Accomplishing Things Through Kaizen

Review:

Lingchi - death by a thousand cuts: to slowly be overwhelmed by things we let into our lives through open doors. 

 

To combat that, we use hansei:

Han - Look upon and turn over

Sei - Look back and review the past

Hansei - Self Reflection:

• Be aware of short-comings and flaws
• Know what tempts you
• Take responsibility for safe guarding against falling
• Avoid blaming everyone else 
• Learn from past mistakes

 

Then we looked our ikigai (our reason for being) and it’s 4 areas:

• What you love
• What you’re good at
• What you can be paid for
• What the world needs

 

When this is unbalanced, we slow down, become unproductive, unsatisfied, and procrastinate often. This leads to: 

• Distractions
• Tired mentally
• Anxiety
• Negative emotion as attached to the task
• Lack of motivation or Not seeing the value of a task. 

 

A common reason we get like this is because what think our ikigai is does not satisfy our upper and lower intelligences, and when they do not work together we find ourselves off course. 

 

They seem to be in conflict most of the time because:

• Your Upper intelligence is logical and methodical, and sees the long term benefits of things. 
• Your Lower Intelligence does not think at all, it pleases itself and survives. It will go along with anything that will bring it immediate pleasure or reward. 
• Since one is long term, and the other is short, they do not work together unless you have a way to satisfy both. 

 

Which brings us to today:

Kaizen (/ky,zen/):

Continuous, incremental improvement is called kaizen. It originated in Japan and the word translates to mean change (kai) for the good (zen).

 

When set out to do a task, set a goal, or plan out something, we often make it way too big, which overloads our reality, or overwhelms the lower intelligence to where it is paralyzed with fear. Fear of not immediate gratification so it fights off this long term thinking. 

 

Kaizen breaks down goals and steps into bite size pieces to where you are working towards the long term, but so small that the lower intelligence is satisfied and sees the rewards through small accomplishments it can celebrate in.