The Japanese employed this concept of constant improvement after the second world war to great effect. They believed in small constant and never ending improvements to everything they did. The results might be small day to day but over time the results would be huge. They managed to take Japan to a economic powerhouse in relatively short order. The Japanese call this concept of constant improvement “Kaizen”. It has now been embraced here in the west as a powerful management technique.
So how can constant improvement benefit your life.
Firstly strive to find innovations and question everything you are doing to look for improvements. A simply tip is to actually grab a piece of paper each day and sit down until you come up with 20 ways to improve what you are doing in life. It could be small things and even seemingly insignificant ideas but the concept is to get your creative juices flowing till you come up with 20 new ideas.
This brainstorming should take you anywhere between 30-60 mins daily which is a great investment in yourself considering the potential benefits that these ideas could generate for your life. So once you get into this habit daily you will essentially be generating 140 new ideas every week.
Don’t be discouraged if it takes you a while at first to come up with the last few ideas, persist and it will get easier over time. By turning this into a habit your mind will become receptive of little ideas throughout your day and the ideas will begin to flow easier over time.
Once you have your daily 20 ideas written down you will then need to get a system together to start to determine which ideas to implement and which ideas to discard. You certainly would not want to be implementing all 20 ideas each day as this will scatter your focus and will not benefit you long term. Most of your ideas will prove to be useless and you will find that your last several ideas each day tend to be the winners. Regardless of which ideas you choose you will want to start what in many circles are called “swipe files”. You will want to create a swipe file of all your daily ideas. This can simply be a folder that you would put your sheet of ideas into and just highlight the ideas that you have short listed each day as possible ideas to implement.
The ideas that you can implement today then simply get right to it. Other ideas may take a little bit more time and planning. So here is where your swipe file comes in handy. You can create another sheet of paper with the idea written at the top and then on that sheet simply put the steps and processes that will need to happen for the idea to be implemented.
The idea with Kaizen is that you need to be either implementing or working through an idea for improvement every day. If you are constantly in the process of improvement then you will find that your life improves over time. Imagine a laser beam that is being pointed dead straight and then having a person come in and moving it a mere 1 degree to the left each day. You probably won’t notice much over days that the laser is no longer pointing directly at its target but over time you will realize that the laser is now pointing at a totally new target. So it is with constant and never ending improvements. You may not necessarily notice that the small changes are changing your life much but over time you will realize that your path is pointing at a whole new destination and most likely a better destination at that.
Terence Young - For more personal growth articles visit:
http://www.personalgrowthunlimited.com
