What Lessons from Physical Therapy Can Teach You About Business

I recently had a hip injury that took several months to heal. After all of that time keeping movement to a minimum and exercise nonexistent, my body mechanics had forgotten how to move properly, not to mention I had lost a lot of strength and stamina. To combat this and keep me from reinjuring myself, my doctor sent me to physical therapy.

Without a long medical description, the first part of my PT experience involved reactivating muscles that were underused during my injury but are necessary for healthy and normal body mechanics (and would help prevent my back muscles from kicking in and causing further strain). These types of exercises are small, tedious, and painstaking, albeit very important. Being a former athlete, my instinct was to go big and push my limits, but that isn’t the goal of physical therapy. Instead, the best thing I could do was hold back, and let my muscles rebuild properly. So every day I did my assignments, regardless of how monotonous and boring they were.

Each week, I made progress, though small, and after several weeks I moved on to strengthening exercises, which also start at a low level and build up, and feel fairly tedious. But each day I made the commitment to do my PT regimen, and am finally starting to feel stronger and moving correctly. I am now hitting my goals and making much more noticeable progress.

I find this experience to be an excellent analogy for life and for your career. Starting small, even when your instinct is to accomplish as much as you can, will help you build a solid foundation from which to work. You may not feel you are getting anywhere, but trust me, you are. Just put in the work one step at a time, and one day you will look back and realize the small progress has all added up. Once you get the wheels turning, you will suddenly have a ton of momentum and strength, which will propel you far, wherever you choose to apply it.

When I say start small, I do not mean pare down your aspirations or efforts. I simply want you to put first things first. In a new business, you may just want to hit the ground running with selling your product or service, but you have to do the sometimes tedious work of making a business plan, creating a pricing structure, and figuring out how things are going to work for you. These tasks create the very foundations of your business, and by having your affairs in order, they won’t come back to haunt you when you are doing bigger and better things. If you can push through those crucial first steps and stick with it, your business will be booming before long.

So trust the process. Every baby step contributes to the giant leap, even if you can’t see it know. My physical therapist is definitely right on this one.