Kaizen and Persistent Mild TBI: Changing Your Life One Small Step at a Time
“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with the first step.” -Lao Tzu
Can You Change Your Life in Three Months?
Within some coaching circles, you’ll hear the buzzwords “90 days” and “3 months” thrown around. As in: helping clients make big, transformational changes that will alter the course of their lives within the first three months of working together. Sounds great, right?
Or does it?
Let me illustrate why I shifted away from that thinking years ago.
A Thought Experiment
Try out this little thought experiment: imagine tasking yourself to solve all of the major problems in your life within three months of everybody taking a COVID vaccine. Take some time to really imagine this— how you picture it in your mind, how it would feel in your body.
How does that really feel to you, when you think about it?
Does it feel inspiring and doable? Or does it feel tiring or overwhelming? Do you even find, after a certain point, that your brain just shuts down thinking about it?
Kaizen: One Small Step Can Change Your Life
That overwhelmed feeling is not uncommon, according to Robert Maurer in Kaizen: One Small Step Can Change Your Life. Whether we’re aware of it or not, when we think about needing to come up with huge solutions, it often provokes huge anxiety. And that anxiety can make us feel paralyzed and helpless.
To illustrate this is in a real-world example, Maurer recounts observing the manager of a work group asking each of his employees to come up with an idea for how their company could become its industry leader. Most of the employees felt daunted by the question and did not offer much in the way of ideas. A number of them showed visible signs of anxiety.
The manager got a far better response, however, when he changed his question later to: “Can you think of one very small step you might take to improve our process or product?”
Think about how much smaller this is as a question. Instead of having to singlehandedly figure out how to vault the company into becoming the industry leader, employees now are only asked to come up with a single, small idea to improve the company’s functioning or its product.
This narrowing of the assignment not only helped individuals keep their anxiety at bay, it also helped focus the task for them— and as a result, they came up with better and more successful ideas.
Small Changes in Our Own Lives
Kaizen, roughly translated, means small steps for continual improvement.When it comes to our own lives, Maurer thus encourages us to ask ourselves small questions and to answer them with small changes. In his view, this will lead to constant, small improvements. And these small improvements, in turn, will produce deep and lasting positive changes in our lives, over time.
Maurer though is not the only one to encourage us to make small changes in our lives.
James Clear, himself a brain injury survivor, wrote an interesting book called Atomic Habits, in which he touts making tiny changes to our habits, one at a time— and doing this continuously over a period of years. Similarly, Damon Zahariades urges readers “to start small so it’s easy to get started right away” in his book Small Habits Revolution: 10 Steps to Transforming Your Life Through the Power of Mini-Habits. The world’s pre-eminent couples therapists, John Gottman and Julie Gottman, tell us in Eight Dates, “Successful relationships are created through small words, small gestures, and small acts.”
In sum, if we continually make small improvements to various aspects of our lives, we can eventually transform ourselves—maybe not within one or two months, but probably within one to two years, if we keep at it.
Small Steps and Persistent Mild Brain Injuries
When it comes to individuals with persistent mild brain injuries, the concepts of ‘small questions, small actions’ and ‘continual improvement’ are especially useful. Mild brain injury survivors are often prone to being flooded by anxiety, and they often struggle with immobility.
The technique of small changes to habits enables them to avoid anxiety overload and to get moving on the things they want to do. That creates steady, incremental progress— with a totally doable amount of effort required. And that creates momentum— and confidence.
Let me share an example from my own experience. Several years ago, my doctor urged me to change my diet. Specifically, she prescribed a paleo diet (i.e., no dairy, no grains). These changes felt overwhelming to me, at the time, so I didn’t implement any of them. But after reading Kaizen some months later, I decided to try one specific thing with my eating: I cut cheese out of my diet. That was pretty manageable, so then I moved on to cutting out almost all dairy the following week. Within two weeks of that, I then tried out going mostly gluten-free. After a few months, I was doing what my doctor had suggested and feeling healthier.
Let me share another example from my experience, this time as a coach. I had a client who felt stuck. There was a lot he wanted to do— he wanted to start a start an organization and build it from the ground up. On top of that, there were a lot of things he needed to do just to tend to the day-to-day needs of his life. He knew he had a lot to do. He just couldn’t get himself organized or moving on it. Immediately coming up with a full three-month plan might well have been too much, too soon for him. But he came up with one small thing that he could do right away: every day, right after waking up, he’d get out his calendar and make a to-do list for the day. This helped him recall what he needed to do for the day. It also was something he could refer back to throughout the day to keep himself on track. And it worked. Within a week, he’d resumed his organization-building work, and he started to make strides in the other areas of his life, as well.
But asking small questions and seeking small answers doesn’t just work for mild brain injury survivors when they look to change their habits. Small questions and small answers also help them tackle problems that feel too big and overwhelming— by breaking them down into more manageable chunks and making it easier to get started on them. In the example of my client above, once he was ready to figure out his three-month plan, he was able to move forward on it by breaking down what he needed to do into smaller tasks— which he could then carry out, one by one.
With every successful small change that we make in our lives from asking small questions and seeking small answers, we not only build confidence, we gain another parcel of control over our lives.
And with all the uncertainty in the world right now, I believe that is truly worthwhile.
A Special Offer
I am about to launch a new coaching program for individuals with mild brain injuries which relies on the principles of improving our lives through small changes.
It’s called Build the Foundation®.
Build the Foundation® is an intensive, individualized coaching program that should last for 4-7 months, depending on individual clients’ needs. Focusing on habits and small, achievable changes, this program should help clients get their everyday lives back under control or working better for them.
Build the Foundation® is currently in its piloting phase, so for the first 4 clients who enroll now, I will offer approximately 20% or more off of its regular rates. If you’re interested, email me ASAP (and mention this blog post) at jon@rebuildcoaching.com for more details and to potentially set up a free consultation. Hurry: these spaces should go fast!