The Key to Consistency

Spoiler: It's nothing to do with motivation

As someone who has struggled with consistency for all my life, let me cut to the chase.

Consistency is a myth - a notion that this magical ‘thing’ is driven by motivation.

If there is anything I’ve learnt is that consistency is just another habit that can be developed over time, and the star of the show is really discipline.

If you can master discipline, becoming consistent towards your goals comes as a result.

Plato once said - 

“For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories. ” 

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

In my humble opinion, consistency starts with clarity.

Clarity allows you to define WHY you want to do something, HOW you’re going to get there, and WHAT action you need to take to get there. 

Once there is a plan in place and you have defined the ‘HOW’, that is where consistency comes in.

In many facets of life, we are taught to make ‘SMART’ goals, the same is true when it comes to personal goals. The ‘HOW’ part of your goals is creating deadlines, scheduling WHEN you’re going to do something and how often.

This is the reason life coach Tony Robbins often repeats the mantra, clarity is power.

Or in the words of the Bible ‘without vision, people perish’.

This exercise of ‘clarity’ usually begins at the end of a year for me. Around November time, before the thrill of Christmas kicks in, I like to take a quiet moment to reflect on my year, things I was proud of, things I wish I had done better and based on this I will make goals for the next year. I call it my ‘life audit’ or life mapping.

When new goals have been set, tracking them on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis is important because it is so natural to fall off track sometimes. 

Tracking your progress gives you the clarity to see how far you’ve come and how far you still have to go.

Photo by 2H Media on Unsplash

I came across an analogy the other day which stated, if you had £24,000 in the bank, would you cry if you lost £10?

In the same vein, while staying consistent to your goals is important, sometimes life happens and things go awry. There is no point throwing the towel in completely or wasting time crying over lost progress, what’s important is to focus on the remainder of the journey and getting better by simply 1% a day. 

Getting better by 1% a day sounds so insignificant in the grand scheme of a year, but by the end of the year you would have improved by 365%.

Once clarity has been established, the first form of consistency is being consistent with your word. Your words are binding spells, little contracts that we make everyday.

If I tell my friend I will meet her for a coffee and 10am, 99% of the time, I will ensure that I do that. However, when I make promises to myself, I don’t feel quite so bad letting myself down.

I find that the more I let myself down, the more comfortable I get with it.

Conversely, when I say I’m going to do something and follow through for myself, my brain also starts recording that and building trust in myself.

I start to change my perception of myself, I suddenly find myself reliable, confident and trustworthy.

I begin to change my own narrative about who I am, and suddenly this changed narrative allows us to shapeshift into the person who has already achieved those goals.

We start thinking not like ourselves but as the person whose lifestyle is already healthy, as the person who is a gym-goer, as a person who manages their finances well, as a reader.

We slowly morph into the thing we are trying to become. 

Getting started is the most important thing, you cannot wait on motivation to get started, sometimes motivation only comes after the event. Discipline is doing it regardless and remembering the end goal and acting as the person that you would be at the end of the goal. If your goal is to read more books, try to envision for a moment, what would a reader do? What would their day look like? Commit to reading a sentence, build to a paragraph, then a page, then a chapter…