One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

Tiptoe Past Fear
Your brain loves questions and won’t reject them . . . unless the question is so big it triggers fear.
Questions such as “How am I going to get thin (or rich, or married) by the end of the year?” or “What new
product will bring in a million more dollars for the company?” are awfully big and frightening. Like
Patrick’s questions to his staff, these create fear in anyone on their receiving end—even when we’re
asking the question of ourselves. Instead of responding with playfulness, our brain, sensing the fear,
suppresses creativity and shuts down access to the cortex (the thinking part of the brain) when we need it
most. One of the brain’s strengths—the ability to go into a self-protective lockdown in times of danger—
here becomes a crippling liability.
By asking small, gentle questions, we keep the fight-or-flight response in the “off” position. Kaizen
questions such as “What’s the smallest step I can take to be more efficient?” or “What can I do in five
minutes a day to reduce my credit-card debt?” or “How could I find one source of information about adult
education classes in my city?” allow us to bypass our fears. They allow the brain to focus on problem-
solving and, eventually, action. Ask a question often enough, and you’ll find your brain storing the
questions, turning them over, and eventually generating some interesting and useful responses.
Although the mechanics of creativity—how the brain goes about producing a new thought—remains one
of the vast unexplored frontiers of science, I’ve had decades of experience helping people move away
from constriction and conformity and toward creativity. I believe that the mere act of posing the same
question on a regular basis and waiting patiently for an answer mobilizes the cortex. A question is not
demanding, not scary. It’s fun. So when you ask small questions, your amygdala (where the fight-or-flight
response occurs) will remain asleep, and the cortex, always hungry for a good time, will wake up and
take notice. It will process and absorb the question and, in its own magical way, create answers when it is
ready . . . which may be in that moment we are in the shower, driving, or washing the dishes. Albert
Einstein once asked, “Why is it I get my best ideas in the morning while I am shaving?” I wonder if he’d
asked himself small questions—well, as small as questions about the nature of the universe can get—in
the days or weeks or months before the best ideas came to him.