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title:: Books/ The Kaizen Way - icon:: 📖 tags:: #Books purchased:: Aug 28th, 2022 start:: Aug 28th, 2022 end:: Aug 28th, 2022 published:: length:: author:: @Robert Maurer cover:: - “Confront the difficult while it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series of small acts.” — Tao Te Ching - List - kaizen mind sculpture sex - Too small to fail - The young doctor and I were concerned about Julie’s long-term health. Her weight (she was carrying more than thirty extra pounds) and soaring stress level put her at increased risk for diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and deeper depression. It was clear that if Julie did not make some changes, she was headed down a spiral of disease and despair. - We knew a cheap, proven way to help Julie, and it wasn’t a bottle of pills or years in psychotherapy. If you read the papers or watch the news, you can probably guess what I’m talking about: exercise. Regular physical activity could improve nearly all of Julie’s health problems, give her more stamina to sustain her through her grueling days, and boost her spirits. - Her only solace was relaxing for a half hour or so on the couch most evenings. I could predict what would happen: The doctor would tell her to exercise, Julie would feel both misunderstood (“How am I going to find time to work out? You don’t understand me at all!”) and guilty. The resident physician would feel frustrated to see her advice ignored one more time—and possibly start to become cynical, as so many hopeful young doctors eventually do. What could I do to break this sad cycle? - When people want to change, they usually turn first to the strategy of innovation. Innovation is fast and big and flashy; it reaches for the largest result in the smallest amount of time. - We ignore a problem or challenge for as long as possible, and then, when we are forced by circumstances or duress, we attempt to make a large leap toward improvement. - There is an alternative to innovation. It is another path altogether, one that winds so gently up the hill that you hardly notice the climb. It is pleasant to negotiate and soft to tread. ==And all it requires is that you place one foot in front of the other.== - “How about if you just march in place in front of the television, each day, for one minute?” The resident shot me an incredulous look. But Julie brightened a little. She said, “I could give that a try.” - When Julie returned for a follow-up visit, she reported that she’d indeed marched in front of the TV set for one minute each night. Granted, she wasn’t going to get much healthier with just sixty seconds of low-intensity exercise. But during this second visit, I noticed that Julie’s attitude had changed. Instead of coming back discouraged, as so many failed exercisers do, Julie was more animated, with less resistance in her speech and demeanor. “What else can I do in one minute a day?” she wanted to know. - ==low-key change helps the human mind circumnavigate the fear that blocks success and creativity.== - I’m talking about really small steps here, ones that seemed almost embarrassingly trivial at first. If a patient wanted to cut out caffeine, we’d start by taking one less sip each day. - As one client often said to me, “**The steps were so small I couldn’t fail!”** - - Kaizen - All changes, even positive ones, are scary. - One way it accomplishes this is to slow down or stop other functions such as rational and creative thinking that could interfere with the physical ability to run or fight.this timidity was crucial. - Whether the challenge is a new job or just meeting a new person, the amygdala alerts parts of the body to prepare for action—and our access to the cortex, the thinking part of the brain, is restricted, and sometimes shut down. - Some lucky people are able to ==get around this problem by turning their fear into another emotion: excitement.== - The little steps of kaizen are a kind of stealth solution to this quality of the brain. #conservative - As your small steps continue and your cortex starts working, the brain begins to create “software” for your desired change, actually laying down new nerve pathways and building new habits. Soon, your resistance to change begins to weaken. - After a few weeks of very limited exercise, she was shocked to find herself exercising even when she didn’t have to. Those first small steps laid down the neural network for enjoying the change. - Small actions (say, writing just three notes) satisfy your brain’s need to do something and soothe its distress. As the alarms die down, you’ll renew access to the cortex and get some of your creative juices flowing again. #gtd - - Stress or Fear? - While the modern medical name for the feeling produced by a new challenge or large goal is stress, for countless generations it went by the old, familiar name of fear. - most successful people are the ones who gaze at fear unblinkingly. Instead of relying on terms like anxiety, stress, or nervousness, they speak openly of being frightened by their responsibilities and challenges. - I noticed that when adults came to see a physician and talked about their emotional pain, they chose words such as stress, anxiety, depression, nervous, and tense. But when I observed children talking about their feelings, they talked about being scared, sad, or afraid. - word choice had less to do with the symptoms and more to do with expectations. ==The children assumed their feelings were normal.== Children know they live in a world they cannot control. - Adults, I believe, assume that if they are living correctly, they can control the events around them. When fear does appear, it seems all wrong—so adults prefer to call it by the names for psychiatric disease. **Fear becomes a disorder, something to put in a box with a tidy label of “stress” or “anxiety.”** - if you expect fear, you can approach it in a compassionate manner. - fear is the body’s gift, alerting us to a challenge. - Six Strategies - Ask small questions - However, the kaizen method works not by manic exhortation to revolutionize the company, but by requests that are much simpler and restricted in scope. - Your brain wants to play! A question wakes up your brain and delights it. Your brain loves to take in questions, even ludicrous or odd ones, and turn them over. - Parents intuitively know to ask questions, then answer them, then ask again and see if the child can recall. They understand that the brain loves questions. - ==Your brain loves questions and won’t reject them . . . unless the question is so big it triggers fear.== - Don’t wake the amygdala - 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. - Instead, he takes a few incidents—“like [a] plane crash or the idea of a patient and a nurse at night talking”—and asks himself a few very small questions, such as “Who is the man in the plane? Why is he there? Why does he crash? What year is this?” Of the answers to small questions, he says, “Those little fragments, fragments of mosaics, they add up and you start finding out the past of these characters and trying to invent a past for these characters.” - Whatever question you use, your challenge is to ask it with a gentle and patient spirit. When you use a harsh or urgent tone with yourself, fear will clog the creative process. - Some of my clients, including Grace, thrive when they are “assigned” to leave answers to their small questions in my voice mail. - If you tend to berate yourself with negative questions (Why am I so fat?), try asking: **What is one thing I like about myself today?** - ingredient basic to kaizen: respect for others, even those whose attitudes and answers we think we already understand. - TODO Here are just a few ideas to get you started. Feel free to come up with your own. - TODO Minds Sculpture how to - What Will Be Your First Small Step? - Begin by deciding where in your life you think you can most easily benefit from small, incremental steps toward excellence. - Body Building - What small, trivial step could you take that might improve your body? - engage core; quick pose like turbo cat or boat pose - ==a step so easy that you can guarantee you’ll take it every single day.== - okok flex my stomach for few seconds every day - - Random Highlights - Small actions trick the brain into thinking: Hey, this change is so tiny that it’s no big deal. No need to get worked up. No risk of failure or unhappiness here. - 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. - exact opposite of the usual pattern, in which a person starts off with a burst of activity for a few weeks, but then returns to a comfortable spot on the couch. - Don’t give up! Instead, try scaling back the size of your steps. - Research demonstrates that people who use a journal to chart their emotions receive many of the same physical and psychological benefits as those who talk to a doctor or minister or friend. I believe that the reason writing in a journal is so effective is that, for many people, **it’s a pretty big deal to decide that your emotional life is valuable enough to commit to a book that no one else will ever see.** #journaling - By taking care that your first step is truly a small one, you give yourself the best shot at success. Once you’ve experienced the joy of taking the first step, you can decide whether it’s appropriate to take another. - Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, and it’s always easier to spot a crack in the ceiling after rain has soaked the plaster. - you are having to push yourself to do the step—are an indication that the step is too big, inviting the amygdala and the harsh voice to awaken and interfere. id:: 62f53a56-ef6b-4d50-942f-65bc0f67b337 - Many Americans are unaware that diarrhea kills a million children around the world each year. To put this number into perspective, that’s the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of children crashing every four hours. #todayILearned