One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

Don’t Small Steps Yield Slow Results?
Kaizen steps may be small, but they can often lead to rapid change. My experience with the clinic shows
that sometimes all it takes is one small step to effect a dramatic improvement. And you may find that a
single tiny change, perhaps taking just five minutes every night to pick up stray toys and household
objects, satisfies your goal of a cleaner house.
When the goal is to perform an activity that you deeply resist (say, exercise) or to give up an ingrained
habit (perhaps you shop as a way to relax), you may find that one small step isn’t quite enough. But that
step 
does
lead you comfortably to a second step and then a third, and so on, until one day you discover
that you have mastered the change.
Let’s return to Julie, the single mother who didn’t have time to exercise. She started with a small action
—marching for just one minute each day in front of the television. This action didn’t do much for her
aerobic capacity, but for Julie it had a different and perhaps even more significant effect. It opened a
window to the possibility of fitting exercise into her life. After a couple of weeks, Julie decided she
could try marching for the duration of a commercial break. Once she mastered that, she decided she would
try for 
two
commercial breaks. And then she forgot to stop. The commercials would conclude, the
television show would resume, and Julie would find that she was still moving. Almost without realizing
it, this extraordinarily busy woman found a way to meet the American Medical Association’s guidelines
for thirty minutes of cardiovascular exercise on most days—and to enjoy it. It had become a habit by
itself, one that she would begin to miss if she skipped it.
Taking small steps, knowing that you are calming fear and building a new habit, requires trust and
optimism. People who struggle with kaizen do so not because the steps are hard but because they are easy.
They can’t overcome the cultural training that says change must always be instantaneous, it must always
require steely self-discipline, and it must never be pleasurable. We think that if we’re hard on ourselves,
exhorting ourselves to do more and to do it faster, we’ll get better results. We say: 
How can I get to my
goal in one minute a day? At this rate, it’ll take years!
But kaizen asks us to be patient. It asks us to have
faith that with small steps, we can better overcome the mind’s initial resistance to change. We do not have
control of the timetable for our change—just as we cannot pinpoint the moment we achieved a goal such
as learning to drive or ski or play the guitar. We simply have to trust that the mind will develop mastery
and obey the instructions we are sending it.

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