to do too much too fast, you hit cognitive and physical limits. You can't repeat what overwhelms you, and you can't automate what you can't repeat.

The stepping stone approach can work at the neurological level because each step is manageable enough to repeat, repeat, and repeat again – until it's encoded and automatic, at which point it becomes the foundation for the next step.

This is why attempting to change everything at once doesn't just fail to work, it actively prevents the kind of consolidation your brain needs to make change last.

So what does stepping stone change actually look like in practice?

It has four elements.

One clear direction. You don't need a detailed 5-year plan. You need a direction. "I want to feel healthier." "I want to be more present with my family." "I want to feel calmer and more in control." That's enough to start identifying stones that lead to your desired destination.

The smallest possible first step. Not the most impressive step. The most achievable one. If you want to exercise more, the first stone isn't "go to the gym every day." It might be "put on your gym shoes after breakfast." BJ Fogg's research is unambiguous: start smaller than feels worth it. The feeling of succeeding on a tiny step is neurologically powerful. It builds what he calls "motivation momentum."

Celebrate before you move. This is the part most people skip. Before you step to the next stone, stand on the one you're on and acknowledge that you made it. Fogg's research shows that tiny celebrations – even a little internal "yes, I did that!" – trigger dopamine release that reinforces the behaviour. You're training your brain to associate forward movement with positive feeling.

Be adaptable on your path. Stay committed to the direction, not the specific route. If a stone is slippery, find another one. If your approach isn't working, adjust it. Being adaptable will help you workaround challenges and interruptions that come your way.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is: Don’t measure your progress by how far you are from the destination; measure your progress by how many steps you've taken.

A person who’s taken 100 small steps forward – even if they're still far from their goal – has fundamentally changed. They've built habits. They've gathered evidence about who they can become. They've trained their brain's reward system to associate effort with satisfaction. They’ve built momentum. They’ve likely learned new things along the way. And they might have even enjoyed the journey so far.

A person who took one dramatic leap and landed back where they started has none of that.

The stepping stone method is slower than the leap, in the short term. But it's one of the best approaches that can work in the long term.

See your direction. Take one step toward it. Stand on that stone and celebrate your movement. Then find the next stone. 

That's how you cross the river.

If the stepping stone method resonates with you, the Personal Growth Toolkit is coming to the StepChange Living store soon – a practical tool designed to help you identify your direction, map your first steps, and keep moving when life gets in the way. Sign up to the newsletter below to be the first to know when it's ready, and to get more research-backed insights in the meantime.

Here at StepChange Living we’re about making progress, not achieving perfection – one step at a time.

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