The concept of Constant Improvements is nothing new to the world. It is a concept that was learnt and used well by Japan during their period of massive recovery in the early 1970s. It is an important concept that allowed the rapid growth of world-leading companies such as Toyota, Honda, and the once revered Sony. As a tutor, incorporating the concept of Constant Improvements in your life can help you achieve new levels of teaching excellence and better relationships with your students.
The Perils of Not Constantly Improving
Why are Constant Improvements important as part of our everyday lives? It helps more than maintain our standard of living and our state of mind, body and soul. If we focused only on maintenance, more likely than not we will deteriorate. If we forget about constant improvements, we can end up like SMRT, which stopped thinking about improving the state of its customers and stopped improving its train technology. We now experience this obsolete technology today in the form of train failures. Forgetting about constantly improving leads countries into trouble as well. Greece has been perpetually in the news lately as their economy has taken a big hit. They lived with massive wealth, borrowed wealth, and seemed to have forgotten about constantly improving; instead their focus shifted to merely Enjoying themselves. While it is undoubtedly important to enjoy themselves, it is critical for the positive energy to be directed to improving their value-add to other people in their lives. The lives of students need to be improved constantly through progressions in how we tutor them.
Individuals are definitely not spared from the adverse effects of not constantly improving. Some old, mature ladies who we see are still in the pink of health, always exercising and careful of their diet. Others who are not so disciplined and who are obese have lost touch with their younger active selves. They have stopped exercising as they did as young children with PE classes, and they have stopped watching their dietary intake. They have lost sight of constant improvements to their health, and they are not even in the state of maintenance, they are in the state of deterioration (with the help of age). As tutors, we need to set good examples to our charges by looking healthy and energetic. Being healthy helps us to go to our lessons charged and with adequate enthusiasm which we may use to infect our students.
Constant Improvements in Your DNA
We have seen people whose lives are in constant upward trajectories; who are hardworking, and who get everything right. It is no secret that an underlying principle they hold onto, whether consciously or subconsciously, is Constant Improvements. How can we incorporate this concept into our lives if we have not done so? This easiest way to do it in asking the following 3 questions everyday:
i) What have I learnt today?
ii) What can I improve?
iii) What did I enjoy doing?
If we constantly ask ourselves these questions everyday, we can be sure to learn more intently and improve. We ask ourselves what did we enjoy doing, and for activities which are work-related or which contribute to our life goals, we do more of them and do them better. To further incorporate the philosophy in our DNAs, we can make the point of asking these questions to our students at the end of each month’s lessons (or at the end of each lesson), as a form of review. In fact, this can be systemized in our lessons simply by printing standard forms for all our students to be completed at the end of every month or quarter.
To constantly improve as a tutor or as an individual can be very simple a task. Go ahead and ask yourself what have you learnt today, and how can you improve.
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