How to apply kaizen in daily life? Have you ever heard about the Japanese technique “KAIZEN”? I learned about it during my MBA, the term and its implication got stuck with me. Kaizen is a philosophy that focuses on gradually improving productivity by involving all employees and by making the work environment more efficient. Kaizen translates to “change for the better” or “continuous improvement” in Japanese.
Research says self-improvement focuses on overall well-being in life and at the workplace. Continous focus on self-improvement enhances concentration, productivity, time management, self-worth and self-esteem.
The word continuous improvement is the keyword here, which we can apply in our daily lives if we make this philosophy our life mantra. Continuous improvement in our work, in our relationships and also the relationship we have with ourselves.
How to apply kaizen in daily life?
Can we control others? Can we change others? I bet you have tried doing that and might have returned even more frustrated. How about working on yourself? How about improving your personal well-being? How about improvising your personal efficiencies?
I believe that we all are work-in-progress, and the day we feel that we are like a perfect finished product that doesn’t need any improvement, we might decay. Like machines upgrade their version for better output and efficiency time and time again, we humans must nurture ourselves with upskilling and learning new things from time to time.
Self-improvement is a continuous process and if you stop upgrading yourself you put an end to your own growth and vitality. How to apply kaizen in daily life? By focusing more on self-improvement by enhancing your self-awareness.
5 Ways To Apply KAIZEN In Daily Life
The logical and technical purpose of kaizen is to decrease work inefficiencies, improve the quality of work, be more efficient, have less idle time, and reduce unnecessary activities. All these translate to money savings and turn potential losses into profits. The philosophy surely focuses on improving productivity by involving all employees at the workplace, we can replace employees with our skills here and make our home or work environment more efficient.
Here are 5 ways to apply kaizen in your daily and head towards a path of self-improvement, which is highly addictive 🙂
1.) Self-discipline
Any change requires a large amount of self-discipline and self-control. In organisations, to maintain a total quality system, they practise philosophies like Kaizen and many others. We can also adopt a practice of being disciplined with ourselves to break the bad habits and form new and productive ones. Isn’t it?
2.) Cutting toxic ties
Getting rid of toxic people and environments automatically helps to sharpen your concentration and shifts your focus on the better things around you. Sanitise your circle often.
3.) Get to the root cause of any problem
Narrow down to the maximum “Whys”…the more you question yourself, the more you get closer to the answers you have been seeking for yourself. Don’t sit on the thoughts, compartmentalize those thoughts in tiny boxes and segregate them out of your mind.
4.) Be solution-focused
Instead of focusing on the problem, focus on the possible solutions. Being a hard-core optimist person, I believe there is a solution to every problem and that is what kaizen highlights as well.
5.) Open to learn
Every experience has something to offer, take the learning part and leave the rest. Our life is a series of mistakes and learnings, the more we are open to learning, the more we tend to focus on the things in our control.
To conclude, I would say although kaizen is a management funda, I feel there is a lot of parallels we could draw from it and apply in our personal development. Any small change can have a big future impact. After all, who doesn’t want a continuous self-improvement mantra? Let me know your thoughts 🙂
Love and light
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Priyanka is a published author of 26 Days 26 Ways for a Happier you, Ardhaviram and Broken & Beautiful. An NLP practitioner and Founder of Sanity Daily, helping you prioritize your mental health. Let’s build a happy community.
