If you have failed in the past at trying to make big changes in your life, try again now, one tiny step at a time
Every year it‘s the same. As December comes to an end, you think about the new year and all the ways you want to improve your life. But as you start to write down your hopes for the new year, your think about last year. You excitedly wrote down all the changes you were going to make, but by the end of January those idea got lost in your crowded, hectic life.
Here‘s suggestion: Forget the overreaching, hard-to-achieve goals. Just think small. “We have this extreme-makeover culture that thinks you‘ve got to do everything in big steps, even though the evidence is overwhelming [that] it doesn‘t work,” says psychologist Robert Maurer, who recently published One Small Step Can Change Your Life. “What we try to do is break down to a step so small that people couldn‘t possibly resist or have and excuse not to do it.”
The kaizen approach
The technique is called kaizen, a Japanese word for an American business philosophy adapted to change behavior and attitudes. During World War II, American factory managers increased productivity by trying small, continuous improvements rather than sudden radical change. After the war, U.S. occupation forces brought that philosophy to a rebuilding Japan, which made it a cornerstone of the country‘s amazing economic rebound. The Japanese called it kaizen, which means “improvement.”
Maurer, who teaches at the UCLA and University of Washington medical schools, say he began studying whether the idea could help people who couldn‘t tackle big challengers. “Some of it is psychological, and some of it is just their overwhelmed lifestyles,” he says. “They don‘t have the time to go to the gym and do all those other things we know are good for us. So kaizen seemed a logical thing to experiment with.”
翻译：
如果你曾企图大举改变自己的生活，徒劳无功，现在不妨再试试，每次做个小改变就好。
每年都一样。当12月接近尾声，想到新的一年时，你有一大堆想用来改善生活的点子。然而，就在你提笔写下新年新希望的同时，你想起了去年。那时您也曾兴奋地写下所有你想改变的事，但一月还没过完，这念头就已经消失在忙碌、紧张的生活中。
给你一个建议：把难度过高、难以达成的目标丢在一旁，从小处思考就好。最近出版的《踏出一小步，人生大不同》的心理学家罗伯·莫勒说：“我们的文化总是鼓吹极度改造，以为每件事都要大张旗鼓，其实有压倒性的证据指出这么做不会成功。而我们试着要做的是，将它打碎至小到一般人不可能排斥，也想不找借口不做的步骤。”
“Kaizen”的对策
这种技巧叫做kaizen，是一个日文词汇，意即一种用来扭转行为与态度的美式企业哲学。第二次世界大战期间，美国的工厂经常尝试通过持续的小幅改进，而非突如其来的急剧改变提高生产力。战后，美国占领军把那套哲学带到正在重建的日本，使它成为这个国家令人叹为观止的经济复苏的基础。日本人称之为kaizen，意即”改善”
在加州大学洛杉矶分校和华盛顿大学两校医学院任教的莫勒表示，自己已开始研究这个观念是否能帮助无法应付很大挑战的人。他指出：“有些问题在于心理因素，有些则只是因为他们过度忙碌的生活方式。这些人没有时间去健身房，也不能做所有那些我们明知对我们有益的事，所以尝试改善似乎相当合理。”
