What is the easiest way to improve your life today?
I have been reflecting on the process of change. Uncertain times are a good time for reflection and introspection. What went right and satisfied you in the last little while? What went the other way and was a struggle or a knot for you?
What would you like to experience next in your life?
There is a deep seated sentiment that change is difficult. Some statistics I have read claim only about 8 % of people are successful in keeping new year resolutions, and almost half of North Americans don't even bother to try, having failed so many times before!
I do challenge the notion that change has to be agonizing or painful.
I believe there is a better way to create transformation, a way of using small steps to create sustainable change. It is often referred to as Kaizen, although many languages have a word for it.
In Italian there is a word called Progredire , which is literal for "to progress".
In Chinese an interesting word is Gaishanfa - meaning roughly "improvementlogy" which is a word I like very much.
The philosophy is simple.
Continual progress can be made through small steps.
It is a gentle way of handling difficulties in our lives, that will leave you feeling lighter and less stressed. It is a simple effective way of building the new for yourself.
You can use small questions to inspire action.
You can use small steps to start a new habit.
You can use small moments to inspire new ideas, products, services or improvements.
Have you ever had a knot in your shoelace? You have to bend down to untie it.
We all suffer difficulties and struggles, and there are a variety of strategies people use when they face a "knot" in their lives
Some people get frustrated and give up too easily before the knot can be figured out. They never know if they could have overcome their adversity.
Some people get angry and pull at their knot without much care or attention, which makes the knot even tighter and more difficult to undo later.
Some people get very impatient, get out the scissors and destroy a perfectly good thing that just needs some thoughtful consideration and time.
Some people just ignore the knot and pretend it isn't there, and then need to develop all kinds of complicated solutions to circumvent the problem ignored.
In the wisdom tradition of the Tao, we say that when confronted with difficulty, respond with modesty.
How the act of keeping things small can turn into giant leaps:
Ask small questions.
Take small actions.
Solve small problems. ( before they get big )
What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask or never think to ask.
By asking small gentle questions, you can tip-toe past the fight or flight response, which is often what keeps people so stuck and afraid of even trying.
For example: when you ask someone: What are you going to do to turn your life or business around? ... now, that's a pretty overwhelming question that's just a very high mountain to climb.
But, I'm not saying don't dream big or climb higher!
I'm saying break big down to small questions.
Avoid: But how on earth will we do it and try...What is the first thing I can do right now?
What small step can I do each day to reach my goal?
What is one small step I could take to improve my ... health, relationship, money situation, product, process etc?
The simple solution.
For everything you've ever considered doing.
When you are first starting out on an idea or venture or trying to make some fundamental change in your life, there is basically no difference between making a choice that is 1 % better or 1 % worse.
In other words, it won’t create much difference on day one.
If you were to begin a meditation practice and sit for one minute today, chances are you would not reach enlightenment in the first minute.
( if you do, please let me know what you discovered and teach it to me )
But by day 365, if you had sat every day and increased your sitting practice by only one minute a week, by week 52, you would be sitting effortlessly for almost an hour.
Your personal development practice would have compounded and you would have figured out a secret most people never stop to ponder: There is a massive gap between people who make only slightly smaller, better choices each day and those who don’t.
And it all started from a humble 60 seconds of effort!
Asking small questions > takes you to the small action step > which helps you solve the small problem.
When you really boil it down, big problems are just small problems that got ignored for a very long time! A truth ignored will always eventually lead to a crisis, which means, within every crisis is a hidden truth that has been suppressed.
In the case of meditation, instead of a big problem of how to become a meditation master, the small problem became, can I find time for a minute of personal development each day for one week and build on that?
Asking small questions helps you find the first necessary step to take. That first small step brings your closer to your goals. At this point, you may not know how you’ll get there, or how it will happen. But by taking that first small step, you are walking. In your answers to those simple questions you can find the next step, and the next step, and the next that is in the direction of your overall goals. Allow the path to be created along the way.
Why it works.
Small steps circumvent the brains built-in resistance to new behaviours. When you confront the difficult situation while it is still small and accomplish the great mission with a series of small dedicated acts, the problems will be absorbed by the solutions.
We allow problems to shape us into asking new questions of ourselves.
We don't fight too hard nor are we passive either. We find the right tension that will allow us to conquer the difficulty without the difficulty wearing us out from too much or too little effort. The strings on a violin must be at just the right tension for the instrument to be in tune.
Our lives acquire meaning and purpose when we face the conflict between our difficulties and our desires and how they shape up with reality of daily living.
For most of us in the 21st century digital age, life may often feel like a series of battles between our inner ideas and our outer constrictions. We wonder if it is actually possible to find the time and resources to live life in a meaningful way, without always feeling rushed or terrified or faking it till we make it.
We are always in search of the next big thing, or convinced the size of the step will determine the quality of the result.
In our work lives it might manifest as always having to have an instant solution, always having to work faster and always having to have some huge bold innovation at our fingertips.
In our personal lives we see in other ways; get rich quick schemes, crash diets or intensive retreats to fix us fast!
Meanwhile, our inner ideas and urges are always whispering to us that much more is possible for us and our world. In the words of Lao Tzu
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
A vision is important, it helps carry you through tough times and also drives people to improve on the existing order of things. But your vision can be about making small improvements each day.
Patient self-control helps you to stay out of expectation and judgment which weakens you as you deal with what you are seeking to transform.
But the very act of going through the struggle is an essential part of the process. Adversity appears to be the forge that the steel must endure to become its strongest self. Without adversity, we cannot really know any true satisfaction in our accomplishments. If it's too easy, we lose interest pretty fast. If it is too hard, we give up too soon. We must each find the right tension to make continual progress.
Of course, it's always wonderful and satisfying when things work out without any struggle, and many of us experience this more than we care to acknowledge. We just become so conditioned to see what is wrong rather than what is right. We step over positive to get to negative. Actually, things go right very often!
The virtuoso performance is nothing but the tip of an iceberg, which always has below the surface a series of small continuous steps and actions to achieve a vision and play the music of our lives.
Some final thoughts.
You can change anything effectively by building in small consistent behaviors rather than feeling like you need to make some, radical and rapid 360's in your life.
Sometimes those huge shifts happen too, often when people have put the time and effort in for them to manifest, and I've seen people make huge progress very fast when they had real clarity of purpose - but if you want to make change stick, then consider small questions and small steps as a very supportive practice for you to adopt, which over time can create wonderful shifts.
It does requires patience and courage to make your actions match your intentions every day.
So if you are facing a conflict or a situation you are struggling with, bend down slowly and carefully to begin the process to undo the knot. And you might like to try a bamboo skewer as a small step to making the process easier.