Why can't I stay consistent?

A man I coach ran somebody else's daily hour for three separate months. Finished work at a set time, showered, sat down, did the hour. The results were good all three months and he said so.

"The results are really good all those three months. I can see it works."

Then each month ended and he made himself the same offer. "This is going to be my routine."

"And it lasts for a week or so and then it just drifts off."

Three for three with the structure. About a week on his own. He isn't making excuses for it. His own summary of the gap: "I know what needs to be done. I just don't know why I don't do it."

Why does it last a week and then drift off?

Because the structure holding it up belonged to somebody else, and when it stopped what he had left was the results and nothing about himself. A good month proves the method works, and tells you nothing about whether you're someone who keeps at it, which is what the next month runs on. So he started again from zero, three times.

The month worked and nothing recorded that you were the one who kept it.

Is it fear, or is it uncertainty?

I offered him the word fear. He didn't take it.

"I wouldn't call it fear. I'd call it uncertainty. Can I actually do this? Can I do this consistently?"

He isn't uncertain whether he can do the hour. He has three good months of it, and his line about a completed rep is "Once I've done it once, I can do it with my eyes closed." What he doesn't know is whether he can keep being that person over years with nobody making him, and that's a different question with a different answer.

Which is where a lot of the advice goes past him, because it answers the first question. Smaller goals and better systems and falling in love with the process, when he had the system, it worked three months running, and it still went in a week.

What causes someone to not be consistent?

In many of the people I sit with, nothing does. They have been consistent for twenty years, for everybody else. It gives way in one place, which is the thing that's only for them, where nobody is waiting on it and nobody is going to check.

This man says honest work, honest days. Two decades of that, and he doesn't think he's broken his word to a client in all of it, and he's been letting himself off the hook the whole way through. Those two facts had never been sitting next to each other until we put them there.

He put the split like this: "I always hit my business ones. And I kind of never hit the personal ones." The personal ones were always more time with the family and more time off.

You're good at this and it's why people lean on you, and not much of it comes back the other way.

A group member summed up what they were building as "not breaking promises that I make to myself." Another described the same split from the other side: keeping every commitment they make to other people, and breaking the ones they make to themselves.

One of the easiest ways to build self-trust is following through on the things you say you're going to do, and it runs the other way as well, because a promise to yourself you can't keep erodes it. Which is why this starts smaller than you want it to.

So what changes this?

Marking the reps. Not the outcome, the way you showed up, until there's enough of it behind you that the next month isn't a question.

Affirmation is telling yourself you are something until you believe it. Acknowledgement is using what you've already done as the evidence that you are. One of those you have to talk yourself into, and the other one already happened.

He'd never done it. I asked whether he'd been acknowledging the changes and the progress and the answer was no, not until months in, when he counted them up and realised he was already at four. He said the same thing about the business he spent his life building. "We never recognised the little achievements that we've made over the years, and then it just grew into this monster."

So he produces an enormous amount, very little of it gets registered anywhere, and then there's nothing to draw on when the next month starts. "You show up for the success of the business," I said to him. And then the other side of it, showing up for the success of you, the felt success, being proud, being accomplished: "you're missing that whole part." We're conditioned to value action, so you can produce outcome after outcome and still never feel like you've arrived anywhere.

So rather than acknowledging an outcome, which is a fleeting moment, we acknowledge all those parts of us that we're intentionally practising, which becomes the compounding effect. We can always be winning when we're acknowledging the way that we're showing up.

Daniel Lawson

One. Tie it to the attribute, not the action. I did the hour is an outcome and it expires the same day, where the characteristic you showed up with, the standard you held and the expectation you met all carry into next week.

Two. Seventy percent counts. If you only hit seventy percent of what you defined you can make that look like failing, because you wanted a hundred. Seventy percent of showing up is more than you'd have done without defining it at all, so take it.

Three. Write it down the day it happens. Ask yourself what you're acknowledging yourself for and your brain goes looking for the evidence, which is much of the value of asking. It can be messy and badly worded, because getting the runs on the board of saying it in a messy way is what brings the clarity, rather than waiting until it sounds good.

Four. Say it to someone else. A group member put theirs like this: acknowledging myself for not letting the over-preparing stop me, and for doing it at all, because part of me thought it'd be easier to just not. Said in front of other people it stops being a note to yourself.

And give it longer than a week before you decide. My own structure is nine metrics measured over six months, specifically because one week is not going to change anything.

The results that you're getting today are not a reflection of who you are today. It's a reflection of who you've been.

Daniel Lawson

Common questions

Why do I struggle to stay consistent with anything?

Have a look at whether it's anything, or whether it's the things with nobody else attached to them. Many of the people who ask me this have twenty-year records of consistency at work and at home, and a gap where the commitment is only to themselves.

How do I get rid of the fear of uncertainty?

You don't need to. Certainty gets built on the inside, out of a cadence of success metrics, and self-trust is what lets you say I'm not certain but I'm going to do it anyway. If you wait for the certainty to show up first the condition just moves. He met his own condition of three positive months and had replaced it with a new one inside a fortnight.

Isn't this just a discipline problem?

Discipline is what you've been using to keep your word to everybody else for two decades. What's missing is felt evidence about yourself, and discipline doesn't produce that, because it gets built out of marking what you did.

If I start recognising what I've already done, will I lose my drive?

It runs the other way round. The pride is what you were going for when you set the target, so going straight on to the next one forfeits the reason you set it. The capable people I sit with aren't short of drive. They're short of any return on twenty years of it that they can feel.

We all want to feel proud and accomplished and successful and at peace, and like it was all worth it, right?

Daniel Lawson

How long before it holds?

Longer than feels reasonable, and a lot of it is dull. Consistency is unsexy. One of the men in a group described two years of incremental steps day by day, working on himself, reflecting, pushing himself a little, reflecting again. Repetition is the mechanism, because an idea gets learned in your head a long time before it's learned in your body.

If this is you

The hard part is that counting your own progress is the thing you're worst at. He had three good months and didn't register one of them, and it wasn't modesty. Marking his own progress felt selfish after a lifetime of everything being for other people. Somebody else counted those months for him, in front of him. And then he had them, and he could see the fourth one coming.

The Reconnected Man and The Reconnected Woman are the group where we have these conversations together.