One Small Step Can Change Your Life – The Kaizen Way

Although I’ve read this book a couple of months ago, there are still valuable and helpful things that I wanted to share from this book. While doing another book haul, I stumbled upon this book by Robert Maurer which caught my attention. 

The title is one of those titles that we might get offended by. “Yeah buddy, how in the world can one small step change my life. Robert, get out of here”. But I remembered reading about Kaizen, which is a method of continuously improving all functions and processes in business in small steps. So using this method on your personal life sounded interesting to me. 

Slow change is better than no change.

Ever wondered why so many new years wishes go down the drain? We start off strong in January with a full plan, February gets a bit tough and in March it’s over with our new healthy habits. Of course, these “new year new me” challenges are well-meant but they don’t last. 

In the book, Robert discusses how the brain reacts to big changes. Small changes are more pleasing to the brain and gives time for the brain to get used to the new habit. Big changes will scare the brain and your decision making brain will try to flee from the situation. 

There are a lot of examples of people who had certain disorders, which could be bypassed by doing the smallest exercises. One woman tried all sorts of fitness programs to lose weight and nothing worked, so Robert came up with the idea to let her do some high knees when there was an advertisement on television.

Her reaction was, of course, great. She didn’t get scared because it was that small and she got hope again.  After trying the exercises for a while, the exercises stuck to her and she began doing other exercises. As you can see, the little exercise caused a chain reaction. 

You can apply this to other goals as well. Quitting smoking, writing a novel or meeting the love of your life. I’m currently using this method with writing. Every day I’ll write for 20 minutes. This is very do-able, and most of the time I write more than 20 minutes because I get in a flow state. 

There are more examples and useful tips in the book and it is definitely worth reading them. The book is pretty short and kept fairly short which I liked.

If you’re currently going through something you would like to change, or a goal you would like to pursue, then I recommend this book to you. Try it with small steps instead of big ones.