Does Your Reach Exceed Your Grasp?

By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer

The concept of continuous improvement means different things to different people.

There is an abundance of popular frameworks that help drive continuous improvement:  Demming and PDCA (plan, do, check, act), Kaizen which was made famous by organizational theorist Masaaki Imai, and a library of International Organization for Standards (ISO) requirements.

Continuous improvement is also a model embraced by sports teams and athletes, and those who are fitness minded. I recall a common mantra among gym rats that I don’t hear as much anymore: “no pain, no gain”. Exercise physiologists, applying continuous improvement, now know much more about the journey to better health and wellness, and in doing so have saved many knee and shoulder joints.

Not all pain leads to gain and not all gain requires pain, but on a personal level, continuous self-improvement requires us to step outside our comfort zone. For some, that can be painful, although it doesn’t have to be. It simply requires the right mindset.

Continuous self-improvement requires us to establish outcomes, set out to achieve them, and then assess how we did and put some thinking into how it could have been better. This can make us feel like we’re never quite successful at accomplishing our goals. This process can cause us to feel frustrated and beat down when we focus on the failure. The problem is that we allow the established outcome to rule our emotions.

The established outcome is a means to achieve the real objective, continuous improvement. The outcome we set doesn’t have to be exact, nor achievable, it just needs to be good enough to fuel improvement. And goals that are slightly beyond our reach are higher octane fuel.

So, set some bold objectives for this week, things that you know are beyond your reach. Don’t worry about falling short and instead, celebrate your improvement.