Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Ever wonder how to make big change in your life without getting overwhelmed? It's tough, right? We're all juggling so much already. Here's something to consider. Kaizen. It's all about small steps for big impact. It's actually a method used by top companies and sports teams all over the world. And the best part? It builds your confidence to keep improving and moving in the right direction. Not only that is, you can use this your life, daily and in your relationship.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Hey, we're Kim and Roger, and we're here to show couples how to get the best out of their relationship so they can start living their dream life together.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: We're a West Aussie couple who are living the life of our dreams. We don't entertain the word should, we think about the future as a field of possibilities and we let joy be our compass.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: We've taken the simple idea of working as a team and applied it to our marriage. And it's been a game changer, allowing us to work out what truly lights us up in life and to go after it together.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: From living in snowy Japan to starting our own house flipping business, we've achieved some big dreams. And most importantly, we feel fulfilled and are having the most fun we've ever had.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Hear conversations from inspiring couples, thoughts from relationship experts, and tales from our own lives as we help you to gain the wisdom and skills you'll need to turn your relationship into a real team.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: These are relationship conversations for real people, by real people. So sit back, get comfortable, whatever tickles you, pickle, and enjoy living the team life.
Today we're talking about the japanese art of Kaizen. Now, this is a philosophy that emphasizes small, continuous changes in all aspects in life and business. So for a majority of my career, I worked in business improvement and I used techniques such as Kaizen six sigma, process mapping, customer satisfaction, et cetera, to, I guess, go through the business and make changes that benefited obviously the bottom line. But also our customers from my career, I'm sure of you will know this from your careers or whatever you do in life is it is very hard to get buy in from the senior leaders in a company and executive doing large improvement projects. They want to see payoff within twelve months. They want to see quick wins. And that was the beauty of Kaizen, right? Because if you went at improvement through lots of little micro bite sized projects and improvement projects, you could show those little wins very quickly, which would then lead to the big wins. And that's what little wins. Leading to big wins is what big wigs liked best. So a common problem for businesses is that how do you improve the machine while it's still operating at capacity? And most businesses do struggle with this in general. But Kaizen isn't just for businesses. It's actually a mindset that can really improve our personal lives, because I think we all feel the same as well. How do we improve our lives day to day when we're at capacity, when we're overwhelmed? How do we stop the machines like us to make things better? And 100% this is so relevant to relationships as well. And that's why we brought it to the table today.
When we see problems in our relationship, or at least we feel disconnected, or something's not right, or we feel stuck, we often see it as too big a problem to fix, or we feel like we don't even have the time to fix it, or we wouldn't know how to fix it in the first place.
[00:03:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I think this is a great topic, Roger, for relationships. It might sound a little bit clinical, but as we've explained throughout previous podcasts and obviously in social media, in some of our education slides, we really believe that there are a lot of principles you can take from other areas of life where people work in collaborative situations, such as the business environment, such as sporting teams, such as any team, really, and apply that to the collaborative space of a relationship. And this is one of those concepts where we really see an obvious application for the concept to relationships. One of the things we hear from couples is they want to make a change, but they can't see possibly how they're going to do that from where they're standing. Whether it's because they feel like they're really short on resources and they don't have capacity, or whether the change just feels too big from where they're standing. It feels impossible either. Or it makes it such that people get frozen in where they are, they get stuck in the same spot. And so what Kaizen is really about, and the reason we've brought that to couples today, is about giving people a way forward, helping them to get unstuck in a way that really works. It's proven it's been used for a long time and helps them to start making change.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. So what we're going to do now is actually just give you a bit of a background on some companies that use it, and even some sporting organizations that use it to give you a bit of confidence that this is definitely something you can use in your relationship. It's something that Kim and I use in our relationship.
Because from little things, big things grow. So, funnily enough, Kaizen actually was made famous by Toyota, which is a japanese car company, which is pretty much the biggest car company in the world. I think Volkswagen's a similar size, and a lot of the other companies, like Ford and other have now adopted that and has been adopted across a lot of businesses have now adopted Kaizen, have now adopted Kaizen, because in the know, when you're making hundreds and hundreds of thousands of cars per year, the slightest little defect, the slightest little problem in one of those car down the end could actually have fatal consequences for whoever's driving it. And that could have fatal consequences in terms of the brand damage or the future of the actual business. We've all seen these massive car recalls whenever the slightest thing has gone wrong with the car, because people's lives are at risk. So Toyota know this, and they know that if they continuously tried to make big changes in their business, they'd get stuck.
They wouldn't be able to.
Those maybe little errors that had occurred wouldn't be fixed. And I think they really identified that throughout their business. It's generally not one big issue. It's lots and lots of little issues that then build up to create the large issues. So taking that approach, you go, okay, well, why don't we use lots and lots of little improvements to make sure we make larger improvements? So Kaizen's focus really about not just on little improvements, but continuous improvements. And as Kim said, really think about improvement as change. Why do we make change? Because we want things to be better. An improvement is just really a change.
What it did was for these companies is it ensured that these problems were identified before they escalated into those fatal errors. And not only that, is it created a culture of continuous improvement through the company. Because if everyone realized that, oh, I can't put my hand up because that's such a big problem, no one want to listen to me. But with a culture of continuous improvement, of little wins, of little improvements, everyone knew that they could impact the company, impact the culture. And if they saw something wrong, they were empowered to put their hand up and say, hey, something's not right here. In fact, they're in the Toyota production system. They actually stop all production. If someone sees a problem, they stop the production line and they actually have a team that come down and review it right there and then, of course.
[00:08:02] Speaker B: Really?
[00:08:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. And you think, again, we talked about the businesses who feel like they're at capacity, so they can't stop. But Toyota understanding that this is a life and death situation. Even if it's something as small as a small ding or a defect on one of the parts of the car, they have empowered their employees to put their hand up, because that's the culture they've brought in to say, hey, something's wrong here. And we need to.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: That is so counterstandard culture. We soldier forward so often because we think, we'll deal with it later. We'll deal with it later. We don't want to stop the momentum we have. It's so interesting that they are so deliberate in understanding that making that small change now is going to have such great benefits that it will outweigh the loss of momentum.
[00:08:53] Speaker A: Well, it empowered people to have a voice where in a lot of companies, people feel they don't have a voice. I remember when I was working, the first thing we did when we had a business improvement project is we might use the numbers and the data to identify the problem. But the first thing I did is went down and talked to the people on the front line, hey, we're seeing this. Why do you think that is? And they sort of look at you go, oh, you're really asking my opinion. Yeah. And they'd come out and they'd tell you, of course, they know the process better than anyone else in the company. And part of you might say, why haven't they ever been told? Why haven't they put their hand up and said anything before? One, they might have, and it didn't reach the top. Two, they probably just never felt empowered to.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's another change in the culture. Not just that they're willing to stop things, but also that people feel empowered enough to even raise their hand and safe enough to raise their hand in the first place and say, you know what? I see a problem here.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: Yeah, 100%. But it's not just in business. It's also in the sporting field that this Kaizen mentality has been adopted.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: Yeah. There's a great story about the british cycling team, and I think it was around 2012, and I think it was the coach. As you can tell, I'm a bit flaky on it. I read this story a while ago, but in a nutshell, the story described the team going from being uncompetitive to being dominant in the 2012 Olympics. And when they were studied after the Olympics and people came in to see what changes they had made, what was fascinating was there was no one thing. They're like, what is the one thing? What's the silver bullet? Or the is it. The silver bullet? Yeah, the silver bullet kills.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: Kills the vampire.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: The gold bullet? No. Okay.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Silver bullet kills the vampire, which is the problem.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: Now I'm even more confused.
They were waiting for the answer of, what's the silver bullet like? We've got some superstar player, superstar bike rider, I should say. Whatever you call them, cyclists. Sorry, cycle people, bicycle people.
[00:10:55] Speaker A: Oh, God.
[00:10:55] Speaker B: Anyway, as you can see, I'm proficient at giving sporting analogies. Anyway, they had people come in and these experts were expecting to notice that there had been one big, significant change. But what they discovered was the approach had actually been to focus on all the marginal gains, which I just love. So every 1% mattered. Things that were as seemingly innocuous as what clothing were they wearing in training?
What pillows did they sleep on? How did they wash their hands to make sure that they stayed healthy? They actually had someone come in and teach them to wash their hands. Because if you get sick, you spend less time in training. You spend less time in training. Obviously you're going to have a knock on effect when it comes to competing. But thinking about what tiny impacts a hand wash has, it's not the most literal obvious. It's not your big diet changes. It's like, what are the one percenters that are all going to add up and make the big difference when they're put together?
[00:12:05] Speaker A: Well, they seem so much more achievable because they seem so much more actionable. Like, yeah, I can clean my hands properly, I can get a new pillow, I can be the best cyclist in the world.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And I imagine at that level, the pressure that these athletes feel to constantly be asked to get better is just such a huge ask, isn't it? But if you're asked, just focus on this one thing, just wash your hands properly. Just focus on making sure that you've got a good pillow you're sleeping on. All right, I can manage that. All right. I can wash my hands. You really take out that massive sense of overwhelm of, you've just got to focus on getting better and better and better. Getting better is way too big. Washing your hands properly, that's achievable. Sleeping on the right pillow, that's achievable. And I think there's a lot in that, in the psyche around the size of what you've bitten off. And then obviously, how those things come together to have that huge cumulative effect.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: Of change, I absolutely love that.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: That's the sporting story. The sporting story that I really, really liked and thought it sort of brought it into focus. Just how powerful these 1% shifts can be. James clear actually talks about this as well. So this is a little bit in terms of the experts in the field talking about how important small changes are. He talks about it in his book Atomic Habits, which we've talked about a lot on here, because it's just such a brilliant book and it is game changing. And habits impact our lives in such a critical way, we will just keep talking about it. Hopefully you guys can get out there and read it.
He says habits are the compound interest of self improvement, and I absolutely love that, because habits don't just stack on top of each other and get you better, you actually get the compounding effect of the improvement as well. And that means that you are exponentially growing, which is such a cool concept. Little habits lead to big changes. That's what's underpinning this. And as I said before, when we're talking about the british cycling team, people struggle with big change. The idea of just get better at riding, just do something better. Everybody, all the cyclists out there are just trying to get better.
We need to break it down in a way that our brains can manage, that they can stay focused, stay engaged in the space. And if you think about why so many New Year's resolutions, for example, fail, how do you stay focused when that goal seems so far off, so big, so insurmountable at the beginning, there's nothing motivating. And we've talked about this before.
It's this psychological point of view that we are in a state of overwhelm. It's not possible to have enough willpower all the time to just reach these big goals, unless maybe you're David Goggins. Some people are freakishly strong, usually born out of some sort of horrendous trauma that has made them the most incredibly willful humans because they needed that to survive. But the reality is that is not most humans. Even if they've suffered some trauma, that most humans are not built with this enormous willpower. Most of us have willpower that waxes and wanes. It comes and goes. And so we can't depend on willpower for change.
In fact, what helps us to make change is a sense of achievement. We build confidence to continue to do the work when we have seen that we've made an achievement. And this is why we say those incremental achievements are so powerful. When we talk about relationships, we talk about this quite often. Once we see we're making change, that motivates us to go further. It's not this magical concept of willpower we actually just need to start making the little changes and the brain and the reward system kick in. And they say, oh, okay, this is feeling good, I'm doing this, I want to do more of this. I want to get more of this feeling. And you're off to the races. Tony Robbins has a saying. He says, it's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently. And that's what Kaizen is really talking about. This continuous improvement, these continuous small incremental changes, that's what makes the big difference in life.
[00:16:33] Speaker A: Yeah, you can see how you can actually look at this. These are expert opinions that have told us about how the human brain and the human psyche deal with change, deal with improvement. And we've all felt that overwhelm when we feel we need to make a change. And it just seems too big. It seems too out of reach. When we make that New Year's resolution, I want to lose weight, or I want to lose 10 kg, or I want to be healthier, or I want to spend more time with my kids, great. But what next? And how do we get there? But if we're doing things like I'm just going to cut chips out of my diet, I'm going to go for a few minute walk every day just around the block, or I'm going to sit down and read a book to my kid, or read a book with my kid every second day or every day on the weekend. It's those little improvements. It's those little achievable nuggets which will kick start us into action.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Right? Like the kid one's such a beautiful one. You say, I want to spend more quality time with my kid. That is just too big. What does that mean? And you risk putting yourself in a shame cycle with that 100%. Oh, I didn't achieve enough today. I didn't do 30 minutes with my kid or like an hour with my kid.
Instead, you break it down and you say, I want to read one story with my kid each day. Now people are going to hear that and say, but that's not enough.
Well, it's 100% more than you were doing before. Yeah, and that's the way you need to look at it. We talk about gap and gain here as well, which is another excellent idea, which is that you need to focus on the gain against where you started, not the gap toward where you're going. It's so important that we stay in the gain space. That's what's going to motivate us. That's what's going to keep us going.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: You're building up evidence of your action.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: So before, if you're sitting there going, I'm not a great dad. I need to spend more time with my kids. And you're thinking, okay, we're going to go get tickets to something, or we're going to go start a new sport. We'll go there. It's like, well, is that actually achievable? And if you fall at the first hurdle, then all of a sudden you're like, you're just almost leaning in. Or the evidence is that, no, you're not a good dad. You don't spend time with your kid, and you can sort of wallow in that a bit. But if you do, maybe just read a book with him or just ask him a few questions, at the end of the day, it's like, what are you looking forward to on the weekend? Or how are some of your friends going just have that five minute chat? Or if the younger read a book with them, then all of a sudden you're building up this evidence of like, hey, I'm someone who does do something with my kid. And yeah, maybe it's not quite enough right now, but it's a start, and it will start to give you that momentum into the future.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: So, of course, this is a relationship podcast. And really, the crux of this was for you to understand that you can make changes in your relationship. And kaizen, small improvements. Building a continuous improvement culture in your relationship is a great way to go about it. So say, for example, you're feeling a bit disconnected with your partner right now.
Kids, work, mortgage. It's overwhelming. But you do want this to change. I mean, most people listen to this podcast are looking for positive changes, positive changes in their relationship and their life. But again, where do you start? Where do you start to make that change? Because it just often seems like too much of a mountain to climb. And of course, your first thoughts might be to do something grand. Okay, I'm going to plan a romantic weekend away, or we're going to go to Naseco or the Maldives, and we're going to do something really expensive and big. But this requires a lot of money. It requires a lot of effort. And the other thing, it's not an ongoing change. Will this actually change anything ongoing? So by looking at the Kaizen method, what we can do is have a lot of little changes, little bite sized chunks, little achievable chunks, to start to continuously improve, to start to change, starting small so one we've talked about before and I love and is something that I do with Kim is we do small acts of kindness and we do them regularly. So a one percenter, I would say, is making sure you kiss your partner at the door at the start of the day, whoever's leaving for work or whatever you're doing, and kiss them and look into their eyes when they arrive back home at night.
Also, another one, which Kim and I do every day, is say your pleases and thank yous. If someone does something for you, say thank you. If you want something done for you, say please. Yes. You live together, you spend all your time together. You do lots of stuff together. But are you showing that gratitude to them? These one percenters can make a big difference.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And even those two examples, the kiss or the alert and present greeting at the beginning and end of the day, the pleases and thank yous, I wouldn't say even commit to both of those at the same time. It's literally about picking one thing.
If your overarching goal or agenda is I want to be kinder to my partner, I want to show them more love, then pick one thing that's going to show you. This is the small improvement that you make. Okay. The one thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure I say please and thank you when they do something for me or I ask them to do something and that's it. And just focus on making that change, implementing that one change. And like you said, gathering the evidence that you are the sort of person that says please or thank you. And another example of a small change that you can make that can be really powerful if you are feeling disconnected from your partner, for example, is a weekly five minute relationship check in. It doesn't need to be every day to start with. It doesn't need to be an hour. Sit down. It doesn't need to be a huge event. It can be as simple as having a cup of coffee together and checking in for five minutes each week. Maybe Sunday morning, the kids are watching cartoons. And you say, when the kids are watching cartoons, when we wake up, let's grab our cup of coffee and head outside and have a five minute check in. Simple as that?
[00:23:10] Speaker A: Yeah. And label it as well. Hey, kids, your mother and I are going to go out the front for five minutes and we're going to talk to each other about what's going on in our lives.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: Oh, I love that.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: That's modeling a healthy relationship to them. You're not trying to sneak out. And yet they'll probably come and try grab you and get your attention. But it's also being clear. It's like, hey, this is mummy and Daddy time. It's only five minutes. You say that to take a phone call or to do something around the house to one of your work jobs or one of your life admin jobs, but actually just being clear on this is what I'm doing. And being clear, this is what we're doing with your partner. When you give your partner a kiss at the start of the day and look in their eyes, or at the end of the day and they go, oh, what's this all about? And going, hey, I really love you and I'm going to do this every day. I'm going to try remember to do this every day because that means something to me. And I see you and trust me, they'll take that away and they'll feel great for the rest of the day.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: Yeah, you're really building those continuous improvements into your relationship. It's just not one big thing, it's lots of small changes.
[00:24:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And just like sports teams have cultures, just like business teams and organizations have cultures, your relationship has a culture. And so if you're doing these little things to start improving and make change in your relationship, you'll find that your partner and even your kids and other people in the house, they'll feel a bit braver to go, hey, actually, I'd like to make a little change here, a positive change here. Can you support me? Or let's do this together. And you'll also start to notice that they're doing it. And they'll start to notice that you're doing it. And so all of a sudden you get this momentum in the culture of, hey, we have a kaizen culture, a continuous improvement culture in our relationship, in our house. And so making changes ongoing when maybe you do feel a bit stuck and do feel a bit disconnected, doesn't seem so out of reach anymore. It actually seems more achievable because it's something that you do regularly.
[00:25:18] Speaker B: I think the culture piece is so powerful. If I look at the first decade of our relationship when we didn't really understand a lot of the principles we teach on now, hadn't learnt them, hadn't experienced life enough, we had a very different relationship culture. The relationship culture we have fostered by making brave, small changes and growing our trust in one another, our respect for our relationship, making the relationship a priority, putting it above our individual selves.
The culture now is so definitive, we have that rhythm and that knowledge and that trust in the relationship, that if we do need to change something or we do want to grow something, there's no fear around it. We know how naturally to raise that issue, make those changes, and it's encouraged. It's supported. And I just think you build and build momentum out of a culture 100%.
[00:26:14] Speaker A: And then it becomes part of your identity. We're a couple who are always looking to improve. We're a couple that can change. And so when things do go wrong in your lives or you have those really hard times as a couple, you can go, hey, we can get out of this because we've proven we can do it before. We've proven we can be open, and we've proven we can make change and make improvements. And not only that, we can embrace it as well.
[00:26:40] Speaker B: All right, Roger, what's your gold nugget out of today's episode?
[00:26:44] Speaker A: For me?
I wish that considering that first ten years of our relationship, I was literally working in an organization, and part of my skill set was Kaizen and small improvements, and I was delivering these and making my reputation doing that, and yet I wasn't bringing it into my household. And as a result, we became stagnant, we became stuck. And now when I look at it, it's like, well, actually, that's something we do on the regular, and we do have that Kaisen culture in our relationship, and, yep, didn't do it, and now we do, and so it's not too late to start.
[00:27:23] Speaker B: Love it. I think for me, the most important thing I would love for people to get out of this is if you set a tiny change target, a tiny change goal.
Do not feel like it's not enough. I think this is one of the most significant barriers for people in terms of learning how to live a more Kaisen life, learning how to make incremental changes, and really building momentum in life. We consistently set goals that are too big because when we set them smaller, we feel like, well, that's not enough. And that's the judgment we have on ourselves as humans. So for me, the gold nugget today is when you set the tiniest of tiny goals.
Be proud that you set the goal. Do not second guess yourself, and do not judge yourself for setting a small goal. That is exactly what we're asking you to do today. And we are telling you, you will make the changes. You will grow your momentum, you will get to where you want to go, and you will do it consistently. If you trust yourself to just start really, really small.
[00:28:40] Speaker A: You'Re amazing. You've just spent quality time on your relationship.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: Feel like you're on a roll. If you want more living the team life relationship insights and conversations, head over to kimandroge.com where you can find all the show notes as well as tons of other relationship goodies.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: And if you liked today's episode, please hit subscribe or let another couple know where they can find us. It'll make them happy, and it'll make us really happy.
[00:29:02] Speaker B: Until next time, keep on living the team life.
