Why is consistency so important?
It’s important because to achieve anything takes time. You can’t go into something and be great at it straight away, you have to practise everyday to get better. Don’t let social media fool you either, people aren’t as good behind the scenes as they appear on social media. Things take time. Getting better at anything takes time, and you need to be consistent. You need to show up everyday.
You also have to remember that you’re going to get good days and bad days. A good day is when everything happened as you expected, or exceeding your expectations. A bad day is the opposite. A bad day is when you performed subpar to your expectations. For this reason I like to look at everything like a practise run, consistently. Everyday you look at the goals and objectives and aims and you practise. The reason why I choose the word practise is because it’s easier on the mind and helps with your mentality. You put less pressure on yourself when you practise. When you practise, you allow yourself room to make mistakes, room to see your errors and weaknesses and where you need to improve. You aren’t looking for homeruns or touchdowns or the winning goal, you’re looking to smooth out techniques, to correct flaws and to master the basics. Practising consistency and mastering the basics is key to getting it right.
Take for example the gym. Now to many it may sound silly to think of lifting weights as practise because you aren’t technically practising for a main event, it’s just exercise, right? But the difference is that when you practise a movement over and over again, and add in progressive overload, you get progress. Let’s say I’m doing dumbbell shoulder presses, with my current goal being to press 30kg in each hand above my head for 3-5 reps. I would maybe think to add some single reps in to drive consistency. It’s not so much of a case of let me aim for 3 sets of 12 reps to build my shoulder muscles up (like everybody does) and if I only get 3 sets of 3 then It’s going to take me ages and I’ll get demotivated. It’s about saying to myself, ‘the more reps I can do with this weight, the stronger and better I’ll get, and the more consistently I can do the reps, the better I’ll get’. This type of mentality is much better at helping me achieving my goals, because instead of limiting myself to 3 sets of 12, I’m pushing myself forward by putting in extra work to get more reps out.
Consistency is really very simple, you just have to keep turning up. The reason why people give up so easily is because they haven’t set themselves an achievable target. You just need to find a target you can see in your mind and visualise doing it so that you can truly believe you can do it and that you are capable of it. I don’t believe that we are all unmotivated. I think sometimes we just lack belief in ourselves and that we hold ourselves back. Of course there will be times where we struggle and we physically aren’t capable on THAT day, at THAT particular moment, but it is just THAT moment, NOT every moment. That’s the key. Maybe not today, and maybe not even tomorrow, but eventually, it can happen, and that is why consistency is so important, because consistency is telling us that out of all the days we try, one of those days will count, and that is what is important.
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