7 Tips That Helped Me To Stay Consistent — Sharing My Trials, Errors and Success Hacks
How To Stay Consistent In Your Business And In Your Health Journey
Do you find it difficult to stay consistent? Every-time you try, you fail after couple of days or weeks?
You know exactly how important consistency is and yet fail to keep it up?
Then, this article is for you.
I tried multiple diets and fitness routines to lose weight. Same applied to certain business activities. In the past I failed after few days or weeks to keep certain things up.
The reason why I failed was, because I just set the short-term goal of losing x amount of weight and I was very strict with myself without a strong foundation behind it. Whenever I was emotionally down, in a group setting, or just didn’t feel like it, I failed over and over again.
But I managed to change my lifestyle around my health, my fitness, my sleep and in my business. Today I will share 6 hacks of how I managed to stay consistent and how you can do it as well.
1.) Keep Your Eye On Your Why
The thing is, many people remain too superficial when it comes to changing habits and remaining consistent. I really went deep into the roots of foundation, back it up with a strong purpose and got clear about my why.
Knowing your why is fundamental to form consistency and any habit.
Don’t just set a short-term goal, but have goals with a long-term outlook as part of your lifestyle. Instead of just goals, set purposeful intentions from a holistic perspective.
Health is true health. It’s one of the most important assets we have as humans, especially as an entrepreneur to stay on top of the game. I knew I had to change something, and make it as part of my lifestyle with a strong why.
Remind yourself why you started, and why it’s super important to you to stay committed. This helps you to not fall back into your old patterns and what keeps you going, even when you’re about to give up.
2.) Understand The Psychology And Get Your Mindset Right
Understand the psychology behind yourself and about the things you want to change.
Now this is really fundamental. Because this is one of the key reasons why I succeeded in keeping my consistency up.
You can’t change something when you are not aware of why it’s important to change it, and when you don’t understand why you’re doing it or what triggers you to do certain things. For example, why you eat non-functional food or are not productive.
You can’t break out of the prison (your old pattern & poor habits), if you don’t realize that you are in prison. Awareness is step number one and the agent for all changes.
For instance, I failed at all sort of diets I tried in my life. But once I had a health coach who explained me deeply how certain food truly affected me mentally and physically, as well as painted the picture on a deeper awareness level, I understood why it was important to drop certain food.
I got awakened by understanding the psychology behind my own behavior and by understanding the psychology of food.
I was aware of how ads or smells manipulate us, peer pressure, old beliefs around food when I grew up as a child, emotional stress that would trigger me to eat certain things and I was aware of my ‘’food devil’’ that would scream for non-functional food in certain moments more than in others.
I learnt how to deal with that and make my food angel stronger than the food devil.
Mindset and a deep contextual understanding is very important to succeed in anything.
Do research behind what you want to change, dig deeper into context, study yourself AND/OR invest into a health coach to understand certain things deeper or to hold yourself accountable. Let also your friends and family know about your new diet and lifestyle.
3.) Pick your battle
We only have limited amount of capacity and willpower. Instead of trying to be consistent in 3 different things, pick 1 thing first.
For example, if you want to workout, quit eating non-functional (sugary) food and quit smoking. Don’t do it all at the same time, even tough you want to go all in with all things at the same time.
Trust me, I tried that several times and failed on the long-term.
Once you master 1 battle, move to the next one.
Confront each battle 1:1 step by step. Develop and stack it over the next weeks and months.
Confront your pain-avoiders proactively.
A pain avoider could be laziness, pleasures all the time, distractions, fear of failure, fear of judgement, etc.
In another article, I will cover in more detail about what battles and habits I stacked week by week to run a successful coaching business and diet/fitness.
4.) Schedule It
Don’t prioritize your schedule, schedule your priorities.
That’s a major difference. Don’t just create a huge to-do list and just make your day look ‘’full’’. Being busy is not always good. Ask yourself: ‘’With what am daily most occupied with and with what am I exactly busy?’’
Before you do anything, identify what truly moves the needle in your business and what things are most relevant to hit your goals. Keep your routine and workflow simple.
Don’t overcomplicate your daily workflow. Complexity is the enemy of execution and consistency.
Instead, of creating a to-do list, which I did a lot in the past (but ended up not doing all of it). I dropped it, and instead create a success-list.
A success list is designed in a way to hit your relevant goal and vision by only focusing on 1–2 major tasks that are impactful for the day to move the needle on what matters. Keep things streamlined.
I prioritize my self-care time, by scheduling gym and my creative sessions.
I time-block hyper-focused non-negotiable sessions to get done my main activities that truly moves the needle in my business daily. And then, I stick to it. I repeat. Boring, but relevant activities leads to massive results.
If I don’t manage to stick to it, I ask myself again: What am i making for important than this? And what’s the consequence of not sticking to it? → Go back to your why.
5.) Build Habits And Stack Your Habits
Once you repeat and stay consistent with a certain task or activity, you automatically start to build a habit. The best thing is that you don’t even realize that if you keep up the consistency game with a brutal strong purpose.
Build your new habits around the ones you already have.
For example, If you manage to workout daily 30 minutes after lunch-break, you can add your new habit of working 2 hours hyper-focused on an important task daily after your workout sessions.
It’s easier to build new habits around the ones you already have. If you don’t have great habits yet, start with 1 great habit and build the second habit around the habit you formed.
6.) Ignore Your Feelings
This is probably ONE exceptional time where I say ignore your feelings.
It’s important that you listen to your body and feel your feelings. But..
When it comes to developing consistency, it’s important to ignore your feelings and just do it anyway. Even if your inner voice screams: ‘’I don’t feel like it.’’
For instance, you don’t feel like working on your business or hit the gym as you said you will. But you want to develop willpower and consistency, just do it. It becomes your habit after you keep going.
If something ‘’pisses’’ me off to do on a day, because I brutally don’t feel like it. I either set the tone by doing something inspiring, going for a walk and get back to it, and I tell myself: ‘’F* it, I will do it anyway.’’ And by the end of the day, I am proud that I did it. Until one day, things became habitual to me, no matter how I feel.
7.) Catch That Wagon
Most people quit being consistent once they fall off track.
For example, when I didn’t manage to hit the gym 1–2 days or failed at something I committed myself to, I would get really hard on myself. My self-talk gets harsh on myself and because of being disappointed from myself, I let the wagon drive away.
Instead of staying discouraged and fall back into your old patterns, your only job in that case is to hop back on track and catch the wagon. Off track? Simple. Just get back on track, and continue.
There are failures we need to embrace on the way to success. Forming new habits is not always easy, but great habits lead to a more quality life. It’s worthwhile for a lifetime. So never give up and stick to your words.
Remember: How you do 1 thing is how you do everything. Once you developed habits and discipline in one area of life, it’s much easier to transfer that into other domains, such as your health or career.
I hope that these 7 tips can help you to be consistent and build great habits.
Consistency is what transforms average into excellence.
Never give up, celebrate all your failures and wins. The fact you try is already a reason to celebrate.
To your success,
Ozzin
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Let me know what tip you found most useful. I’d be curious to know. What’s some idea or strategy that helped you become more consistent? What hasn’t worked for you and what worked out well?
