Kaizen Effect in Life- Grow with It

Change, improvement, achievement, goals, success all these words sound so good to the ears, but these are not mere words, behind each one of them stands the dream of millions of people, and some may even die before reaching their destination. Have you ever thought why it happens, why a dream remains a fiction and never becomes true? What is it that we lack to convert our dreams into reality?

James Freeman Clarke rightly said, that

“We are either progressing or retrograding all the while. There is no such thing as remaining stationary in this life”. 

We do not realize that in the due course of life we don’t remain stationary at all; there is either a process of advancement or regression. So how does it matter then? Most of the time we become so occupied in living life that we don’t even comprehend what our dreams are all about and just keep on hovering over the river of life. We go to the school which is selected by our parents (yes, there is a less chance of us making our own choice here), we opt a career of our parents’ choice, we work for a boss, where is our life then?

“When what you want doesn’t happen, learn to want what does.” (Arabic proverb) and here it goes, this is what we all do though we may think that there is nothing wrong in accepting the facts of life, but then one needs to ask- what about dreams?

So, what should we do for the continuous growth? Dream and then make sure that you fulfill all of them, without accepting defeat, be it professional dreams or personal, and ironically many of us do not even realize the difference between the two, for us becoming a doctor is a dream which is both personal and professional. Similarly, receiving a promotion is a dream and it becomes both personal and professional.

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. Benjamin Franklin

So my dear friends let us Progress, let’s look at the sky with open arms and just grab all the opportunities which come our way.

Here are the recommendations on how we can progress in Organizations:

Discover: What do you want to be? This much we all know, but how to reach there gets difficult as we join a company. Discover yourself, your strength, your key interests, your talents, weaknesses, limitations and everything that you can get to know about yourself. Just like a company has its own vision statement, why don’t you also envision one for yourself? An intelligent foresight will help you realize your vision and mission in life.

Affiliation: Discovery of inner self is done, though it is an ongoing process to discover oneself, the next step is to take affiliation wherever possible, acquire a skill set which you think is missing or lacking, network with people who can help you accomplish your goals, join some club, become a part of a project team. Get involved with people, groups, and communities, just open your wings and fly to connect with others. Continuous improvement can be acquired with addition to something new be it hobbies, interests or just adapting to changes.

Communication: Now comes the difficult part, communicate with people in the network so that you get the opportunity to grow and prosper in to what you want to be. The goals can be achieved if they are properly communicated to the Leader of the organization or vice versa. In fact, how you present your self is also part of communication and plays an important role in the path of progress. It has many facets such as seeking and giving feedback, listing, empathy and plan.

Conception: So you have a plan, now is the time to draft your actions accordingly. Take one step at a time, do no hurry and design your course of action. These actions are like foundation stones of a building, the strength of which carries the entire burden of a building and the people in it. :)

Execution: Not so difficult and not that easy too…if any problems comes in between the realization of dreams now, make sure you don’t change the desired goals, just change the action plan. It is always better to change a path than changing a destination altogether, which can not only be tiring but painful too. Especially in organizations the distress it causes affects the personal life too, and sometimes to such an extent that we may say “I QUIT.”

Measure: Yes, measuring the goals and actions are a necessary requirement, which keeps you under check all the time and ensures that you are on the right track and that there is no hindrance coming your way. Evaluation is also empirical for knowing what more needs to be done, as well as the areas we lack in and how to increase the efforts. We can also call this performance check but the only difference here is; that this is an internal performance evaluation.

So here is cheers to Kaizen, lets improve, lets progress and embrace changes with open arms and cultivate the same in our teams as well.

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