How to be CONSISTENT??
“Consistency eats Talent for breakfast”
If you are the kind of person who is serious about achieving some goals then you must have read books, articles or you may have watched videos or movies just to get an answer to the question, “How to be consistent?”. You would have also tried various techniques like making a task list, keeping it slow, making a habit, following the 2 day rule, etc. (I’ll be dealing with the abovementioned and some other practical techniques as well)
But let me ask you one thing, “Did it work?” I guess your answer would be somewhat like — It all goes in a flow in the beginning but you come back to square one eventually. Why does this happen? Why can’t you maintain that flow for long? Why does your energy get drained in the end? Is it really possible to achieve some extraordinary feats with the techniques you use? And of course, how to actually be consistent? Well today, I’ll help you to ponder over these questions and to get a realistic view.
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First imagine a scenario when you were fully motivated, it may be because you watched some video or just read an article or a quote somewhere…what do you do then? You make task lists, plan for the future events and I am pretty sure you may have also made that time table with different tasks allotted to different time slots as well. I also used to make them. But frankly, it never worked. All of my motivation and my energy used to drain after some weeks, days or even hours.
American author and speaker, John Maxwell says that Motivation gives you the push to start work but Discipline gives you the energy to keep it sustained. It is called the Law of Consistency. It does not matter how talented you are or how many opportunities you get, if you want to grow then you have to have consistency.
So our focus should not be directly on becoming consistent but to build discipline. As a disciplined person does his/her work even if doesn’t feel like doing. The way of doing that is to produce quality work especially on those ‘difficult days’ as it will give you the confidence that you can work hard. Just do something on those days and embrace that!!!
One of the most respected psychobiologists of the world, Jaak Panksepp observed in a research the behavior of the motivational circuits in a mouse as our mind’s foundation has traits of the animalistic circuitry. So studying brains of animals can tell us a lot about our own biological and psychological behavior without being biased towards our modern culture. During the experiment, scientists attached a spring to the tail of the mouse and observed the behavior in two cases: (a) When the mouse was hungry, (b) When there was danger around. So Panksepp observed that, usually mouse show a certain motivational force but when there was danger around (essence of a cat), there was an exponential increase in the motivational force.
An interesting thing to note here is that fear produces more motivation than any desire. Your fear will keep on pushing you to work hard. So the secret to be motivated, disciplined and consistent is the fear of being stuck in the same place. You need that fire to get out of your comfort zone. This fear will in developing that ‘horse-vision’ where you’ll have no other option but to work hard and that too everyday. Making a time-table, watching videos, reading books are also important but all these activities will work only when you have that fire within you.
GIVE IT A THOUGHT….!!!!
