LIVING THE PLAN

The development of your daily action plan has been started or completed and you are now ready to begin Living the Plan.  As you prepare to implement your new plan and finalize your individual process, please understand the action steps you will take have a much higher level of importance in their affect.  It is very important to have a strong understanding of how to get started.

You’ve laid out the 6 steps to start your day and how you may add or repeat steps through the entire day.  However, as you start there are two vitally important points you must keep in mind –

1. Maintain a Healthy Mindset
2. Practice a “Kaizen” approach to your transforming day.

 

Maintain a Health Mindset –

In all things during this time, re-focus your activities to a point of view that best realizes a healthy mindset.  That is, all your actions must have a sense and practice directed to a more healthy lifestyle.  This can take many different forms but most notably, removing excesses of unhealthful consumption of food and drink, and realizing some increased level of exercise.  This doesn’t require an extreme reversal of normal living, crash diets or becoming a gym rat.   Rather govern all things by appropriate levels of moderation and healthful growth.  Adjustments to your living should be made based on individual needs.

A Kaizen Approach –

Kaizen is actually born from a manufacturing practice developed by Toyota to provide a more focused approach toward continuous improvement.  For Toyota the focus was to build a better product,  for you the focus is also to build a better product – you!  This concept of continuous improvement lends itself very effectively to an increased level of quality in a great many areas of manufacturing, service businesses, and even in one’s personal life.

For our purposes, the idea of Kaizen revolves around the idea of starting a task in a small way and working to continually improve efforts for the achievement of our goal.  Taking small steps, often very small steps, allows you to start and continue moving toward self improvement without the discouragement of the often overwhelming life changes that make it difficult to maintain and grow.

Take a look at your plan. It may be very aggressive and you may now have the resolve to tackle it and finally make the breakthrough you’ve always hoped for.  But wait.  Speaking to personal experience – and no doubt your own experience – the “resolve” goes away quickly as the reality of personal expectation or even the anticipation of the plan becomes a barrier for progress.  Because the challenges are at their greatest near the beginning of the process, anyone can become discouraged and even abandon their plan to change and improve their lives.

Take another look at your plan.  Make sure you are not too aggressive with your initial expectations.  You will be much more successful if you start slow and small while practicing continuous improvement and growth.  Make adjustments as you go.  If you find your plan too challenging, pull back to a more comfortable level and reset your move forward.  You should always keep some level of challenge in your efforts but not to a level of becoming discouraged.

Remember, life is a marathon, not a sprint.  Build for the long haul and you will be more successful and much more happy with yourself.