Get a Little Better Every Day Using the Kaizen Method
How to reach your goals one small step at a time.
Most people in this world want to make positive changes in their lives. We are all constantly evaluating ourselves and recognizing things that we’d like to improve upon. This idealogy can come in many different forms from person to person. Maybe you feel you’re overweight and you want to drop a few pounds or get in better shape. Maybe you have an unhealthy habit like smoking that you want to break. Or it could be that you want to improve your financial stability and start saving money. The things we want to improve on are almost immeasurable.
Most of the time when we decide to act on these changes we set big goals and hit the ground running. Early on in the process, we’re doing great and feel like we’re making real strides to achieving those goals. But then things start to dip. It could be the fact that working extra hours at work is getting in the way of moving forward. Or maybe a night out with friends leads to some overeating and takes away all of your weight loss gains for that week. No matter the reason, whenever we start to get derailed from the path to our big goals, it tends to create a snowball effect and before we know it, we’re right back at square one. And with that comes disappointment, and with disappointment comes a tendency to give up altogether.
It’s happened to me too many times to count. I’ll give you a quick example. Quite a while back I decided I wanted to stop smoking. I told myself this was the time that I was going to succeed. I decided to go the “cold turkey” route and just stop altogether. I did well the first week. I didn’t partake in a single cigarette. I was feeling great and proud of myself for my accomplishment. At the end of the week though, I went out with some friends, a couple of whom were smokers. We were having fun that night hanging out, laughing, and catching up on the week. One of my smoking friends offered me a smoke, and feeling great about my success, I thought I would reward myself and have one. One turned into two, and two turned into three. The next day I bought a pack and I was right back to smoking almost a pack a day. I was back where I started and was ashamed of myself for not being able to reach my goal. I gave up altogether.
My problem was, and what is the case with most who fail to hit their targets in situations like these, is my goal was too big to begin with. It’s a near-impossible task to set a goal like “I’m going to lose 20 lbs. this month” and stick to it. As you measure yourself against that goal along the way and don’t see the results you’re anticipating, you get discouraged, and that discouragement piles up to the point where you end up giving up. And big blanket goals like that without smaller targets to hit along the way leave you with no sense of accomplishment, and with no sense of accomplishment, your motivation wanes.
So how do we remedy this? We fix these issues by implementing kaizen into our daily lives. Maybe you’ve heard the term kaizen before. If you work in any kind of production environment, I’m almost positive you’ve heard it before. And if you work in other fields, you’re probably in the process and don’t realize it. But almost every company employs some version of kaizen in what they do with their processes.
What is Kaizen?
Kaizen is a Japanese term that means “change for the better” or “continuous improvement”. Toyota is the company most often held up as the example when it comes to kaizen, but contrary to popular belief, the Japanese did not create this methodology.
The reality is that it was developed by Depression-era American business management theorists to improve productivity in factories to help build the arsenal to win World War II. Instead of getting companies to make drastic changes to the way they did things and to their infrastructure, these theorists encouraged them to make small, continuous improvements. They encouraged them to look for hundreds of small things they could improve upon. They urged them not to look for big department layout changes or install new equipment. Instead, they suggested they look for improvements on existing jobs, and existing equipment and processes.
After the success of this idealogy in American factories helped turn the tide and win the war, these same theorists introduced this concept to Japanese factories to help them revitalize their economy and start rebuilding their nation. The Japanese took to the idea of small, continual improvement right away and gave it a name: Kaizen — Japanese for continuous improvement.
While Japanese companies embraced this American idea of small, continuous improvement, American companies forgot all about it. Instead, the new vision of radical innovation took hold and became the norm in American business. Using Kaizen, Japanese auto companies like Toyota slowly but surely began to outperform American automakers during the 1970s and 1980s. In response, American companies started asking Japanese companies to teach them about a business philosophy American companies had originally taught the Japanese and here we are.
While Kaizen was originally developed to help businesses improve and thrive, we can all implement it in our daily lives when trying to reach our goals. Instead of trying to reach big goals in a short amount of time, we need to focus on making small improvements every day that will eventually lead to the changes we want.
Each day, just focus on getting a little bit better in whatever it is you’re trying to improve on. You may not think that making a small improvement every day will lead to much, but those small improvements compound on each other, and before you know it, you’ve made significant changes.
How to Implement Kaizen in Your Life
To implement kaizen in your life, instead of looking at the big goal, start looking for the small ones. Going back to the examples I laid out at the beginning of this, let’s look at some ways to implement the kaizen method to reach those goals.
You want to lose weight but trying all of the trendy diet fads hasn’t worked for you. Think small. At break time, cut your snack in half today. Then cut it down smaller the next day, and the day after that. Then start looking for more small improvements to make. Maybe that means reducing your portions at dinner a little each day. Then work on reducing your portions at other mealtimes. Before you know it, you’re consuming less each day and the weight starts to slowly fall off.
If you want to get in better shape by exercising, jumping into a gym membership, and telling yourself you’re going to spend an hour there every day is a huge goal. Maybe start by doing a single pushup when you get up in the morning. The next day do two. Continue adding one every morning. After a month you’re up to doing 30 every morning and on your way to being in better shape.
If you want to save more money, change may be the keyword. As in pocket change. Start with holding on to your pocket change every day and saving it until you have a nice amount to roll. You can compound on that by evaluating the things you subscribe to and cutting one each month.
I had a friend who would take whatever $1 bills he had in his wallet at the end of each day and put them in a box. When he had a hundred of them in that box he would deposit them in his savings account. Before long, he was adding between $100 and $200 a month to his savings account. It was a small change he made that led to achieving a big goal.
And taking my own advice, I could use kaizen to help stop smoking. I’m a pack-a-day smoker. For those of you who don’t know, cigarettes come twenty to a pack. My small goal would be to cut one cigarette a day from my habit. On day one I cut down to nineteen. On day two I cut down to eighteen. It sounds small, but after just ten days, I’m doing half the damage to my body as I was just a little over a week before.
The moral of this story is to start small and make your increases gradual. Avoid the temptation to get impatient and start rushing forward and taking bigger leaps. Take it slow, steady, and consistent. Enjoy the small wins. You’ll see real, measurable progress, and this will help you stay motivated to continue on toward that larger goal. The improvements will be gradual, but you will improve. There may be days that you fail and backslide, but it will be a small fail because your goal was small. It’s not a catastrophic failure like when I tried to quit smoking altogether at once. Time and patience will lead you where you want to go.
“Little strokes fell great oaks.” –Benjamin Franklin