You Can’t Think Your Way Into Improvement
The body leads, the mind follows. If you want lasting improvement, don’t just study the theory—practice until it lives in your bones.
At the climbing gym recently, I watched an expert coach at work.
He began by asking the climber what route she wanted to try and how she planned to approach it. Then, instead of explaining techniques or offering advice, he simply said: “Go ahead, give it a try.”
She made a few moves and fell.
There was no critique. No lecture. Instead, the coach asked: “OK, what did you notice about what happened there?”
It was a striking moment. By climbing first, she gained direct experience—the reach, the feeling of imbalance, the slip and fall. And only after she reflected on that did the coach add detail on what he saw: the angle of her leg, the degree of force applied, why a particular move didn’t generate leverage on that hold. His observations were precise, but they landed because they connected to something she had just lived.
I’m willing to bet she learned more from that fall than she would have from a 20-minute talk about body mechanics.
Why action comes first
This is what Japanese teachers mean when they say: “When you learn with your body, you have a whole set of experiences, senses, and emotions that come into account. When you learn with the body, it is very hard to forget it.” As Sylvain Landry writes in Bringing Scientific Thinking to Life: “Do to understand, rather than understand to do.”
Or, more simply: “If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.”
Psychologists have long taught that action precedes belief. Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman calls it “mood follows action”—in other words, don’t wait until you feel ready or motivated. Act first, and the mindset will follow.
Seth Godin echoes this in The Practice: “We become what we do.”
The common thread is clear: you can’t think your way into change. You have to move. You have to try, fail, reflect, and try again.
Learning with practice, not theory
This matters for any skill. My husband has been watching wing foil-surfing videos and joking that he’s “basically figured it out.” But we both know that until he’s out there standing on the board in the waves, wobbling and falling, he’ll have no chance of learning this complex skill.
The same is true for operational excellence, process improvement, or Lean leadership. There are lots of webinars and books. You might even have a certifate yourself! But Landry reminds us that: “Periodic Lean courses, workshops, and kaizen events…are not the key to changing behavior. Skill development and mindset shifts, which require daily practice with coaching feedback, must also happen.”
We don’t learn continuous improvement by sitting in a classroom or memorizing frameworks. We learn by engaging in cycles of practice, with a coach who helps us reflect to make sense of our experience.
The Improvement Kata connection
Let’s go see what actually happens!
That’s the logic behind the initial set of practices or “starter kata” we use in our Lean engagements. It’s not about understanding the theory perfectly up front—it’s about acting your way into a new way of thinking, which will then color how you do anything (at work, or beyond). Each cycle goes like this:
Make a plan, including a prediction about what will happen.
Try it out!
Reflect: What actually happened? What did you notice?
Adjust and try again.
Over time, these reps build skill and confidence. And just like the climber on the wall, we learn far more from trying and reflecting than from any amount of advance explanation.
The takeaway
Learning with the body—through that visceral experience, solidified by reflection—creates lasting skill in a way that learning with the mind alone never will.
So if you want to get better at Lean, at leadership, or at anything else worth mastering, don’t wait until you “understand” it. You don’t need another course. Just start doing it! Trust that through the action, the understanding will come.