How To Stay Consistent
Contents:
3 Reasons Why You Struggle to Stay Consistent
How to Stay Consistent For Good
Anyone looking to better themselves in health, work, relationships, and life in general, will eventually begin to wonder how to stay consistent. Well, here’s the best way.
Think back to any goal you ever set, whether you succeeded or not.
What’s one requirement they all had in common? My bet is on consistency.
Any expert in any field will tell you that if you wish to succeed, you must learn to be consistent. But how?
Read on and learn how to stay consistent with your habits and succeed in your goals.
What is Consistency?
Let’s first begin by clarifying what we mean by consistency, and how it is applied.
By definition, consistency means doing something in a similar way over time.
Consistency is usually referred to positively, with the idea of committing to a favourable action for the potential of future gain.
But it’s necessary to understand the negative application too, which is best explained through an example.
Say you wish to lose weight. To do so, you must eat healthily while exercising (you can read Cutting Concepts for more details on fat loss).
But instead, you eat junk food and don’t get up from the sofa, wondering how to stay consistent.
But in reality, you are being consistent, just on things which are goal-harming.
So when you ask how to stay consistent, what you’re asking is how to stay consistent on things which will benefit, and not hinder, you over time.
Consistency can make or break you; once the momentum builds, it can become troublesome to stop, and depending on the context, that’s either very good or very bad.
Why Consistency is Important
It’s difficult to stay consistent if you fail to realise its importance.
Think of the tallest natural structures on this planet: mountains.
You see the result, land that shoots up, stabbing the sky.
They appear great and immense.
But those monumental formations would not have occurred without events that appear insignificant and small previously, like the millimetre movements of the tectonic plates..
Today, Mount Everest is vast due to consistent growth over millions of years. Before that, it was nothing.
That’s how all great things are created.
The work that no one sees today compounds until the pinnacle is reached.
That’s how life works, and that’s the rules we must play by if we wish to win.
But being consistent isn't important if you don’t truly wish to succeed.
And that brings me to my first point of the next section.
3 Reasons Why You Struggle to Stay Consistent
Here are three reasons why you struggle to stay consistent, but there are many more.
1. You don’t care
How badly do you want it? For most, the honest answer is not enough.
If your goals don’t mean anything, whether actual or perceived, then why bother staying consistent and pursuing them?
2. You’re easily tempted
You want to lose weight but if someone offers you pizza, you won’t say no.
You want to save up for a house but if you’re invited out, you’ll spend your savings on drinks.
Saying no isn’t easy, it’s almost a skill.
But if you lack that ability, and you’re in the wrong circle, then it’s a recipe for inconsistency.
3. You lack patience
The choice is either effort and pain today for future gains or “joy” for no future returns.
If your goals don’t matter enough, short-term “joy” will always prevail and consistency will fail.
How to Stay Consistent For Good
So, what’s the best way to stay consistent? A routine.
A routine is a chronologically ordered list of habits from the start of your day till the end, that you repeat every day.
You might be thinking: “If I’m struggling to stay consistent with one habit to achieve one goal, how am I supposed to consistently stick to a whole routine?”.
It sounds challenging, but to start, it’s really simple: be consistent with your current routine.
Fix the order of your current habits and repeat that every day.
I don’t care if you wake up in the afternoon, eat chocolate for breakfast, then scroll on social media.
If that’s what you regularly do, stick to it.
But instead of going through the motions, bring purpose into your routine by restricting things like time.
Here’s an example: set an alarm for 1 pm, have your chocolate ready the night before, and bring structure to your scrolling habits by limiting screen time and selecting just one app to use in advance.
This brings purpose, structure, and stability to your life, and that’s how you’ll learn to stay consistent.
Even so, under most circumstances, waking up at 1 pm isn’t a good thing.
But now you’ll benefit from having purpose rather than being a slave to your body’s impulses.
Use a routine to bring structure and stability, then use the control that gives you to progress.
How to Progress
You’ve ordered and time-restrained your habits into a routine, bringing structure and stability to your life, but your habits are still “bad”.
To remedy this, the next step is a series of smaller steps, each progressively bringing you closer to not only staying consistent, but continuously progressing.
Let’s use the waking up at 1 pm example.
At first, simply waking up at 1 pm every day may prove difficult.
But it’ll soon become easy, and that’s when you know it’s time to move on.
Mastering waking up at a regular time places your bodies sleep patterns in your own hands, now you can use that control to make further improvements.
For example, if your goal is to wake up early, you can periodically set your alarm half an hour earlier until your ideal time is reached.
Consistency can’t be dropped into your life, it’s nurtured through your current day-to-day actions.
Final Thoughts
The smallest positive actions combined with the power of compounding can materialize into something good or even great.
That’s dependent on how far you’re willing to go to grow.
You could be a stream that doesn’t stop flowing. It’s there, reliant and faithful.
Or you could be a steady stream of water that grows with each coming day, eventually becoming a great torrent that has the power to move both a rock and a hard place.
The choice is yours with one major precursor for both: consistency.
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