My friend Sunyata recommended that I read psychologist Dr. Robert Maurer’s book, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way.
The Sino-Japanese word “kaizen” means “change for better” or “improvement”, and became associated with the Toyota Way of continuous improvement through small steps. (Even though there’s nothing in the word Kaizen itself that indicates the change has to be small. For the benefit of all my fellow nitpickers…)
In the book, Maurer goes through six aspects of Kaizen:
- Ask small questions
- Think small thoughts
- Take small actions
- Solve small problems
- Bestow small rewards
- Identify small moments
They all work with our mind’s tendency to identify big change as danger, and resist it.
Therefore, by challenging ourselves to make the tiniest possible change that could create improvement, we dramatically increase our chances of actually going through with the change.
One example from the book’s “small actions” section stuck with me. This lady wanted to start exercising regularly. However, her past efforts all ended in failure, and she really didn’t like exercising. Dr. Maurer recommended something so ridiculously easy, that it was completely nonthreatening. The woman already had a habit of drinking coffee with her morning paper. So he instructed her to take her coffee while standing on her treadmill (without turning it on). She did this for a whole month! Then he instructed her to walk for one minute after her coffee for the following month. Slowly but surely, she reached the point of running 3 miles 4 times a week.
I think it takes special discipline to do something so outrageously simple on your own. In my opinion, if this hadn’t been her therapist’s “prescription”, this lady would not have stuck with taking coffee on her motionless treadmill for one month.
I went through a mental exercise to translate this to something I wanted to do for myself:
I’m inconsistent about eating salad for lunch, because many times I’m hungry and I just want to warm something up quickly. I thought that the tiniest action I could take was to open my refrigerator vegetable drawer and look at the vegetables, and then close it and just grab whatever I wanted to eat. I would look at my vegetables before eating lunch for a month.
Despite what the Kaizen book says, I felt resistance.
Not because the task was hard, but because it was stupid.
I’m sure that if I had regular (and expensive!) appointments with a therapist who instructed me to perform this task daily, I’d be better at doing it. An authority figure could help justify making this change, even though it was silly. Don’t you agree?
So, since I’m not Dr. Maurer’s patient, I decided to make you my therapist slash accountability partner, and start this new habit immediately. In a few weeks’ time, I’ll report my progress.
Wish me luck!
What’s a change you’d like to make, and what’s the tiniest possible action you can take?
Do you feel comfortable taking on a commitment to this action? If not, why?
I’d love to know.
I’m all about this idea! Small changes are so much easier to get started with and less threatening like you said. Thanks Shlomit!
This one here was mind-blowing for me: “They all work with our mind’s tendency to identify big change as danger, and resist it.”
That alone will change the way I look at change! (Although, I’m one of the folks who loves change.) But looking at the scale in this context has me spinning already…
I recently decided to start a habit of doing planks a few times a day. I’ve done Plank Challenges before and they get too hard and I quit. So now I’m doing the same length plank at least 3 times before increasing my plank by 1 second. It’s not exactly Kaizen, but it’s working for me. Some days I do 3 planks throughout the day so the next day I increase by 1 second, sometimes it takes me 3 days to move up a second.
One small step was realizing that the action I wanted to take was not happening. So I went through all of the components that made up the action and they were known. But my old way of doing it wasn’t working anymore. I needed to streamline one part. I was unable to do it because I met the resistance of judgment. Once I saw that was the only thing holding me back. I did it differently and daily! Success.
Happy to be a stand-in for an expensive therapist! Go look at your vegetables!!
I can really relate to this, Shlomit. I try to be just 1% better each week with my YouTube videos, which really adds up over time.