英语智慧背囊 08-寻求大改变，从小处做起
 音频下载[点击右键另存为][00:01.48]Tiny Steps, Big Changes寻求大改变，从小处做起[00:04.53]If you have failed in the past at trying to make big changes in your life, [00:10.25]try again now, one tiny step at a time. [00:14.18]Every year it’s the same. [00:16.15]As December comes to an end, [00:18.15]you think about the new year and all the ways you want to improve your life. [00:22.94]But as you start to write down your hopes for the new year, [00:26.22]you think about last year. [00:28.23]You excitedly wrote down all the changes you were going to make, [00:32.48]but by the end of January those ideas got lost in your crowded life. [00:36.99]Here’s a suggestion: [00:39.28]Forget the overreaching, hard-to-achieve goals. [00:42.67]Just think small. [00:44.42]"We have this extreme-makeover culture that thinks you’ve got to do everything in big steps, [00:50.34]even though the evidence is overwhelming that it doesn’t work," [00:54.06]says psychologist Robert Maurer, [00:56.35]who recently published One Small Step Can Change Your Life. [01:00.32]"What we try to do is to break down to a step so small [01:04.14]that people couldn’t possibly resist or have any excuse not to do it." [01:08.87]The technique is called kaizen, [01:11.05]a Japanese word for an American business philosophy adapted to change behavior and attitudes. [01:17.74]During World War II, American factory managers increased productivity by trying small, [01:24.54]continuous improvements rather than sudden radical change. [01:28.58]After the war, U.S. occupation forces brought that philosophy to a rebuilding Japan, [01:35.57]which made it a cornerstone of the country’s amazing economic rebound. [01:40.19]The Japanese called it kaizen, which means "improvement". [01:44.70]Maurer, who teaches at the UCLA and University of Washington medical schools, [01:50.71]says he began studying whether the idea could help people who couldn’t tackle big challenges. [01:56.97]"Some of it is psychological, and some of it is just their overwhelmed lifestyles," he says. [02:03.40]"They don’t have the time to go to the gym and do all those other things we know are good for us. [02:09.12]So kaizen seemed a logical thing to experiment with." |
