Kaizen and the Art of Your Job Search | Career Management Alliance Blog

This post is part of the Career Collective's collection of January 21st posts on helping job seekers make the most of the new year. Follow us on Twitter at #careercollective. Have you already broken your resolutions for 2010? We're three weeks into the new year, and many of us are already disappointed with our track record. We aren't living at the gym, we're not eating five veggies every day, and we haven't hit our goal of attending one job interview each week. Well take heart - at least you've made it through January 18 - said by some to be the most depressing day of the year. Regarding your job search, this is the perfect time to toss out your well-meaning yet crazy-making New Year's resolutions and instead take a continuous improvement, or kaizen, approach. Companies such as Toyota are famous for utilizing a kaizen approach to get things done across teams, however you can apply the idea of continuous improvement to your individual job search. The idea is simple - take very small, incremental steps toward your goal every single day. Focus on the daily small steps rather than on the Big Hairy Audacious Goals. The reason that I especially recommend a kaizen approach to job seekers is that searching for a job is a fearful experience, and a kaizen approach does a lot to reduce your fear. When you are just focusing on thinking about your very next tiny step and are implementing it, your mind is distracted away from the bigger picture, "Oh my God, what if I never get a new job," thoughts and fears. Also kaizen is the antidote to entropy, a state that job seekers do not want to find themselves in. Says Ingrid E. Cummings, author of The Vigorous Mind: Cross-Train Your Brain to Break Through Mental, Emotional and Professional Boundaries, "Nothing can ever defeat entropy, but keeping it at bay via small incremental steps consistently taken - that's cookin' with gas; that's the strike zone." New Year's resolutions are often too broad and too numerous to serve us very well. We want instant and big changes and we want them yesterday, but really, most significant changes are the results of days or weeks or months of taking consistent, small, incremental steps. Don't worry about planning the next 50 small, incremental changes you want to do, either - just plan the next few and then see where you are and plan the next few, and so on. I'd love to hear: How will you take a more kaizen approach to your job search? photo by devo in regress