Consistency Is King
My 5 tricks to be consistently consistent
For most of us, life seldom offers anything without effort. We must actively strive for everything we desire: work, health, relationships, or psychological well-being.
For progress in these areas, there is no shortcut. Maintaining good health requires regular exercise, building a career demands constant dedication, and finding love necessitates consistent selfless care for others.
Results in all the meaningful dimensions of life arrive if we constantly evaluate what we want to achieve, define the best strategy to get there, derive actions from it, and keep implementing them until we reach our goals.
Growth is a long-term process, and the key to achieving it is to consistently implement our actions and stick to our habits.
To be more precise, for a meaningful life, we need to be consistently consistent. It’s not only about being consistent with our actions but also about consistently challenging the actions we are consistently implementing, to make sure they lead us where we want to get.
What may sound easy in theory is very hard in practice. Despite my motivation, I often found myself succumbing to laziness, or wasting time and energy on useless tasks.
I still have a long way to go, but at least throughout the years I could figure out some tricks to be more consistently consistent, and hopefully reading them can be helpful also for you.
1. Believe in the why behind your actions
We should make sure that our actions are connected to the goals we want to achieve.
Knowing the reason for our actions is crucial for pushing us out of our comfort zone.
Whenever we are not feeling motivated to do something, we should ask ourselves what alternative we are prioritizing.
Are we skipping a morning workout because we want to stay longer in bed?
Are we skipping a party because we want to avoid talking to strangers?
If we find ourselves trying to prioritize short-term comfort over long-term rewards, we should stick to our action plan and get out of our comfort zone.
2. Optimize your surrounding
We have limited willpower throughout the day, and constantly having to decide if we want to stick to our action plan is draining.
To remain consistent with our actions and habits we have to optimize our surrounding so that sticking to our plan becomes a must and not a choice.
If we are trying to lose weight we should remove all the unhealthy food from our apartment.
If we want to reduce our time in front of the phone, we should lock it in a place out of our immediate reach.
Once we optimize our surrounding, we optimize also our mental environment. We stop challenging our motivation, and we begin acting without hesitation.
3. Define scalable habits
A big reason why we don’t stick to our habits is that they work only under ideal conditions.
If we go on vacation, have a busy week, or have some changes in our lives, we start skipping our daily run, neglecting our sleep, or ignoring a friendship.
Actions towards our goals should always be implementable, independent of where we are and how much time we have.
It doesn’t matter what we want to achieve, doing something is always better than doing nothing. Every goal can be broken down into smaller tasks so that even during busy or stressful times we find the energy for doing something.
Instead of going to the gym, we can still exercise at home. Instead of meeting a friend in person, we can still have a quick call, and instead of preparing a healthy dinner, we can still order some fresh food.
4. Focus on the first 5 minutes
When we define our action plan we are often very ambitious due to the initial motivation. In the first few days we manage to stick to the plan, but sooner or later we end up skipping our habits because we feel overwhelmed.
Is it a long run, a strict diet, or many working hours, we may end up skipping all of it because we feel overwhelmed by the size of the task.
What challenges us the most, however, is taking the first step.
It is the moment of wearing running shoes and going out for a run, the moment of picking up the phone and calling a friend, or turning on the computer and starting to work.
Once we are through the first 5 minutes of our habit, the rest of it becomes much easier.
We should not pretend to always go all in, instead, we should pretend to give it a try every day.
Most of the time, if we manage to do the first step, also all the rest will follow. For the days when after 5 minutes we are still not feeling able to continue, it is ok to take it easy. Life is a marathon, not a sprint.
If we feel overwhelmed for a longer period, then we have been too ambitious with our action plan. We should scale it down for some days, and then ramp it up again, once we are feeling more at ease.
But one thing is sure, giving it a try every day, will make accomplishing our actions easier.
Every day it gets easier, but we have to do it every day, that is the hardest part.
5. Understand that progress isn’t linear
For everything in life, our effort only contributes up to a certain extent to our results. It is not a mathematical equation, where investing a given amount of resources leads to a specific result.
This shouldn’t prevent us from acting, and from regularly optimizing our action plan, but we shouldn’t act always expecting results in return.
Progress isn’t linear, but it is guaranteed as long as we consistently act in the right direction.
We can only remain consistent if we accept, that there will be external circumstances pushing us back, and periods where we won’t move forward despite our efforts.
Our habits and actions do define who we are and who we will become. The key to being consistent is to start enjoying the process of growth, and not just the growth itself.
I’ve often been told the sentence confidence is king. I wrongly assumed that to feel confident I just needed a shift in mindset and to fake it until I would feel it.
But the first time I started feeling confident was when I began growing.
It was the moment I figured out that no matter which challenges life will throw at me, I will be able to overcome them by consistently working on myself, and by keeping the right mindset and the right attitude.
If we fake confidence, assuming it is just a state of mind, we may see success in the short term. But sooner or later our lies will catch up with our reality. If we are not what we pretend to be, we won’t be able to sustain our confidence in the long run.
Confidence comes through growth, growth is achieved through consistency, so consistency is king.