I read a book last week called One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer. If you’ve ever heard of the Kaizen philosophy, this book is for you. If you’ve never heard about Kaizen, I highly recommend learning about it.

Basically, Kaizen is all about doing very small things in order to achieve a bigger goal or behaviour change. For example, your goal might be to lose weight but we all know that’s easier said than done. The brain sees this as a major task, fear kicks in and you freeze.

But instead of that nebulous goal, you break it down into small steps. You start by reducing the amount of chocolate you eat. That’s still pretty big. So you decide for one week you’ll discard the first bite. Easy enough to achieve and your brain goes, “Woo hoo! That wasn’t so hard. I’m good at this self-restraint thing.” And then, because you’ve had a win, you’re more inclined to move on to bigger goals, so you discard the first two bites for the second week and so on.

You might think, “That’s a bit naff,” but personally, I’m impressed with the psychology behind it and have found myself looking at ways I can implement it in my life. And one of those has, of course, been writing.

My current work in progress has hit a bit of a saggy patch. This is mostly because the plot for the middle isn’t fully in my head. I’ve got to 30,000 words with a reasonable amount of action and now I’ve reached part two and I’m writing blind. There’s a vague direction for the rest of the book but I have to introduce a heap of characters, create a functional world and progress the plot. Big, big challenges. So, quite naturally, my brain is resisting.

I didn’t write for about a week. I could blame New Year’s celebrations (even though writing every day was a resolution. How quickly they fail). But I know it’s the gaping maw of the unknown stretching out before me. So I’ve implemented Kaizen. I asked myself what little step can I do to progress my book? 500 words used to be a good goal for me but at the moment even that seems a bit daunted.

Five minutes? Now you’re talking.

Bit by bit I’m chipping away, five minutes at a time. Sometimes I’ve written longer, thrilled when the muse takes me. Other times it’s been a struggle to get to five minutes. But I got there and my brain celebrated. I felt myself relax and give myself a mental pat on the back.

Unless I get a major breakthrough with these little five minute sprints, I’ll then progress to ten minutes, maybe seven and a half if that proves too onerous. You might laugh, and you might groan, but I’ll take whatever I can get to push through this stage. Onward and upward, one chunk at a time. After all, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

P.S. For anyone struggling with goals or behaviour change, I thoroughly recommend the book. It’s only about $10 on Kindle. Well worth it.