Slow And Steady Wins The Race: Using Kaizen Method To Improve Your Life

Kaizen or the Kaizen method is a Japanese method of improvement that uses slow, steady, incremental change to achieve big results. Originally developed to improve the manufacturing process, the Kaizen method is applicable to almost every area of life.

The word Kaizen itself is a Japanese word that means improvement, continual change or change for the better and that’s exactly what utilizing the Kaizen method can bring. It is both an action plan and a philosophy that helps to bring about change in a gentle, stress-free way. Here’s how Kaizen helps where other methods fail.

Why change is hard

Most people have something in their life they want to change. Whether it is losing weight, getting healthier or being better with their finances, we all have areas in our lives we long to improve. In many cases, people even set goals and try to achieve them. What often happens is that as people recognize just how big the chasm is between where they are and where they want to be. Once this happens, they get overwhelmed.

One way the Kaizen method succeeds where other methods fail is that it helps to counteract the feeling of being overwhelmed with change.

The result of being overwhelmed is that they generally quit or give up and go right back to their old comfortable, familiar patterns. Kaizen takes the focus off the goal and puts it on the journey.

Brief history of Kaizen

The Kaizen method was first developed in the 1950’s as a means of increasing productivity in automotive assembly lines. A Japanese executive visiting the United States was impressed with the overall efficiency of Henry Ford’s assembly line but also noticed some deficiencies as well. Most notably that workers themselves were not being consulted for their input and that inventory would sometimes back up in one area while being understocked in another.

On the other hand, American grocery stores had a much better system of inventory management that could be combined with the assembly line process to create a much more effective system. All of these components eventually combined to become the start of what is now known as the Kaizen system. Overall, the system is designed to decrease waste and increase efficiency, but it also has a number of applications for personal development as well.

How to incorporate Kaizen into your life

One of the reasons people struggle to make big changes in their lives is simply that they get so focused on the goal they become frustrated with the process of getting there. Rather than making the goal a destination, Kaizen makes it simply a compass point that gives you a general direction in which you want to head.

Take losing weight as an example. Let’s say you set a goal to lose 50 pounds. The way most people would set about achieving this goal would be to try and immediately eliminate a large number of foods from their diet, exercise every day and weigh themselves religiously to see what kind of progress they are making. That kind of system is bound to fail because you are trying to make too many changes too rapidly and expecting immediate results.

Now imagine instead that instead of trying to make major overnight changes, you broke your larger goal down into a series of smaller goals and then broke those goals down even further into even smaller daily achievable goals.

For instance, rather than immediately trying to change everything in your diet, imagine you simply eliminated a small thing, such as substituting soda for sparkly water, or stop skipping breakfast so you don’t become hangry by midday.

Instead of trying to cram an hour-long workout into your day, imagine you instead resolved to do one small thing each day such as walking for 30 minutes or doing 10 sit-ups.

Then each day, you work to improve by 1%. That’s all. Just 1% improvement each day can eventually lead to extraordinary results, but a 1% improvement each day is imminently achievable. Over time, those 1% improvements will get you exactly where you want to go without all the stress and strain of trying to do too much all at once.

What to do if you revert to old habits?

One of the primary goals of the Kaizen method is to achieve lasting results. It doesn’t do you any good to lose 50 pounds or save up enough money to go on vacation if you immediately revert to all of your old habits once your goal has been achieved.

The importance of increasing slowly and steadily is that eventually, these small, daily actions become habits that carry you all the way to your goal and beyond.

This is why it is so important to focus on the habits and not the goal. If all you focus on is the goal, then as soon as the goal is achieved, you will simply fall right back into all the same old habits and patterns that will land you right back where you started.

This is where the slow and steady nature of the Kaizen method is so important. You will have bad days. You will have days where you just want to chuck it all and fall right back into your same old destructive habits and patterns, and sometimes you will go right back to it. But every day is a new day and every day brings with it a fresh opportunity for improvement.

If you fall back into old habits and patterns one day, just get up the next day and make a 1% improvement. Then you will be back on track.

Whether you want to lose weight, save money, improve your health or even your efficiency at work, the Kaizen method can help. Not only is it a great action strategy, but it is also a great life philosophy. The goal is constant, steady improvement, not reaching a specific destination. By creating slow, steady improvement each and every day, however, there is almost no goal you cannot meet.

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