Today I found myself researching common approaches to personal growth.  This research led me down a bit of a rabbit hole.  After about 40 minutes of searching Google and scanning the blogs of a few “gurus” I came across the concept of Kaizen.

Kaizen is Japanese for improvement.  However, in the U.S. we typically interpret Kaizen to mean continuous improvement.  Toyota made the idea of Kaizen in business popular when they started crushing U.S. auto-makers in the 80s and 90s.  Several books were then written to spread the concept in the west. Today, personal growth coaches are now using Kaizen as a means to help people achieve their goals.

While I was getting more information on how Kaizen is being applied in the coaching industry, I came across a well written blog post on the platform Medium.com. The author for this post does a great job summing up this topic by including several very good quotes to make his points.  For example, this quote by Stephen Covey:

Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment. — Stephen Covey

Without doubt, this quote sums up the approach to using Kaizen for personal growth perfectly. Once you commit to being patient with yourself, you will start thinking in baby steps instead of giant leaps.  Then allow the baby steps to compound like interest.

Even if it’s just one minute working on your personal growth. You can spend one minute a day for a few weeks, then increase to 2 minutes for a few weeks, then 3 and so on a so forth.  Be patient, invest, then invest a little more. That’s Kaizen.