This week, we’re looking at the big picture, and I’m sharing with you some non-retirement tips...my personal life hacks that have helped me navigate the challenging, unpredictable, and winding path of life.

Today, I’m talking about Kaizen, which is a Japanese word meaning continuous improvement. Kaizen is what took Toyota from a tiny Japanese car company to the world’s largest car manufacturer in the world.

I first learned about Kaizen in college when I took a quality control and lean manufacturing course as a required business class. When I signed up for this class, I thought it was going to be a colossal waste of time. Little did I know that what I learned in this class would be one of the most valuable things I learned while in college.

At its core, Kaizen is about making small, seemingly insignificant yet constant improvements, rather than big leaps of change to make big changes over time.

Kaizen doesn’t just work in the business world either. Author and psychologist, Robert Maurer, applied the concept of Kaizen to his psychology patients with dramatic and lasting results.

Kaizen is so effective because the ridiculously small steps you take to build new habits or destroy bad habits circumvent the brain’s built-in resistance we all have to a new behavior.

I have plenty of bad habits, but the poor health habit that has nagged at me the most over the years is that I have never been consistent with flossing. I don’t want my teeth to fall out, but I can’t seem to will myself into flossing every day. Usually I just floss regularly for about 3 weeks before my dental cleaning so I don’t get scolded, then fall back into my old bad habits again.

If you follow the concept of Kaizen and you’re trying to build the habit of flossing every day, you would start by just taking a piece of floss and just placing it on your counter. Then after doing that for a week, maybe you floss one tooth. Then 2 teeth, and continue to build, one ridiculous step at a time. You might build the habit gradually, one painless step at a time, until one day you’re flossing your whole mouth!

That’s it for today!  Thanks for listening, but I need to go floss 4 teeth now.

My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the One Minute Retirement Tip.

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