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.”

翻譯：

如果你曾企圖大舉改變自己的生活，徒勞無功，現在不妨再試試，每次做個小改變就好。

   每年都一樣。當12月接近尾聲，想到新的一年時，你有一大堆想用來改善生活的點子。然而，就在你提筆寫下新年新希望的同時，你想起了去年。那時您也曾興奮地寫下所有你想改變的事，但一月還沒過完，這念頭就已經消失在忙碌、緊張的生活中。

   給你一個建議：把難度過高、難以達成的目標丟在一旁，從小處思考就好。最近出版的《踏出一小步，人生大不同》的心理學家羅伯·莫勒說：“我們的文化總是鼓吹極度改造，以為每件事都要大張旗鼓，其實有壓倒性的證據指出這么做不會成功。而我們試著要做的是，將它打碎至小到一般人不可能排斥，也想不找借口不做的步驟。”

“Kaizen”的對策

    這種技巧叫做kaizen，是一個日文詞匯，意即一種用來扭轉行為與態度的美式企業哲學。第二次世界大戰期間，美國的工廠經常嘗試通過持續的小幅改進，而非突如其來的急劇改變提高生產力。戰后，美國占領軍把那套哲學帶到正在重建的日本，使它成為這個國家令人嘆為觀止的經濟復蘇的基礎。日本人稱之為kaizen，意即”改善”

   在加州大學洛杉磯分校和華盛頓大學兩校醫學院任教的莫勒表示，自己已開始研究這個觀念是否能幫助無法應付很大挑戰的人。他指出：“有些問題在于心理因素，有些則只是因為他們過度忙碌的生活方式。這些人沒有時間去健身房，也不能做所有那些我們明知對我們有益的事，所以嘗試改善似乎相當合理。”