Monthly Featured Article (January 2019)

Make Small Improvements Daily, a.k.a. Kaizen

by Susie J. Briscoe 

Who doesn’t want to improve their lives? If you look at self-help and productivity information, you will see it’s quite popular and growing.

People want to improve. However, one of the biggest challenges people face is they try to do too much too fast.

When you build up your improvement plan, you have a much better chance of success by taking small steps.

Determine what you want to improve. You can’t tackle everything.  

Therefore, make a priority of the aspects of your life you want to improve. Once you have that, you can determine a plan on how to improve. For instance, suppose you want to improve a skill at work or learn a new one. Learn what is involved in getting up to speed, and then map out small steps that you can take to accomplish that goal.

People make the mistake of trying to fast-track their improvements. If you tried to learn your new skill in two days, you could become confused. That would have the opposite effect, which is counterproductive. Try breaking up what you need to learn into small, 15-minute chunks. Then, schedule those learning activities for the next few months.

Colleges have been structuring their learning in this manner for years. Students take a course for an hour or two at a time. Then, they move on to their next class. That is spread out over several months. The reason colleges have been doing it this way is because it works.

While you can take on multiple improvements at the same time, don’t go overboard. You need to make sure your current improvements are working. Otherwise, you will get overwhelmed. When that happens, you run the risk of not continuing with all that you’ve mapped out.

Don’t listen to what others believe you should improve. It’s your life, and you are the one that will have to go through the improvements.

If you should happen to let your quest towards improvement slip, don’t be too hard on yourself. Life is busy, and working on improvements is not something people include in their schedule. It is a mindset shift, and it takes a while to get used to the new ways. Therefore, you should keep the sessions short.

By making small changes daily, the improvements will become habits. After a while, they will become second nature. The fact that you kept your activities small gave you a better chance of being successful at them. 

Don’t forget to share with me what you discovered during this month and let me know if I may share it within this newsletter next month.