Kaizen Creativity: Baby steps to success

Atomic Habits & Kaizen Creativity

As part of my New Year reading, I finally began Atomic Habits, which had been popping up on my radar for a while. 

Just a few pages in, I was completely sold on the power of small, repeated actions. 

I was also overjoyed to discover the author’s diagram about the The Valley of Disappointment – this simple line drawing helped me make peace with disappointing results and shift my focus to inspiring ideas of inevitable success and eventual rewards. 

This mindset shift alone was a revelation. 

But the main ethos of the book was what sparked my exciting New Year Experiment.

The power of Atomic Habits aligned perfectly with a new approach I’ve been playing with in my current work-in-progress, The Creative Arts of Believing & Receiving, which is all about the ultimate creative process: manifestation. 

My new philosophy is to shift from a Making It Happen mentality of force and discipline and striving, to a more human-friendly (and enjoyable) commitment to Making It Likely. (You can read more on that story here.) 

The daily habits approach lends itself perfectly to my new Make It Likely philosophy, which is essentially to keep calmly and consistantly taking small, inspired actions in the direction of my bigger vision. 

This is the essence of The Kaizen Way, which I first discovered a few years ago in the excellent book One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Dr Robert Maurer. 

As a lifelong advacate for enjoying the journey and seeking the happiest routes to success, all of the above have culminated in a new commitment that I intend to focus on for the entire year. 

I’m calling it Atomic Blogging 365. 

Baby Steps – The Kaizen Way

My vision for this year – as a baby step towards my bigger Heaven Hall vision – is to create an inspiring blog presence that supports my creative freedom, my Life By Design intentions and my Dharma projects. 

Because I LOVE blogging. 

It’s my kind of creative happy, along with creating online courses. 

After over a decade of blogging experiments, I’ve thankfully found a formula that is really starting to pay off. 

It’s been a long and bumpy journey to get to here, but happily my blogging is becoming a sound foundation for my larger business goals and career plans. 

So now I’m ready to go all in, to see what happens if I devote myself fully to blogging my creative heart out. 

Over the lovely New Year period, as this plan was cystallising, I found myself pondering the question;

I wonder what would happen if I took regular, simple actions to build my blog every day for the entire year? 

I reasoned that if a little blogging effort was yielding a little success, perhaps a bigger blogging effort would yield even bigger success? 

The more I thought about it, the more excited I was to find out. 

Flow Productivity & Enjoying the journey

While the idea of a yearlong commitment to my beloved creative therapy was appealing, I was reminded of my past experience with the whole Do It Daily pressure that I experimented with one year during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). 

I know discipline and total commitment can work really well for some, but I’ve learned that they don’t work for me, at least in terms of quality of life, doing my best work and enjoying the journey, which are my ultimate MOs. 

Instead, I’ve learned that I operate best when I appoint Joy as my Creative Director and trust the Power of Whim & Fancy. 

The more I surrender to these core principles, the more I get to enjoy unprecedented productivity and lots of joyful time in that blissful flow state. 

So, my new yearlong commitment has a little breathing space and wiggle room built in. 

The plan is to still harness the magic of Atomic Habits, the Kaizen Way and Making It Likely, but without the relentless pressure and spirit-sapping force of daily discipline.

My subtle twist is this;

Instead of creating or optimising a blog post every day for a year, my pledge is to create or optimise 365 blog posts over the course of the year. 

Which is still a mighty commitment – but this reframe allowances for life’s inevitablte interventions and a healthy approach to self care. 

My plan is to intend to work on my blog daily, but if I miss a day, I’ll just make it up another day. 

The net result will be the same, and I’m more likely to enjoy the journey. 

So – that’s the plan. 🙂 

Inevitable Success

As so often happens when we go with an idea that excites us, another resource appeared in my life that supported my new plan. 

During a New Year Planning workshop with my favourite Conscious Marketers, Kylie Slavik and Richard Taubinger, I dutifully completed my worksheet with the relevant notes and intentions to support my goal. 

And then Richard casually mentioned a few magic words that really got my attention – that when we do these simple actions, with commitment and devotion, and we just keep going – success becomes inevitable. 

It’s such a simple idea – that if we just keep going , we get to enjoy inevitable success! 

It’s something I’ve been hearing and reading more and more from success experts from a whole range of periods in history. 

So, I’m beginning to sense there’s something in this idea of Baby Steps to Success. 

And my Atomic Blogging 365 is my practice mission to find out if that’s really all it takes. 

I’ll be sharing my findings at the end of the year, and, as part of my creating in public commitment, I’ll also be updating my progress here on this page at regular intervals as we go along. 

It’s going to be fun to see just how much committing to baby steps and tracking simple metrics can play a part in successful results. 

As I write this, it’s the end of January so it’s still relatively early in the process, but I already feel that I’ve effortlessly devoted far more time and attention to my blogging than I would have without my Atomic Blogging 365 plan in place.

Over to you…

Depending when you’re reading this, you can either follow along, or see below how this Baby Steps To Success theory played out for me.

Either way, my hope is that this Kaizen Way approach will inspire you to try an ongoing commitment to your creative goals and visions.

If blogging is not your thing – what is? 

What would you be excited to commit to?

What would you love to work on daily(ish)?

What would you be happy to take many baby steps towards over the next year?

What kind of Atomic Project 365 would inspire you? 

What creative vision could you slowly but surely bring to life using the Kaizen Way?

I’d love to hear!

And if you decide to give this a go, let me know so I can cheer you on.

In the meantime, I’ll be merrily blogging my way through the year and charting my progress below. 

So, if you ever feel stuck or blocked in your own creative endeavours, I hope you’ll check in with my progress to see how small simple actions can add up, and perhaps find a blog post or two to help you get back into flow. 🙂 

Whatever you choose to focus on or commit to this year, I wish you a joyful creative journey and a wealth of  effortless success,

PS If you’d love to play with this idea but you sense issues of resistance or procrastination would get in the way of your plans, I have something for you. 

It’s a short story that will reveal what has stopped you going for your creative dreams in the past, and what you can do about it. 

You can get the full scoop in this short series here. 

Alternatively, perhaps you’d be all in with a project like this – if only you knew what to focus on! 

If so, I have a free ebook that will help you in your quest to discover the joyful soul work that would inspire you to devote an entire year of your creative energy and devotion. 

You can get that free ebook here. 

“Small improvements accumulate into such remarkable results”

~ James Clear