How should you proceed implementing positive changes and making them permanent in your life?
One Small Step Can Change Your Life is a nice little book that answers this question by showing a simple and effective approach. In fact, this approach is so amazing that I consider it to be nothing less than the greatest personal development tool when it comes to implementing changes that really last.
The Kaizen Way
The tool I’m talking about is small, continuous improvement – or Kaizen, as the Japanese call it. Although the concept was originally created to be used in factories and production lines, it really shines when used as a personal development tool. Its core idea is so simple that it barely needs any adaptation and can be summarized in a single sentence:
Commit yourself to continuously take small steps towards improvement.
If you make and maintain this one commitment, you’ll naturally overcome the fears and other psychological responses often associated with changes, such as procrastination and feelings of resistance. Instead of attempting to achieve increasingly larger steps, your challenge should be quite the opposite. In every step of the way, try answering the question:
“How can I take a step so small that it is impossible to fail?”
- By focusing on making the steps as tiny as possible, you guarantee small successes you can build on and gain momentum.
- By focusing on continuously answering that question, you lay out the foundation to transform the change into a new habit – which is the best way to implement effortless and sustainable life changes.
A Small Step Towards Kaizen
In the very spirit of kaizen, instead of trying to cover such a fascinating topic in detail all at once, I decided to take a smaller step instead: sharing a summary for the book I mentioned earlier – One Small Step Can Change Your Life, by Robert Maurer. The book is very readable and does a great job of introducing Kaizen in the context of personal development. It provides several strategies and useful insights on solving many challenges, such as starting an exercise program, stop overspending, and many others.
The book summary is formatted as a mind map – which is a great way to summarize a book, since it makes possible recalling it in 5 minutes or less whenever you want.
A Quick Note on Mind Map Formats
The book summary was originally created using the great MindManager software. This program remains open in my desktop most of the time, and I just couldn’t recommend it more.
But, despite all its greatness, not everybody is willing to invest money in a commercial mind mapping application. For that reason, I exported the file to the free, multi-platform FreeMind. While not as full-featured and usable as many paid solutions, it has a nice interactive online mind map viewer. Bear in mind that the interactive version does not contain all the graphics and formatting as the original – but you will be able to check out the book summary without downloading or installing anything.
Get the mind map for One Small Step Can Change Your Life:
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So let’s try a tough one this time.
Luciano, do you know that Mindmaps are really about the connections that you do with the material that you’ve learned. So it is utterly personal. My question is why did you adopted this kind of presentation instead of, for example, giving a summary of the topic?
Please don’t change your approach but legitimate it.
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by the way Great Article!
Fier, thanks for your comment. The goals I had in mind when publishing the mind map were:
1. To present the full content the book. I really think the book touches on a lot of interesting points about Kaizen, making it interesting as a starting point for readers that want to explore the subject more thoroughly.
2. To show a practical example of the technique of mind mapping an entire book – theme of my previous article ‘How to Recall an Entire Book in 5 Minutes or Less‘.
3. To give a small step, experimenting with alternative ways of presenting information…
I agree that a mind map is indeed a personal expression of the connections I made with the book, but that would hold true regardless of the format I picked: it’s impossible to detach authors’ personal biases from their work.
Luciano, I just wanted to say that I love your blog. It’s one of my favorites. I just got done reading “One Small Step…” and have already begun making some TINY changes. I’m also in the process of mind mapping the book for myself using Buzan’s iMindMap. You’ve inspired me to use mind maps for other things as well. I now use mind maps as a kind of journal. The center is the month and each node from there is the week. For each day I keep track of positive actions, ideas, thoughts, improvements, etc.
Thanks again and I look forward to reading future posts.
Hi, Selena. Thanks for your compliments; I’m really glad you got inspired by the site.
I’m very interested in your use of mind mapping as a journaling tool. I also use mind maps in a somewhat similar way to what you described, but instead of adopting a chronological view, I prefer to make the topic branches (thoughts, improvements, etc.) as top-level nodes. That´s one of the reasons I like mind mapping so much: each person is free to organize information in whatever way it works best for them.
As for my mind map, I like to call it my “Life Dashboard”, and I’ll surely talk more about it here in the future…
Baby steps, or small steps forward are helping me in my personal journey with a trainer and losing weight. I get overwhelmed thinking about doing it all at once, but one small step at a time, has kept me strong.
In my writing, I’m trying to take tiny steps to help growth on my business blog (BizMarkTech.com), and it’s frustrating, but I know with each small change I make, it does a little better.
Really enjoyed this, and going to check out the book, thanks.
Its funny how we always want to run before we walk or walk before we crawl. We get impatient. I like a song I heard once that said, ” I am climbing this mountain one step at a time” (from Psalty a Christian kids praise video I think)
This is a great article. I’d heard of using Kaizen in business before, but never thought to transport the process into personal development. Your process of using a mindmap for a book summary is really cool. I’ve used them to layout websites but that’s about it. I’m reading a new book about Changing Your Course right now, and I’m definitely going to borrow your mindmap technique to summarize and work through the process the book teaches. Thanks!
Ruth: Glad you enjoy the book review in mind map format. Mind mapping is a very versatile technique, and it works great even for large amounts of information such as more in-depth book summaries.
By the way, judging by the description in the website the book you mention seems pretty interesting! Would you mind sharing your mind map when it’s done? I would love to take a peek at it… Thanks!
Thanks for the Mindmap, interesting book
I strongly agree. Improvements don’t have to be giant leaps, but the process of continuous improvements has to go on every day!
I use Kaizen for new software product developments. Here is a blog about it:
http://blog.maysoft.org/blog.n.....PAO-7LJRVS
Hi!
I’m glad to discover your blog
I spend 6 years to figure out how to create a methodology to program computer with minimalism as goal (less code = more speed + less bugs)
My conclusio is pretty clear: mind maps are perfect for that
Mind maps is the more natural metaphor because is how our brain do the job
Everytime I read more information a other points of view I discover new words for my work and Kaizen is a very, very good one because it describe with only one word the process to achive a project conclusion with my work (called Yanged)
Trying to build a computing system with Yanged is based on Kaizen because of extrem programming techniques are Kaizen, iteration is the key
Thanks for you work here. I’ll be reading you
I like the mind map, nice looking!