The Aspirant Podcast
Hello, incredible entrepreneurs, and welcome to 'The Aspirant Podcast!' I’m your host, Natasha Clawson, a Digital Marketing Educator and Strategist, and I’m here to help you build a business that doesn’t just work but thrives—and feels good while doing it.
🌟 Every week, we explore actionable business wisdom designed to help you create a business that aligns with your values, generates the income you desire, and operates like a well-oiled machine with the right systems, processes, and automation in place.
Imagine a business where taking consistent action is purposeful and attracts the clients you actually want to work with. So doing the work you love is more than just a goal—it’s your everyday reality.
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The Aspirant Podcast
The One Word That Could Transform Your Year
What if one word could guide your year, bring focus to your goals, and shift how you approach your day-to-day? In today’s episode, I’m sharing the word I’ve chosen for 2025 and the story behind how it found me.
This word is already helping me rethink progress, tackle big dreams, and find joy in small, daily wins—and it might just do the same for you.
If you’re ready for a fresh perspective and a little inspiration, this episode is for you. Let’s dive in!
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Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode. Have you ever considered choosing a word of the year? It's a simple but powerful practice that complements your regular goals by providing a guiding theme for the year. Rather than replacing specific resolutions or benchmarks, a word of the year offers an overarching mindset or value to focus on. It serves as your touchstone, a reminder of what's most important, helping you stay aligned and inspired as you work towards your goals. My word came to me with complete clarity in 2024, when my virtual assistant, billy, introduced me to the concept of Kaizen. I'd never heard of this practice before, but as I learned more about it, which I'll explain to you in just a second, I knew that this would be my word for 2025.
Speaker 1:Kaizen is the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. It's about making small, incremental changes to improve by just 1% every day. What I love about Kaizen is that it applies not only to work, but also to your personal life. It's a reminder that transformation does not have to be massive or dramatic to be meaningful. Instead of aiming for perfection or taking on monumental changes all at once, kaizen invites us to approach progress as a daily practice. Too often, we fall into the trap of this all or nothing mindset. Maybe you've done this. You set a big, huge goal, you dive into it headfirst, but quickly you become overwhelmed and abandon it, and then the cycle begins Another goal unaccomplished, another layer of shame. That inner voice starts up asking why can't I just finish what I start? It reminds me of one of my dad's sayings when I was a kid how do you eat an elephant One bite at a time? At the time I thought it was just one of his corny dad jokes, but now I realize it's a perfect metaphor for Kaizen. It's about breaking down big goals into manageable steps and focusing on consistent small progress. Looking back, I wouldn't be surprised if my dad picked it up during his work and process improvement. It's always stuck out to me, though. What would your life look like if you committed to being just 1% better every day? This year, I'm inviting you to pay special attention to the little things because, as cliche as it sounds, they really do make all the difference. Want a real-life example?
Speaker 1:On a recent podcast episode, I spoke with Kelly Sewell, who had always dreamed of becoming a writer. As her 50th birthday approached, she realized it was now or never. But as a busy mom of two with a demanding career. She didn't have the luxury of a long quiet weekend or a cabin retreat to write. Instead she had to write in 10 to 15 minute increments while waiting for her kids. At practice. She outlined plot ideas during her daily commute and jotted down notes in the few minutes before bed. Piece by piece, her novel came together. Eventually she finished it and published it. Now I don't know if Kelly knew that she was using the Kaizen principle, but I think that's a beautiful bit of encouragement If Kelly can write a novel in the middle of a packed schedule.
Speaker 1:What could you accomplish this year? What small steps could you take each day to move closer to your goal? In business, we often focus on putting out fires rather than pursuing deliberate improvement. When we're in survival mode, acting with intention feels impossible. Kaizen is the antidote to that chaos. By focusing on the small, intentional changes, you can break free from the reactive cycle and make steady, meaningful progress. So if the word Kaizen feels hard to remember, just think of my dad's old joke you can't eat the elephant in one sitting, but you can eat it one bite at a time. So as often happens, when I learned a new word or something new, I see that same thing repeated in a different way somewhere else.
Speaker 1:So another example on this recent podcast featuring Rangan Chatterjee, I saw this principle through a different lens. His episode was on intentional living for behavioral change and he really highlighted this chaotic world we live in and how we're just bombarded with knowledge and these ever-mounting to-do lists and we can get so overwhelmed and make just no progress. But Rangan suggested a simple shift choose one meaningful thing to complete each day that could be showing up presently for your children. It could be getting the car fixed, could be getting a business proposal done, but not focusing on this whole to-do list, but just one thing each day. It seems so surprisingly simple, but if you get one big thing done each day, when you look back in a month you'll have accomplished 30 meaningful things. Do you feel like that's something you're already doing in your life and if not, how can you incorporate this simple practice for big change in your life? So I just I love that example and I love seeing this in different ways through the world as I start to pay attention to something.
Speaker 1:The other thing I wanted to share was the other fascinating thing I learned while exploring Kaizen, and it's how it's tied to Japanese culture. In Japan, it's common for employees to have a job for life. This creates a unique environment where incremental improvements are encouraged without the fear of job loss. I just it's such a beautiful concept. To my American mind that's so hard to grasp. But you could have a job for life and like how that would change how you showed up in your work. And I think you can take this principle too as a business owner. How would you show up if you didn't think that you were going to fail? Probably pretty differently.
Speaker 1:And then this last bit is just how beautiful this practice of Kaizen is, because we live in a world that's constantly changing due to AI, new technologies, shifting trends, and sometimes we feel like we need to be in all the places and maybe we need to make dramatic shifts, or maybe we need to stay the course and we're never sure kind of where to be. But with Kaizen it's a steady path forward. So by that 1% change each day, you're never falling behind, but you're never jumping dramatically ahead either. So it's this beautiful balance of making sure that you're not falling behind but you're also not having the instability of a dramatic shift or jump. So it's just always moving forward and I love that I'm a Libra You'll probably hear me say this a lot so I'm this, this girl of balance.
Speaker 1:So Kaizen feels really beautiful to me for that, and this principle is not just a personal philosophy. It can really be a company-wide culture. When you adopt Kaizen, you're creating a space where continuous improvement becomes second nature, allowing you and your business to thrive in a sustainable way. So, as we wrap this episode down, I just want to share how excited I am to embrace Kaizen as my word of the year and put it into a daily practice. I would love for you to join me on this, because these small, consistent steps towards our goals do not have to be overwhelming if we take it just one day. 1% better at a time. That's all I've got for you today. I hope this gave you some inspiration for the week and I look forward to seeing you back in the next episode.
