Kaizen can essentially be describe as a Japanese method of transforming habits one step at a time. By focusing on one particular aspect or skill you want to improve and meticulously breaking it down and practicing and improving each step, you will experience significant improvements.
Kaizen is a flexible and adaptable concept that can be applied to any areas of life that you want to improve. It allows you create a ‘life strategy’ through the use of small actions.
Absolutely. It has been used not only to rebuild the Japanese economy after WW2 but also by everyone from top level athletes right through to people like you, me and everyone else. Have you ever thought about something you wanted or needed to learn and you broke it down into steps to practise? That is essentially Kaizen!
Over the past 18 years I have seen the same stumbling blocks occur time and time again, not only for my students, but in my own training as well. These ‘stumbling blocks’ can be derived from physical incapabilities, mental health difficulties or even just daily pressures of life and other activities.
So by identifying and utilising teaching methods that allow us to get around theses ‘stumbling blocks’ and break everything down into such a methodical way it allows people to always improve in at least one aspect of their training or technique at every session they attend.
Many schools and styles I have trained at or observed tend to lack any specific focus each lesson/week/term etc. Often people turn up to teach and just throw together a few techniques which don’t really have anything to do with each other, nor link with anything they have taught previously.
Teaching at Kaizen will always take a multi-faceted approach following something similar to this format:
– Phased syllabus where each level builds on the previous one.
– Each week focuses on a specific principle.
– Each lesson in turn then focuses on improving the different component parts of that principle by breaking down and deconstructing each technique into its important elements.
– New principles are then linked in to the previous weeks work to allow more than one ‘idea’ to be used together with another.
– The weekly principle is then applied to a number of situations to ensure the student can start to evolve and find their own way to use the concepts they learn.
