Why consistency is important
This is a personal reflection on the benefits consistency, which is strongly related to discipline and commitment. It can be difficult, but from my experience, has many benefits and gets easier with time. My belief is that the consistency leads to habits which become self-supporting, but it takes time and commitment to get to that point. In my opinion, this bridge between starting and forming the habit is the hardest period and where consistency becomes so important.
These beliefs come from a combination of experiences, from writing articles to journaling and reflection; building connections and relationships; researching personal projects to university courses and many others.
This piece has a simple message about the benefits of showing-up and making it easy to show-up.
The consistency problem
I do not know about you, by my experience of starting new things is difficult and scary — it is something about stepping into the unknown, and the unknown is scary. For many things this is irrational; what harm could come from writing an article? Maybe no one would read it. What could be the harm is starting a diet? I may not lose weight. In both cases the worst case is the same as not starting. But even with that rational logic it still has the personal emotional aspect making it uncomfortable.
To overcome this involves taking the first step, committing and follow through. In my case feeling stick in a rut and wanting to learn something to help progress in life are real driving forces for change. These driving forces are far more powerful than the fear of the unknown, and the motivation to at least start and get out of my comfort zone.
I feel proud of myself and exhilarated when stepping out my comfort zone. It feels great, but this is a single moment, a solitary break through. Yes, I might have gone to an event or party I wanted to back out from, and it feels good going through with it. But it is a single event and a single moment in time. This is not a change of behaviour it is simply showing the willingness to step out of the comfort zone.
For instance, is this the same as learning to write? Developing a new skill? No, these align with Anders Eriksson’s 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. These are not a single event; these are many events strung together over a long period of time. Although stepping out of the comfort zone once is an act of bravery and an indicator that change could happen, it is not a long-term commitment. The above require long-term commitments and regular hard work.
Now the step out of the comfort zone is over and, it is now the new comfort zone, but slightly expanded. It no longer feels new, or has that immediate exhilaration of overcoming a challenge. It is the long arduous process of learning something new and having to repeat and refine the process multiple times. It also means learning from mistakes and repeatedly showing up. It represents commitment and discipline. It is a whole new world. This is the problem, like New Year’s Resolutions, being able to maintain longer-term exercises after the initial jolt has gone, hence consistency.
Finding the importance of consistency
Consistency is regularity; to form and maintaining the habit. However, there are many blockers to being consistent.
For me there was the challenge of opportunity cost. There are so many things that I could also do. For instance, writing a journal article would take time away from doing something else. How do I decide? Life is often unpredictable and things appear, so it raises questions of how to handle this with commitments to doing something else? This is important, because this comes down to priorities.
Before committing to anything, I need to have an achievable, credible and manageable set of personal goals. Without personal goals I cannot have priorities. When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. So, having a manageable set is important, else my focus would be everywhere.
Moreover, it is important to have good goals, which are clear, specific and unambiguous, and more importantly I know why I want them. It is much easier when I knew why I wanted to do things to set priorities, and these priorities became much clearer. There are tensions in everyday life, and knowing what I want and having clear priorities, from my experience, made it so much easier to commit and stick with them. I knew the most important things and I could just focus on them, and then build them as habits.
For instance, I write articles (see link below) to improve my communication skills, and the lack of these skills were a contributor to a lack of progress; regularly writing a journal (see link below) provides a record that can be looked at in the future without relying on my poor memory; writing regular reflections helps gain insight from my journals and other feedback for personal improvement and progress.
This logic helped frame what I was trying to do and why I was trying to do it. It provided the mental roadmap to priorities, and the compelling reason to commit. Hence, it was important to write this rationale down. I found without working out the rationale and writing it down there was no commitment, and it was difficult to maintain momentum; I would then run after the next thing and forget about building the skill and experience. Hence, things were started and soon stopped. Knowing my own mind and what I wanted and needed was a major step, it was about developing a personal strategy.
I found that life is not that simple; not only are there tensions between goals and priorities, as I reflected and journaled, new things began to emerge. What if the reasoning why I am doing something is wrong? What if it is unimportant? What if something else is more important? What if I am going in the wrong direction? Well, should I change? Should I stick with it?
This gave a new problem — being in two minds. Being in two minds appeared to come from fear and more importantly, a lack of clarity. There is an awful lot I do not know and fully understand. There are things that I will get wrong. However, it is not always clear at the start and it can take some time to figure this out. In many ways, feedback is not instant, and often it takes time to build things up to get enough information to make decisions.
The importance of this message, is initially these questions of change led to chopping and changing, or that I tried to do everything and took on too much. When I chopped and changed, things were started and immediately stopped — nothing was getting done; I could not settle on a single thing. Also, I had a large amount of mental overload — it really did take a long time to change between different tasks, trying to catch-up and remember why I was doing them in the first place. This was the same outcome for trying to do everything, but I also found myself overwhelmed and mentally exhausted.
This reinforced the message of patience and persistence; the need to give things time to build-up and give a message — patience is important in everything. How I made progress was having a firm direction and sticking with it; focussing only on a few manageable things — things were now getting done and done regularly. Putting things out there gave some feedback and led to improvement. Even if I progressed in some wrong directions, that was okay. This was because I would learn from at least doing things, and often this learning indicated that the reasons for stopping were wrong. But without forging forward and gaining the learning this would not have become clear.
As an example, I was originally reading some books about thinking and then thought books about creativity were more important. I stopped and moved on to the creativity books and realised part way through reading them, these were not important at all. The thinking process and mindset were the key points, and these were in the thinking books. Moreover, because of the change, I forgot what I had read in the thinking books and had to start from the beginning wasting time. Additionally, I had previously stopped writing because of a flaw in my logic, and then realised later the importance in developing the skill for a variety of reasons. It also took more time to pick up after stopping.
Overall, learning from my various attempts has led me to believe that continuing with something for one to two years allows the bigger picture to emerge. Having the bigger picture is a better place to make decisions on what to carry forward and what to stop. So, maintaining momentum for this timescale is important before making any decisions on stopping.
Developing consistency
To maintain momentum, it is important to have realistic expectations on my time and what I could schedule in. I wrote my first Medium article about a year ago, and this will be number seven. There was a major gap between the early and later efforts, as I had scheduled in a high writing frequency and given the other activities I was also doing, the lack of time and motivation crept in and the writing stopped being a priority.
However, my more recent articles are spaced at about two per month. This is important because two per month is not excessive on my time, and they are easy to calendar in. I applaud people who write an article per day and kudos to their success. However, they are likely to have different priorities and goals for writing; also, they are likely to have a different lifestyle and better ability. It was very important to see that my efforts need to reflect my schedule and priorities and not others — I need to run my own race and not compare my efforts and regularity with others. Choosing a regularity that fit my schedules and priorities and the word count that suits me best was key for commitment, because now there is no excuse for not finding the time.
Having a regularity that suits me and following though has shown that things do improve over time. When I started to journal (see previous link) I set aside 30 minutes and wrote a single page; I now take about 15 minutes to write a page. When I wrote my first article (see previous link), it took me a week to write. Now I can write, edit and proofread an article over two evenings. The consistency just led to finding a rhythm and with the rhythm it became easier; the more I did the easier it got. Thus over time I can either write more or do other things with the time savings.
Now a question arises; because life happens, what if I miss a journal entry or do not write an article? Well as discussed in a previous article about with journaling, I did not always do it every day and that was fine. It could be done for the next day, or the day after that. The point was not to beat myself up, sometimes things happen and just doing the next one will maintain momentum. There can be gaps, and this is not the end of the world. If momentum is maintained, it is more likely to get done than not, and the skill will be maintained. It was so much easier to maintain momentum when I realised there would be off days, and these are okay.
Moreover, this eventually became a habit, making things much easier. I could put time in my schedule to remind me to do it every evening before bed. Eventually I did not need to, I just remembered.
To build the habit, making it easy for myself was key. For instance, having a pre-defined article idea before writing made it easier to do; otherwise, I would chop and change try to figure something out and get nowhere. Now with a plan, I could just sit down and write. Having the time pencilled in the calendar meant there was nothing else competing with it for time and there were no excuses not to do it. Calendaring in my reflection time on Sunday, also made it easy to do. I had a reminder; I knew how much I needed to write and could just do it. Thus, clarity and pre-work to support the habit made building them much easier.
Not only that, building one habit led to it being easier to build others. I had a roadmap and I just needed a good reason to commit to them. Time could be put aside and then it was straight forward. All I needed to do was to commit to a year and then decide afterwards whether to continue with it.
A further upside is that when building habits became easier, confidence improved. I could make changes in my life and habits and stick with them. I could trust myself to do things over a long-term horizon and just get on and learn how to improve at them. Each habit built a little more confidence, it is about deciding what are the important habits and making sure that they are done reasonably consistently.
Learning from this
My belief, is that being consistent in doing something will eventually lead to it become a habit. With more experience of doing something the easier and quicker it will become. Learning new skills will lead to improved confidence and self-efficacy. The real challenge in my opinion, is the gap.
The gap is the space between the initial stepping out of the comfort zone, when it is fun and new, to the time when it becomes an embedded habit, and things become easier. This gap is where consistency is so important. It is where discipline, effort and commitment are needed to cross this gap. That is why being realistic on available time, not over-committing, knowing why it needs to be done and making it easy to do it, are so important. From my experience this is why sticking with something for a reasonable period of time, at least a year, is necessary to get the benefit from it.
Some key learning points from my experience are:
- It is difficult to maintain high pace and energy all the time. If some deviation from the schedule occurs this is not a crime and there is no need for punishment and recrimination. What is important is to try and do something tomorrow or the day after — maintaining momentum is what is important.
- Knowing why I wanted to do something was immensely important in gaining commitment and maintaining consistency.
- Being reasonable and having a flexible and light schedule at first really helps. I found that it is easier to ramp up than down. If too much is taken on it is easy to fall off the wagon and stay off the wagon. The key is to keep going on a pace that it achievable and fits in with real life.
- Having a regular calendar and deciding many things before hand is useful. It becomes much easier with a plan I front of me to just do the work, rather than have to work it out as I go.
- Chopping and changing was my biggest enemy as it can lead to confusion, perfectionism, analysis paralysis and a lot of additional cognitive load. Also, the skills and learning are likely lost.
- Sticking with something for at least a year gave the amount of feedback and learning required to decide whether to continue with it
- The easier I made it for myself to do the work, the easier it was to do it.
- Things take time and it is a process — just keep at it at your own pace.
- Being consistent gives strong confidence in your reliability to yourself and others. Consistency helps build significant personal confidence and self-efficacy
- Being regular and consistent really helped in building a habit. Also, it transfers into to other areas and make building other habits so much easier.
- The more I did the easier and quicker it became.
I hope this has been of some benefit to you. If it has, please feel free to leave a comment below.
