If you are a typical New Year’s resolver, you’ve just taken on a large, daunting, personal transformation project. You want to lose weight or be nicer or play for the Celtics. Good for you!But if you are also typical you (a) haven’t been too successful at this resolution in the past and have recycled it (b) have good intentions but no plan and (c) are doing this entirely alone.We mentioned my 10,000 steps rule. I have lost track of it after a few years of doing really well, some years of going pretty good, and lately a few years of saying “Oh today I actually did it”. During the years I did really well, I was using an on-line tool called Walker Tracker and, together with my friends like Ed Vielmetti and Prentiss Riddle I walked the equivalent of Seattle to Phoenix by way of San Diego.When we all drifted away from the tool, I lost the community and, therefore, focus.This year, I am resolving the more amorphous “be healthier.” This involves three things: eat better, exercise more, and see friends. These are also amorphous. I cannot treat these like projects, but I can treat them as the focus of my Kaizen events. None of these things require undue coordination, but they do require focus.What is Kaizen? Kaizen, in its essence, is continuous improvement. It is an internal drive to constantly be making things better. I want to do okay this week, a little better next week, a little better the week after that.What I don’t want is to over-commit to something far outside my routine. Business does this all the time. They call it a “re-org” - meaning they are radically reorganizing the processes, structure, and culture of the company. They usually fail.Why? Because they’ve done so much change at once they shocked the system. In 1998, after a decade of being a vegetarian, I decided to start eating meat again. How did I do this? Well, I ate half a chicken. It was delicious. It nearly destroyed me - rather than introducing small amounts of meat into my system, I shocked it with a large amount of change it literally could not digest.Don’t do that.With Kaizen we want to make small incremental changes. In this case, we want to pick up new habits that benefit our New Year’s goals. For this, we can use our Personal Kanban. Let’s say that for these habits, we do two things:1. Remind ourselves of the habits2. Invent small, obtainable projects to get you there.So, we have a habits swim lane. Note that we’ve identified a bunch of habits we’d like to achieve this year in the ready column, but right now we’re just working on a few. While those blue habits are “in progress”, we have blue actions in our working kanban.So we see that we have in our swimlane “exercise more”. (Fitting that it’s in a swim lane). So here’s where life gets interesting. Our first task is to find an exercise buddy - someone with whom we can create some social pressure and some support to actually do this exercising. We find Jill, who's totally ready to exercise - but we find that she’s into hot yoga and not treadmills at the gym.After some discussion, we agree to go with her to hot yoga.If you had pre-decided that the only way for you to lose weight was with treadmills at the gym, you would have bought a lot of new clothes and shoes and a gym membership. Now, you are looking at the best yoga studio. You had patience, and looked for the best options.Remember, your New Year’s Resolution is a goal. It is an end state you would like to achieve. There are many paths to your end-state. If you over-commit to one particular path, you greatly reduce your chances of success. Flexibility - especially in something as fuzzy as a New Year’s Resolution - is vital.Set yourself up for success. Build habits naturally. Don’t force change, but embrace it.