This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "One Small Step Can Change Your Life" by Robert Maurer. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Is it hard for you to make positive changes in your life? How can questions help you achieve your goals?
In One Small Step Can Change Your Life, Robert Maurer provides strategies for implementing kaizen. Questions, he contends, can be a simple yet powerful tool for personal growth and problem-solving. By asking yourself small, non-threatening questions daily, you can tackle various life challenges.
Keep reading to discover how to implement kaizen by asking the right questions at the right time.
Questions, the Kaizen Way
In his book, Maurer presents simple and effective strategies that will empower you to avoid the fight-or-flight response, move forward, and achieve your goals. His strategies are based on the Japanese technique of kaizen. Questions, writes Maurer, catalyze change by engaging the problem-solving regions of your brain. When you pose a question, your brain takes it as a cue to seek out answers, which shifts your attention away from reasons not to change and toward potential ways you can make change happen. (Shortform note: The problem-solving process Maurer describes aligns with what’s widely known as instinctive elaboration. Simply put, asking a question creates a gap in your understanding. In response, your brain feels compelled to fill this void with an answer and initiates a process to find solutions.)
Maurer says you should regularly ask yourself non-threatening questions that lead to solutions. He emphasizes the need to frame your questions in a way that doesn’t trigger your fight-or-flight response, which will hinder your ability to come up with solutions. For example, if your goal is to quit smoking, asking “How can I quit smoking today?” might provoke anxiety that exacerbates your resistance to change. On the other hand, asking a gentler question, such as, “What’s one way I can cut back on cigarettes this month?” is less likely to induce stress and more likely to elicit solutions.
To apply this strategy, Maurer recommends that you integrate questions into your daily routine. After formulating a question, commit to asking it every day—perhaps as part of your morning routine. This daily practice is crucial for three reasons:
- Your brain associates frequency with importance: The more you focus on a question, the more your brain interprets it as a priority and allocates resources to address it.
- Your brain enhances problem-solving with repetition: Repeatedly focusing on the same question encourages your brain to explore the issue from different angles and in greater depth, which can lead to more insightful and well-developed solutions.
- Your brain adapts through repetition: Over time, this ongoing practice reshapes how you think about change in general, fostering a mindset that automatically looks for ways to implement changes in other areas of your life.
| How Your Brain Adapts Through Repetition Neuroscience research offers insight into how regularly asking questions increases your chances of coming up with solutions. The more you engage in a cognitive task, such as taking in new information, the more you change the physical structure of your brain by strengthening specific neural pathways. Here’s a very brief overview of how neural pathways work: • The brain consists of a dense network of pathways made up of neurons, or information messengers. • Sensory information is transmitted through synapses, which are the connections between neurons. • This sensory information gets stored in your short-term memory while your brain compares it to the memories you’ve stored in your long-term memory. This allows your brain to judge how relevant the new information is to what you already know (the processes stored in your long-term memory)—helping your brain determine whether the new information is worthy of your attention and important enough to prioritize. Neuroscientists believe that your ability to recall memories and generate ideas relies on the relationships between your neurons. Each time you learn something new, your brain forms new neural connections and pathways. The more you practice recalling specific information, the stronger the relationships between the corresponding neurons in your brain become, and the more likely your brain is to store the information in your long-term memory. And it’s through this process that information gets converted into knowledge that sparks new ideas. This research implies that regularly focusing on a specific problem-solving question forms and strengthens neural connections and pathways that help answer that question while also training the brain to ask problem-solving questions in the face of other challenges. |
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Here's what you'll find in our full One Small Step Can Change Your Life summary:
- Why it's often difficult to make the changes you want
- How to avoid your fight-or-flight response and move forward instead
- Simple strategies to transform seemingly daunting goals into enjoyable and attainable ones
