Do you struggle to take action and make progress toward your goals? How can you overcome the three most common obstacles to reaching your goals?
In Ikigai & Kaizen, Anthony Raymond suggests that three obstacles contribute to this struggle—insufficient motivation, unawareness of self-sabotaging behaviors, and fear of taking action. He argues that you can overcome these obstacles by integrating three Japanese strategies: ikigai, hansei, and kaizen.
Continue reading for an overview of Ikigai & Kaizen and learn how to reach your goals.
Ikigai & Kaizen Book Overview
Pursuing meaningful goals is key to living a fulfilling life, but many people struggle to take action and progress toward their goals. In Ikigai & Kaizen, Anthony Raymond suggests that three obstacles contribute to this struggle—insufficient motivation, unawareness of self-sabotaging behaviors, and fear of taking action.
He argues that you can overcome these obstacles and feel more empowered to tackle your goals by integrating three Japanese strategies: Find your ikigai (pursue your life purpose), practice hansei (reflect on and address unconstructive behaviors), and implement kaizen (make progress with small, consistent actions).
In addition to Ikigai & Kaizen, Anthony Raymond has published two books: How to be a Good Boss & a Leader, and How Autonomous Vehicles will Change the World.
This guide walks you through Raymond’s explanations of each obstacle and how his Japanese-inspired solutions help overcome them. Additionally, we’ll supplement his ideas with psychological research and advice from other self-improvement experts.
Boost Motivation by Finding Your Ikigai
Raymond argues that one reason people struggle to pursue goals is that they lack the right motivation. In this section, we’ll explore this obstacle in greater depth before turning to the solution Raymond proposes.
Obstacle: You Lack Motivation
Raymond explains that you set a goal for one of two reasons:
- You believe achieving it will allow you to acquire external rewards such as social approval or money.
- You believe pursuing it will allow you to experience internal rewards such as enjoyment or satisfaction.
He suggests that you’re more likely to feel unmotivated when you’re too focused on external rewards.
Why External Rewards Decrease Motivation
According to Raymond, goals motivated only by external rewards are difficult to act on because they don’t align with what fulfills you, nor do they provide opportunities to spend time on your interests. As a result, they don’t inspire positive emotions that make you want to work toward your goal. Instead, you focus only on the potential result of achieving your goal (the external reward), and you perceive goal-related tasks as chores that you should do to make it to the finish line. According to Raymond, this perception makes it difficult to summon the energy to take action and make meaningful progress.
Over time, your lack of progress makes you associate goal-related tasks with uncomfortable feelings that make it increasingly difficult to take action: Each time you think you should work on your goal, your lack of enjoyment heightens your awareness of other things you’d rather be doing. This awareness causes you to resent spending time on goal-related tasks, making you prone to procrastination. Then, giving in to procrastination sparks feelings such as guilt (for not progressing) and anxiety (because there’s so much left to do)—leaving you too emotionally drained to take action.
Why Internal Rewards Increase Motivation
On the other hand, Raymond argues that goals motivated by internal rewards are easier to act on because you associate the process of working toward them with pleasurable feelings. This is because such goals align with what fulfills you—meaning, you choose to pursue these goals because they enable you to spend time on interests that inspire positive emotions.
As a result, you enjoy working on goal-related tasks, and your enjoyment creates a positive feedback loop that reinforces your desire to take action: Each time you work toward your goal, your positive emotions make you want to immerse yourself in goal-related tasks. The more you immerse yourself, the easier you find it to develop the confidence and abilities you need to overcome challenges and make progress. This progress invigorates you and makes you want to keep taking action.
Solution: Find Your Ikigai
Raymond argues that knowing your ikigai boosts motivation by helping you set goals that promise internal rewards. Ikigai is a concept that roughly translates to “your reason for being,” referring to the personal and professional activities that give your life a sense of meaning or purpose.
An ikigai combines four elements that naturally generate internal rewards:
1. It’s something you love doing. This makes working on goal-related tasks pleasurable and satisfying.
2. It’s something you’re good at, or are willing to become good at. This ensures your actions lead to positive results. Each small win boosts your confidence in your ability to make progress.
3. It’s something that benefits others. This aligns goal-related tasks with a larger purpose, making them feel meaningful and fulfilling.
4. It’s something you can make money doing. This provides opportunities for financial stability, allowing you to devote more time and energy to goal-related tasks and what you love doing.
Because your ikigai generates internal rewards, the process of working toward ikigai-based goals is as satisfying as achieving them. As a result, you always feel motivated to take action and make progress toward these goals.
How to Find Your Ikigai
Raymond suggests that you can find your ikigai by ranking all your interests, skills, activities, and career ideas against each of the four elements we just outlined. For example, if one of your hobbies is upholstering furniture, you would rank this activity by asking yourself these four questions:
- How much do I love upholstering?
- How good are my completed projects, and how willing am I to improve my skills?
- How much potential is there for my skills or upholstered furniture to benefit others?
- How much potential is there for my skills or upholstered furniture to make money?
Once you’ve ranked your interests and activities, identify anything that ranks highly in all four elements.
Don’t feel discouraged if you don’t immediately discover your ikigai. Raymond explains that finding your ikigai is an evolutionary process—your feelings about different activities will naturally change as you grow and gain new experiences. He suggests completing this exercise periodically will help you understand your shifting priorities. Over time, this will provide opportunities to move toward internally rewarding activities.
Overcome Self-Sabotage by Practicing Hansei
Since an ikigai increases satisfaction and motivation, you might assume finding yours will make pursuing goals feel like smooth sailing. But Raymond says many people face another obstacle: They unknowingly engage in self-sabotaging behaviors that undermine their efforts.
In this section, we’ll explore self-sabotaging behaviors and explain how Raymond’s solution helps overcome them.
Obstacle: You Engage in Self-Sabotaging Behaviors
Raymond suggests that you might unknowingly engage in self-sabotaging behaviors that undermine your efforts. Why is it hard to know when you’re sabotaging yourself? According to Raymond, it could be because you’re making excuses for your self-sabotaging behaviors or downplaying their consequences.
He explains that the issues that prevent you from making progress—like mistakes or problems—usually stem from repeating seemingly innocent behaviors. These behaviors usually feel innocent because, in isolation, they’re easy to rationalize and dismiss. For example, say you sleep in one morning instead of working on an upholstery project. You might rationalize that a single late morning won’t derail your progress, and anyway, sleeping a little more might make you more productive or creative.
However, Raymond argues that rationalizing such behaviors thwarts progress in two ways: First, it blinds you to the negative consequences of your self-sabotaging behaviors. Second, it leads you to blame other factors for the problems your self-sabotage causes.
1) You’re Blind to the Negative Consequences of Your Self-Sabotaging Behaviors
Raymond argues that rationalizing self-sabotaging behaviors makes you blind to their negative consequences—and this, in turn, makes you more likely to repeat and keep rationalizing those behaviors. Over time, the negative consequences of these behaviors add up, resulting in mistakes or problems that derail your progress.
Raymond uses the Chinese concept of lingchi (“death by a thousand cuts”) to illustrate this: One small cut causes only a slight hurt, which is why it’s easy to ignore, but a thousand cuts will kill you. For example, sleeping in one morning isn’t a big deal. But after many lazy mornings, you’re running behind on an order that’s due. In your rush to complete it, you make many mistakes, creating a subpar piece of furniture.
2) You Blame Other Factors for the Problems Your Self-Sabotaging Behaviors Cause
According to Raymond, rationalizing your small, self-sabotaging behaviors prevents you from recognizing how, over time, you’re contributing to the issues thwarting your progress. And this lack of recognition leads you to attribute blame for mistakes and problems to one-time events or external factors. For example, you might believe the negative feedback you receive for the furniture you upholstered is due to a bad day at work or a difficult customer. As a result, you continue to engage in the same behaviors, repeating mistakes and creating even more problems—for example, continually creating flawed pieces might lead to multiple unsatisfied customers and demands for refunds.
Solution: Practice Hansei
According to Raymond, practicing hansei helps overcome the tendency to rationalize and ignore self-sabotaging behaviors. Hansei is a concept that roughly translates to “reflect on the past.” It involves evaluating your role in mistakes and problems, identifying self-sabotaging behaviors, and devising plans to replace those behaviors with more constructive ones. This process increases both your awareness of when you’re engaging in self-sabotaging behaviors and your sense of responsibility for changing these behaviors.
Raymond suggests regularly devoting at least 10 minutes of uninterrupted time for hansei practice—the more often you practice, the easier it will be to maintain awareness of self-sabotaging behaviors and to follow through on strategies to overcome them.
To practice, follow this four-step process: 1) Reflect on a recent problem. 2) Log behaviors that may have contributed to the problem. 3) Make a plan for overcoming problematic behaviors. 4) Practice even when you don’t have problems. Let’s explore each step in detail.
Step 1) Reflect on a Recent Problem
Pick a recent mistake or problem, reflecting on how you contributed to it and how you might’ve handled it differently. Raymond suggests that reverse-engineering issues in this way opens your eyes to the consequences of your self-sabotaging behaviors, making it more difficult to rationalize and ignore those behaviors. One way to do this is with the “five whys” technique, in which you ask yourself why you made the mistake, followed by asking why your answer occurred, and repeating the process three more times.
Raymond warns you to be careful not to spiral into self-criticism—the goal is to learn from your behaviors, not beat yourself up for them. For example, you might reflect on the negative reviews you’ve received, noting that allocating more time to the projects would have resulted in fewer mistakes and happier customers.
Step 2) Log Behaviors That May Have Contributed to the Problem
Log the behaviors that may have contributed to this mistake or problem, including details about when, where, or who you’re with when you engage in them. Raymond says that this context might reveal why you engage in those behaviors. For example, you might realize that you always feel more tempted to sleep in and avoid working on your project after a long night of binge-watching TV.
Step 3) Make a Plan for Overcoming Problematic Behaviors
Make a plan for avoiding these behaviors in the future. Raymond argues that once you know that a specific behavior creates a problem, you immediately have a solution for that problem that you can control: Stop engaging in the behavior. This requires you to use the insights you gathered in Step 2 to devise a plan for replacing the behavior with a more positive one. For example, you might restrict yourself to watching only a single episode, get to bed earlier, and commit to getting out of bed as soon as your alarm goes off.
Step 4) Practice Even When You Don’t Have Problems
Raymond adds that even when everything’s going well, there’s always room for improvement. Therefore, he recommends engaging in hansei practice even if you don’t have any unwanted issues to reflect on. For example, if you’re happy with a completed project, you might reflect on things that could’ve been better—like how you might’ve completed it more quickly, cheaply, or with less stress.
Conquer Goal-Related Fears by Implementing Kaizen
By the time you’ve found your ikigai and devised plans for overcoming any self-sabotaging behaviors, you’ll likely have several goals you want to follow through on. However, Raymond suggests that many people face a third obstacle that prevents them from moving forward: They fear taking action. In this section, we’ll explore this obstacle and clarify why Raymond’s solution is key to overcoming it.
Obstacle: You Fear Taking Action
Raymond suggests that fear of taking action often results from pursuing goals that are too large or challenging. Such goals create uncertainty about where to begin and how to proceed, and they require you to invest a great deal of time and effort—which often means changing your routine. Since your brain believes that familiar routines keep you physically and mentally safe, it perceives uncertainty and change as threats it must protect you from. It does this by inducing psychological resistance in the form of fear, anxiety, or overwhelm—uncomfortable feelings designed to convince you to revert to your familiar, safe routine instead of taking action toward your goal.
Large Goals Increase the Risk of Failure
Additionally, large goals exacerbate psychological resistance by increasing the risk of failure. Raymond explains that the larger and more complex a goal is, the more steps it requires, the more skills you need to master, and the more obstacles you’re likely to encounter along the way. Each additional step, skill, and obstacle represents another chance for something to go wrong—increasing the likelihood that you’ll fail somewhere in the process. Since failure tends to trigger painful emotions such as shame and disappointment, your brain interprets this heightened risk of failure as a potential threat to your psychological safety, causing it to induce even more fear and discomfort to prevent you from taking action.
Solution: Implement Kaizen
Raymond suggests that implementing kaizen can quell any fears you’re holding onto, making it easier to progress toward your goals. Kaizen is a concept that roughly translates to “continuous improvement.” It involves taking small, consistent, and achievable steps—tiny actions that won’t trigger your brain’s threat response or the resulting psychological resistance and goal-related fears. Raymond explains four ways that kaizen circumvents the obstacles created by your subconscious:
1. It gets you to break down large goals into very small and effortless actions. Because these actions require minimal time and effort, they don’t disrupt your routine and pull you out of your comfort zone.
2. It removes uncertainty by providing direction. Restricting your focus to the smallest possible next step helps you feel clear about exactly what you need to do to progress toward your goal.
3. It eliminates the risk of failure. Because these actions are so effortless and achievable, you approach them with confidence, knowing you can successfully complete them.
4. It creates momentum with consistent wins. With every small action you complete, you experience a sense of accomplishment that boosts your confidence and simultaneously expands your comfort zone, making it progressively easier to take the next action and progress toward your goal.
How to Implement Kaizen
Raymond suggests that you can implement kaizen and make continuous progress toward your goals by following a three-step process:
1. Identify the smallest possible step you can take to make progress. Make this action so simple that it feels almost trivial. For example, if your goal is to sell one of your upholstery projects, your first action might be to spend five minutes researching local craft fairs or to take a single photo of your finished work.
2. Commit to taking at least one small action every day to build momentum. Consistency matters more than intensity—by habitually completing small actions, you’ll accumulate small wins that create noticeable progress over time.
3. Increase the scope of your actions as your comfort level expands. Attempt more complex or time-consuming tasks to keep your momentum going. For example, after photographing your work, you might create a simple social media post showcasing it, then later reach out to one potential venue.
Exercise: Apply Ikigai, Hansei, and Kaizen to Your Goals
Raymond suggests that implementing three Japanese strategies—ikigai, hansei, and kaizen—empowers you to take action toward your goals. This exercise will help you start applying them.
- Reflect on your current goals and identify one that you’ve struggled to make progress on.
- Consider how your selected goal aligns with the four ikigai elements: something you love, something you’re good at (or willing to become good at), something that benefits others, and something that could make money. Which elements are present, and which might be missing?
- Now practice hansei by identifying one specific instance where you didn’t make the progress you wanted on this goal. What self-sabotaging behaviors might have contributed to this outcome?
- Following the kaizen approach, what’s the smallest possible action you could take today to overcome any self-sabotaging behaviors you identified?
- Continuing with the kaizen approach, what’s the smallest possible action you could take today to make progress toward your goal?
