There is an amazing process that has changed world-wide manufacturing that can be applied to writing your letter to your grandchildren. It is called Kaizen.

In manufacturing it the process of continuous improvement through small incremental changes. It was first fully utilized by Toyota and now they are the largest car manufacturing company in the world. It works.

One Kaizen concept that can be used successfully to write your letter is the idea of small changes. In his book “One Small Step Can Change Your Life” Robert Maurer writes about how when a person is faced with a very large task (like writing a life story) the brain immediately reacts with fear. This fear comes from thousands of years of evolution and comes from a person’s ‘lizard brain.’ It is the limbic part of the human brain. It reacts in less than one second to anything that triggers fight or flight. It is much, much more powerful than people think.

If you say to yourself, “I’m need to write a 500 page memoir”, the lizard brain kicks in with a vengeance. Part of that powerful reaction results in shutting down the full use of the prefrontal cortex. That is the part of your brain that plays a central role in your cognitive control functions. The part of you that successfully solves problems.

What triggers the lizard brain is fear. Writing 500 pages is too much. However, if you tell yourself you have write one paragraph, your lizard brain doesn’t panic. It doesn’t consume you with fear. It is not a threat. You react from your prefrontal cortex and not from you lizard brain.

The pattern changes from large challenge to fear and eventual failure to small challenge to calm thinking to eventual success. 

Use this Kaizen concept of picking small achievable goals that lead to eventual success through continuous small steps toward overall improvement and success.

You can write one paragraph leads ultimately to a successful letter to your grandchildren.