Consistency, in simpler words, is the repetition of actions that you do over time. It can be compared to the repetitions individuals do at the gym while performing a workout. The benefit of “repetitions” performed at the gym can be directly compared with the consistent repetitive acts we devote to our lives. There’s a lot to talk about the importance of consistency, so sit tight and keep reading!
Consistency, in specific terms, is the quality of maintaining some standards, patterns, or actions and showing up constantly while pursuing something over a certain period. It is referred to as the uniformity and reliability of an approach that one carries while taking on a challenge that requires constant effort.
Importance of Consistency
Consistency in domains where you require sustained effort is crucial. You cannot achieve feats that require determination, without consistency. Small yet consistent efforts lead to bigger results one cannot even manifest. Consistency helps improve work ethics, achieve goals and aspirations, foster healthy habits, cultivate discipline, and remove mediocrity and shallow work from one’s routine.
Small manageable steps toward a bigger milestone must be the biggest cheat code for humans. If you were to imagine the power of consistency, visualize this:
You’re standing at one end of a short straight road, that leads to your house. It’s a bit far, like 200 meters. To say the least, it’s a lot to cover in just “one step.” Or perhaps maybe in two or three. It would require you to take some 100-odd steps approximately to reach your home. This is how consistency works. Small progressive steps and the end is triumphant.
Here’s a visual first-person POV:
Key Pillars
The key pillars on which the foundation of consistency is laid are accountability, discipline, and responsibility. Embracing consistency is a foundational step toward personal and professional growth. Consistent actions and the determination to stick to one cause are the make-or-break factors in determining success.
Moreover, it adds the trust of people in you, acknowledging that this person is consistent in their doings, contributing to a much-enhanced reputation and your relevance in the industry/people’s lives. It also brings self-control along with discipline, keeping the consistency-practicer in check for not performing extraordinary lapses.
The Advantages of being consistent
Self-Accountability
Consistent behaviors add the cherry of “Accountability” in your life. When you’re predictable in your efforts toward a thing, it creates an internal accountability mechanism to question oneself about one’s performance and actions. For instance, if you have a regular habit of waking up at 6 AM, the days you miss, you’ll question yourself why you miss it. To say the least, this is what I have experienced.
Long-Term Goal Achievement
Consistent efforts on the same road to a milestone will certainly help you get there. As explained through an example above of a road and your house at the far end of it. Assume a similar case here in terms of your goals. That house of yours is the goal you want to achieve. You are currently standing at the other end of the road, trying and struggling to get there. Slashes of extrinsic motivation and boosts won’t work. Consistent, small actionable steps will.
Strong Work Ethic
Consistency assists you professionally by building a sound work ethic. Carrying forward the example of waking up at 6 in the morning. Suppose you wake up, have your morning coffee, and work your day off moving ahead. This routine has ultimately built a strong consistent work ethic without even you being focused on creating one. It has been on autopilot, and you would’ve consistently been able to deliver your best work by following the roads of consistency.
Reliable Habits and Routine
Consistency is incorporated into your life in basic things. The most ordinary things you do throughout your day make you a “consistent being.” For instance, getting up early, reading books, working and being disciplined in it, or studying and setting up effective study habits, etc. All of this is where consistency is found.
When these core things in your life are consistent. Your life is consistent. Your income is consistent and growing. Your success is exponentially consistent. Consistent here doesn’t mean stagnant. It means progressing.
Some habits that are popular to be included consistently in one’s life are mentioned here and carry the potential to transform your life.
Discipline
It’s quite evident and self-explanatory that a direct benefit of adopting consistency in your actions and habits is that it cultivates discipline in you. Discipline carries immense importance in today’s day and age along with the importance of consistency. Consistency is concerned and related to the quality of habits and actions one performs whereas, discipline on the other side, is associated with self-control. Both complement one another well enough because consistency is the repetition of the action while discipline is the courage to foster such habit of repetition.
Patience
“Every good thing takes time.” for every blessing to unfold. For every drop of sweat we put in our work, it takes some time to yield the return back to us. Nothing is “immediate” in life that sustains long term. Even if you win a million dollars in a lottery ticket, sooner or later that amount will also come back to zero. Either through extravagant spending or poor money management because that wasn’t earned.
Consistency fosters patience in us. The courage of waiting for things to unfold and unravel. An individual puts in consistent efforts for one reason, after a sufficient amount of time, they will finally get to enjoy the fruit. That wait for the optimum time prepares us for this world and cultivates the excruciatingly important habit of patience within us which is one of the major pathways to success. Hanging in there, trusting in yourself, and keep putting in your best.
Progress Tracking
Firm actions allow you to track your progress over time. Suppose you hit the gym consistently and successfully do it for a couple of months. Your body will be the proof of the progress that you’ve made over these months. Such is the power of consistency that the current condition of the thing you’re pursuing is the progress you’ve made so far. This makes tracking progress toward one’s goals so much easier and motivating.
Minimizing Distractions
Once you embrace the challenge of consistency, it is then that you will also benefit from very minimum distractions. Just imagine the following scenario. You wake up at 6 in the morning, who is going to be there to distract you? No messages on the phone. No one is up in your house. Dwelling in peace outdoors with no noise. It gives you a consistent window of minimizing distractions and getting your work done in the meantime. As said earlier, consistency is closely linked with discipline. Waking up at 6 is more of a disciplinary thing that becomes long-term through consistency.
Increasing Self Confidence
Consistent efforts and habits inculcate heights of self-confidence in you. It boosts your ego and authority in the sense that you know you’ve been shedding some sweat in pursuit of a challenge/goal that you wish to achieve, knowing once it reaches an optimum level, it will start yielding results. You gradually become an expert in that domain. A subject matter expert, someone people might want to consult.
This passion and optimism for getting things done and being in pursuit of them consistently signals that you are not far from your destination. Along the way, when you feel triumphant, it adds much more to your self-confidence, which allows you to take more of such steps, leaps, and risks. This further contributes to success, taking it to an exponential level.
Peaking Productivity
Discipline joined by consistency brings the best out of the person. Suppose you remain disciplined in your life. Have no lapses and consistently work toward your goal, you’re going to see your efforts compounding and adding up. For instance, if you hit the gym 5 to 6 days a week, but after a couple of weeks you skip 3 consecutive weeks straight, the efforts won’t compound then. But if you even train the majority of the days out of these 5 weeks, you’ll witness compounding results.
It is important to be disciplined in life to witness exponentially beneficial results of consistency such as that mentioned above. Let’s not move forward on how to incorporate consistency in your life and other aspects of it.
Cultivating Consistency
While we’ve discussed and shed light upon the advantages gained through consistency. Let’s now review some practical ways to incorporate consistency in your efforts and habits.
Mindset
A mindset shift toward consistency is necessary to start. The highlighting of consistency’s advantages contributes toward the mindset or perspective shift I am mentioning here. You must realize the importance of consistency. Knowing how consistent actions, through micro and short-term examples—like the house and the road one above—compound along the journey is a skill you must master to succeed in any realm of life.
You must cultivate this thinking that being consistent isn’t hard. Instead, it is easier than huge bursts of motivation. Out of 24 hours of your day, if you spare a few minutes, or perhaps even a few hours if you can afford to, toward your goal, imagine how much down the road in a couple of months you’ll progress. It’s just about getting started and keeping your pace consistent without overwhelming or underwhelming yourself.
Take an example of consistency in fitness. An ideal muscular body isn’t built in 3 days in the gym, it takes 3 weeks to notice only some changes. 3 months for those changes to be evident, and a good amount of months to notice visible changes in muscles. But, it is only done through consistent hours of exercise on the majority of the days, and a discipline to not quit and have a balanced, high-protein diet.
Discipline
As explained multiple times above, discipline and consistency go hand in hand. Discipline allows you to cultivate consistency. And through consistency, you develop discipline. However, the first thing you need to embrace is to recognize and be aware of what it takes to be disciplined. You need to realize the sacrifices you need to make once you become disciplined. The lapses you cannot afford or long breaks you cannot go on while being consistent. Discipline isn’t hard. It’s more about choosing the right thing for yourself.
Stop Procrastinating by finding your “WHY”
To be consistent in life, you need to stop finding excuses, take those consistent steps, and move forward. There isn’t a way that you remain in your comfort zone and achieve all your feats. You must say goodbye to comfort. And to say goodbye to comfort, I believe what has worked for me is not the “how” technique. It has always been the “Why” factor.
Why do I need to work out? Because I need a lean, muscular body. Why do I wake up early in the morning? Because I want to work, to impact people’s lives, earn money, and be wealthy. I don’t want to be broke for the rest of my life. If your mission is big, and if your “Why” is solid, there is no way you cannot beat procrastination. It is not that I do not procrastinate at all. But I do it to a very minute extent.
To gain more perspective on this, I have a newsletter edition on “WHY” you should stop procrastinating. Read it here.
Find Fun
A lot is dependent on the fact that whether you find fun during the process or not. If you take it as a “duty” or a tiring obligation being enforced on you, it won’t work. You need to be ecstatic and accepting regarding your consistent and disciplined practices.
If you view it as something you need to do it on yourself forcefully. It’s something that is a prerequisite for success. But you’re not so willing to do it., sooner or later, your consistency will crumble. Find and cultivate such practices and routines in which you find fun. Once you find that, be disciplined in it and become consistent.
Coping with Demotivating Days
Consistency and Discipline are not all so sweet and rewarding. Most of the time, it is. But some days would be hard. Some days might be difficult, where you will hit lows. It is not a sign of worry since life is all about ups and downs. An individual must learn to cope with such days by taking some time off the routine and returning back to the things that genuinely excite and bring happiness. Getting a good amount of rest, along with prioritizing your health during the process is important.
Common Barriers to Consistency
Some common barriers that a potential consistency pursuer might face include a lack of motivation. Motivation and consistency have a strange relationship that I have covered in the article mentioned. A person must have some intrinsic motivation to pursue their feats and mission because extrinsic motivation isn’t long-term. You have to stay internally motivated and contented with the things in your pursuit and your performance.
Another common barrier that comes along is a lack of clear goals. Before you start your journey, you need to set a destination to pursue. Without a destination, a traveler is just wandering around and doesn’t know where to go. This way, you may not find your “WHY” as I mentioned above. A lack of goals will cause further procrastination and a lack of motivation. I have a detailed guide written on how to set achievable goals. Lack of clear goals including overcommitting and under-committing as well that further serves as a barrier to consistent behavior.
Moreover, you have to stay patient and let things compound, unfold, and yield results over the long term. Consistency is all about consistent long-term efforts and exponentially big feats.
It is also important to give yourself breaks and time to recover. This “rest” period should not take over the majority part of consistency. It must stay under it but must be present to ensure sound mental and physical health and wellbeing. Otherwise, thorough consistent behaviors might result in a heavy burnout that usually collapses the efforts one puts in over the long term consistently.
Conclusion
To conclude, consistency is unbelievably powerful. It is such a tool for humans that turns ordinary into extraordinary. It is a doorway toward personal development and growth. It must be used rightly and to one’s advantage to achieve long-term aspirations and dreams. Become consistent and disciplined in your life and watch yourself transform magically into the best version of yourself.