If you have been following this blog for a while you’ll know that I believe that Continuous Improvement is the Only Way when it comes to self development. A problem I have always been grappling with is how to ensure that I’m making progress towards all my goals. In particular the internal ones are difficult to keep a track of.

While I was in India I was lucky enough to be staying in a serviced apartment. What amazed me was that every single day when I came home something had changed, an improvement had been made.

I started off with two tiny single beds, hard mattress and a blanket. Over the course of a few weeks I went through the following progression:

• Two beds together with a double bed quilt
• Double bed (nice mattress) with existing quilt
• Nicer double bed

Similarly one day I got a tabletop stove, the next a gas bottle, the next a connection between the two, the next a bunch of pots. To begin with the power to the apartment was always dying. A few weeks in we had a whole series of batteries chained up and the power was a whole lot more reliable.

In a period of 6 weeks so many things were improved in that apartment, all of them little by little. In my life I have never seen a clearer example of continuous improvement.

What makes this continuous improvement possible?

I think it was two things:

• Planned set of actions
• Clear progress feedback

Planning to Maximise Internal Development

Clearly there was a plan for the improvement of my apartment. It was like watching an invisible to do list being ticked off day by day.

By having clear action steps of a size that can be completed in a single day, everyday something was done to improve things.

But how can this be applied for internal development?

I find most of the techniques I use I have been applying very broadly, so it has become difficult for me to gauge their effectiveness from week to week. The evidence of improvement seems to come over months as a general improvement.

But I don’t believe that progress for internal development is something that cannot be planned for on a daily basis.

The most important element is to try and improve in every single moment and this must not be forgotten. However you can make an extra effort to improve in particular areas of your life.

In a day there are generally a few events that we know are likely to happen. We may know there is a high likelihood of driving to work today, or that we will talk to our boss.

Each day we can pick a few of these to focus extra development effort on. Today I will watch for anger while driving, I will look at how authentic I am being when talking to my boss.

The way to gain the most from this method is to pick activities that you know you have problems with. So you may know that your emotions get out of check when talking to your spouse or that you tend to enhance the truth when talking to friends out of pride.

By targeting these areas in particular each day you can chip away at yourself and become more authentic faster.

Sometimes the problem with just trying your hardest in each moment is that you don’t adapt enough to big challenges. It is like sweeping a path, you clear away all the dust with your broom but sometimes there is a rock on the path that cannot be shifted with just a broom and regular brushing. So you partially ignore it and focus on all the other areas, keeping yourself busy.

This is why targeting problem areas allows you to tackle aspects of yourself that you may just brush over in your day as you try to cover the whole path.

Plan to make extreme progress in some areas of your life.

Internal development does not happen through effort, internal development occurs through extra effort.

Feedback: The Cornerstone of Continuous Improvement

In the case of the apartment it was very easy to see progress. Either a better quality bed was there or it was not. The feedback was explicit.

Improvement is not so simple to measure when it comes to our internal goals and personal development.

We cannot simply drop in a component and become more peaceful or honourable.

So how do measure our progress? How do we ensure that we are heading in the right direction towards our internal goals?

This is something that I wanted to ask you all.

I judge my own progress based upon two factors.

• My general levels of happiness and peace throughout the day.
• My internal state during particular activities that I have previously identified. These are the activities that I mentioned in the planning section of this post.

How do I evaluate these on a daily basis? A session of retrospection at the end of each day.

Relax somewhere and close your eyes. Now watch your day from start to finish without making any judgments. If you watch openly as each event of the day plays through you can see how you were internally during those events. The areas in which you acted badly will become obvious because the emotions will arise again. Your memories hold a taste of how you were internally at each moment, which is a good tool to evaluate yourself with.

Using this retrospective you can plan new activities for the next day to exert extra development efforts into.

How do you ensure you are making continual daily progress?