The Japanese philosophy, Kaizen is often used to describe the process of continuous improvement. That means making lots of small changes on a regular basis in order to ultimately improve the operation on a larger scale. It’s often applied to business and particularly to things like manufacturing and engineering. Often, I speak with people and my greatest message is one of progress. In life, we must progress.
Kaizen can also be applied to your own personal goals. If you take the approach of continuous improvement – of making lots of tiny little changes in your life on a regular basis – then over time you’ll be able to ‘upgrade’ every single aspect of your life and in a few years, you can be in a whole different place. Along the way you get progress.
Countless studies tell us that people resist extreme change. That is to say that if you think you can wake up one morning and become a highly disciplined individual, then you’re in for a big surprise. It just doesn’t happen.
In order for change to be successful, it must be incremental and it must be holistic. You have to change every aspect of yourself and your lifestyle to support yourself in the pursuit of your new goals. And to do this, you need to make lots of small, manageable changes. You need progression.
How to Use the Process
So how does this actually look once you start using it? How do you take this idea and turn it into a reliable blueprint that you can follow? How can you drive progress?
A good place to start would be at the beginning. So look for one small change you can make to your lifestyle that can help to serve you in some tiny way in achieving your goal. One small change, implemented successfully gets the process rolling.
Let’s walk through an example. Let’s say you need more time. Perhaps then the thing you need is to get more sleep. So maybe you want to wake up half an hour later. So why not buy yourself a steamer and save a lot of time ironing? Or replace all your shirts with ones that don’t have to be ironed.
That’s a tiny change you’ve made – switching your shirts – but the result is half an hour of extra sleep. That’s a huge difference to your energy levels throughout the day.
What’s holding you back from your goals? Often it’s money. If you need a little more money then perhaps you could look for a way to save $1 a day. $1 a day is a tiny thing to have to change, so maybe it just means that you have a cup of tea in the morning instead of a coffee, or get off the bus one stop earlier. Do you believe you can save one dollar a day? Of course, you can. Once you bed that down, build it to two. In no time you build momentum and you could be saving $20 a week.
Now you have 30 minutes of extra sleep and an additional $20 a week. Those are two tiny changes but they’ve just made it much easier for you to accomplish anything else you want to in your life because you have more energy and more money… What else might be possible?
Achieve your best self by applying these small changes to your life. Do you want to learn more about goal setting and get a free email series providing ten goal setting hacks for you to apply. Check it out here.
