When goal setting, the two words you need to remember most are "baby steps."

One of my favorite movies is "What About Bob", where Bill Murray plays a neurotic bumbler who drives his world famous therapist (played brilliantly by Richard Dreyfuss) to the brink of insanity.

In one hilarious scene, Murray's character is shuffling around the city, mumbling his therapist's mantra to himself repeatedly and drawing strange looks from passers-by.

The mantra? Baby steps.

Baby steps are an essential part of life. We take baby steps before walking and running. And as we mature, we take baby steps before striking out in any new direction--or at least we should. Some teenagers could use a lesson in taking baby steps, especially behind the wheel...

But when setting goals, baby steps are crucial to staying with the program. Goals are those things that we want to achieve in life, and we can't just leap from point A to point B without actually traveling along the path.

Can we run to our goals? We can try, but we'll drop dead from exhaustion before we reach them.

Can we walk to our goals? Sounds good...but with so many distractions along the way, we'll get sidetracked and lose sight of our goal. Eventually, we'll forget what we were walking towards in the first place.

So we take baby steps. And although it takes us longer to get there, we WILL get there.

Can you use baby steps to help you in your goal setting. Absolutely. And here's an example of how I do it...

I have several marketing projects that I want to launch in the next few months . There's a lot of work involved and it makes me tired just thinking about the long list of things I need to do before I reach my goals.

So I break those mental lists down into "baby steps". Every night, before I leave my office, I write down the next day's goals on a post-it note.

I don't use a big sheet of paper, because I may put too much stuff on there and it will never get done. I use a post-it note with limited room to write.

Usually there's 3 or 4 tasks I'd like to complete. Not too hard, not too daunting, just a few simple things that will take me one step closer to my goals.

The next day, I review them again first thing in the morning to get my mindset right. Then I dive into Baby Step #1.

When I finish, I take a big blue Sharpie and cross that sucker right off. And what a feeling that is, to know that you've really accomplished something. It's great!

And at the end of the day, it's tremendously rewarding to toss that yellow note in the trash, with the assurance that everything you wanted to do is actually done. Then I start on the next day's list, with the confidence of knowing I can tackle it without worry.

Why not take some baby steps of your own today? It's easy and it only takes a minute or two. Make a short list of daily goals, cross everything off when you accomplish them, and throw it away when you're done.

You won't believe how great you'll feel...AND you'll be one step closer to achieving all those bigger goals that you've set for yourself.