Hey Team,
What does consistency look like for you?
I know that in discussions about habit-building and life-enhancement there’s a lot of pressure to do your practices every day (and at the same time of day, for the same amount of time, and so on.)
There is value in that – it can be a lot easier to build momentum and to see your progress if you can do something every single day.
BUT
It’s also not feasible for a lot of people.
A lot of us don’t have the capacity to do our practices the same way every single day. We might have busy lives, we may have irregular schedules, we may have a caretaker role, we may have disabilities or chronic illnesses, or we may have some other variable that makes it impossible for us to predict our energy level/availability/schedule on any given day.
Our varying capacity doesn’t mean that we have to automatically abandon any plans to enhance or expand our lives.
(Although, that is a totally valid option if it’s what you need in this season of your life. You are the only one who can tell what will serve you best right now.)
Instead, we can benefit from reconsidering consistency and figuring out what regularly returning to our life-expanding practices could look like for us right now.
Identical daily practice is only one form of consistency.
Perhaps your form of consistency is doing something every day but your practice varies widely in time/schedule/location/activities/content.
Maybe your consistency looks like a weekly or monthly practice.
Or perhaps it looks like a different scale/scope of practice on different days of the week.
Maybe you have different practices for different types of energy.
Consistency can be any pattern of returning to a practice, even if the pattern is not easily spotted because it is stretched out over weeks, months, and years.
And while you may have multiple factors that affect your capacity, you are the best one to understand those factors, to understand your capacity, and to declare what consistency will look like for you right now.
So, Team, as you look back at your January efforts, I invite you to ask yourself, kindly, “In what ways was I consistent with my practices (or my planning!) this month?”
And then I hope you will seek out the patterns, identify the ways you kept returning to your practice (or plans), and note the efforts that you made for yourself.
You are not a robot with singular programming who can do the exact same thing at the exact same time in the exact same way every single day.
You are a human, operating in your own ecosystem, who has all kinds of factors affecting your approach to each day.
Rather than judging yourself against a single standard of consistency and being upset if/when you fall short, I hope you will develop your own parameters for consistency, celebrate when they work and change them when they don’t.
Here is your star for today’s efforts no matter what they were and no matter what type of consistency was involved. Your hard work matters and it all counts.
Go Team Us!
