I Found a Completely New Way to become Consistent

In this video, I'm going to show you how to be consistent. So that's what the topic is. And with that in mind, I want you to try and guess what I'm going to say. Try and guess, especially if this is the first time you've seen me. I'm David, by the way. I'm a therapist and psychologist. I've written a few books on procrastination, especially. So I'm going to talk about how to be consistent. So consistent in goal achievement, right? Going after what it is you want in life. Because when people procrastinate, it's not really that they fail to follow through occasionally from time to time. It's the problem really is that they can't maintain a level of consistent engagement with something over time, right? So that's what the topic is. Now, I don't know how many times you've watched videos on how to be consistent, but you've probably seen a few if you're at my channel, which is a rather small channel, right? So what am I going to tell you? It's an interesting way to think about it. What are you expecting me to say? Write affirmations. Maybe you should create a vision board for yourself. That actually wouldn't be the worst advice. Worse would be, maybe you think I'm going to tell you to get serious, to think about the negative things that will happen in your life, that you will stagnate and you'll end up in a really bad place if you don't become consistent and take action. Well, actually, no, I'm not going to say any of that stuff. I think what I'm going to say here is not about discipline or willpower, or certainly not about bulldozing and bullying yourself into action, because I have identified that as the primary problem in this whole thing, in terms of how you relate to yourself. It's a bullying language and it's really based in language. It's how we talk to ourselves. That's the problem. So how to be consistent? What am I going to tell you? Well, with what I've just said, it informs what I'm going to say, which is to understand consistency. The problem is we think consistency is this straightforward thing. Okay, so let's say you want to go to, you want to put in consistent hours and working on your business, or you want to go to the gym regularly, or you want to learn a language, or you want to learn an instrument, or you want to write a book. These are things that are going to... Now, it's true. You're going to, it's more than likely, it's going to require that you engage with it over time, right? Consistently. The problem is we think, and we're told, that it's pretty straightforward to be consistent with something. So given that, well, what do we mean? Well, why is it consistent? Well, it's just you do the thing again and again, day after day. You do it today, you do it tomorrow, you do it the next day, right? Simple. That's how you get consistency. True enough, that's what it looks like. But how you actually do that, and if you think of it this way, how many people are truly consistent in things? I certainly struggled for a long time. Certainly when I was following that advice about building willpower and trying to bully myself into taking consistent action, I struggled with it. So it's not that. It's this idea, first of all, that you have to let go of the idea that consistency is this just simple, straightforward thing of doing something again and again, right? That's what it looks like, but that's not how it's achieved. Because if you believe that, if you believe that it is this super easy thing, straightforward, just do the thing again and again, you will start commanding or demanding consistency of yourself because it's so simple and straightforward, right? So just do the thing. And that is not how consistency works. This is what consistency is, and this is how it works. Consistency is not an order you back at yourself. Consistency is something that emerges through reflection. Okay, so it emerges. It's possible. I want you to take that away from this video. It is absolutely 100% possible to become consistent in things that you find that are important for your life, but you don't become consistency by, first of all, assuming that it's a simple thing, and then just back and order yourself to do the thing. It's much more about, here's a way to think about it. Let's say you attempt to do the thing today, and you don't do the thing today. That failure to follow through isn't actually a failure. It's information. It's telling you something about what you set up in your life or the way you're thinking. And is it supportive of consistency, or is there something off with that? Now, if you can just say, okay, maybe this is more complicated than I thought. Maybe that failure to follow through wasn't a failure. It's informing me, and it will help me adjust or change my approach going forward, maybe in a small way. That's eventually how you become consistent. You start to adjust, and you start to create an approach that allows consistency to emerge. But it's not barked at. It's not an order issue to yourself. It's like, okay, I'm getting informed here about what's required for consistency to emerge. And with this approach, this is all in my book. After you don't show up, the primary way I focus on this and developing consistency is in learning from the times when you fail to follow through on a commitment instead of doing what we always do, which is, well, I screwed up there. That's a big mistake. I just need to try harder next time because this is very straightforward. It's not straightforward. There's all sorts of things that go into being consistent. What kind of boundaries you have in your life, how you talk to yourself, practical things, getting enough sleep, for instance. That's important. I'm a little bit tired as I'm making this video, but the point is I'm still making it so it didn't stop me from making it, but it could, right? It could, that could be something to adjust. So you make these adjustments. Now, these are not excuses, and that's a big thing I go into in the book. The method in the book, I call it the incredible method because what it helps is it helps you to restore credibility to yourself. Basically, the thing I talk about in the book is, okay, you commit to something, and if you don't do the thing, it's not a failure. It's feedback, right? And you use that after you didn't do the thing, after you don't show up, you allow reflection to occur. Which is understanding, understanding, not judging why you didn't show up. Now, that's harder than it sounds because really, in order for that to happen, after you don't do the thing, instead of scrambling to do the thing again and again and again that day, you have to stop and say, okay, what just happened? I promised myself something there. I committed to something. I didn't do it. And instead of just assuming that that was, well, it's simple. I just didn't do the thing. I need to do the thing more. I need to try harder. I need to mean it more. You go into pause. That's significant. Let's try and learn from that instead of trying to scramble for the remainder of the day, okay? And you will get, if you're not scrambling, so if you stop that, I call them reflex promises. So after you don't do the thing, our defense mechanism, and it's a defense mechanism, is to, okay, something's gone wrong. Instead of going into reflection, something that might help you develop consistency because you'll learn from it, is we go into, okay, not now, okay, I'll do it then. I'll do it soon. And it's always this promising to rescue the failure. And that is the hard thing to give up. It's almost like an addiction, right? Because we think that's the reasonable thing to do. That's the responsible, the helpful thing to do, right? Something has gone wrong. Okay, this is how I'm going to fix it. I'm going to recommit. But that can be so corrosive for us because you could potentially find yourself for months in this thing of perpetually re-promising. And as long as there's another promise available, you never have to go back and look at, yeah, but why did I not follow through there? Really, why didn't I follow through there? That's where excuses come in. If you're still trying to rescue the situation by recommitting, you're not actually genuinely curious about why you didn't show up. You're trying to justify why another attempt is warranted, okay? And that's a very different thing. That does lead to excuses. Well, what's an excuse in that context? I didn't do a thing. I'm going to do it soon though because that motivational video I watched wasn't really that good. I just need to find a better one. That's an excuse, okay? Now, when you stop after the failure to show up for yourself and you say, okay, let's just pause. Something significant has happened there. I wonder what happened there. That's going to take some time. Excuse my microphone here. That's going to take a little bit of time for you to really, because if you're genuinely curious, that was significant there. I said I would do something. I didn't. Why didn't I? And instead of assuming, it's what the first thing we assume usually is that there's something wrong with me. I'm a bad person. It isn't that either. What if your failure to follow through? This is a big question. What if your failure to show up for yourself has nothing to do with the type of person you are? Think about that for a second. Think about what that would mean about all the self-judgment that's gone on in the past. It's not that even that it's wrong. We waste the time. It's keeping you from finding the real reasons why you didn't show up when you said you would. So imagine in a scenario where you say, okay, look, I'm going to listen to this David guy here for a second and try that. Maybe he's full of it, but I'll try it anyway. And you say, okay, I didn't show up there. That's it. I'm not going to try and rescue that situation. I'm just going to try and pause and really figure out why I didn't do that. And you'll notice initially, the first thing is, well, I'm just disorganized or I'm not a serious person. And that might be there for 15 minutes. But as you really sit with yourself and hold the boundary, it's like, no, well, let's really let that marinate there. Let's really see what else comes up in terms of an explanation. Because there's nothing to rescue now. I've let it go. I'm not trying to rescue it. I'm not trying to salvage my persona that I am this super productive person. I'm just getting honest with myself. There's nothing to bargain for here. I'm not trying to save the day. It's gone. I put it down. And when you're not bargaining, honesty emerges. And it'll be and it's so interesting. It's never that you come to the realization. Oh, yeah, I really was a lazy so-and-so. I really was a bad person. I really was not serious enough. It's almost always something practical or something around a boundary. And those things can be adjusted. Okay, I assumed that my family knew I was going to be working. But really, they thought that I was going to be available to do something. So what could I do now going forward, given that that's a genuine insight I have, not a label I've attached to myself? What could I do going forward to help myself be more consistent? Well, I could probably communicate to people around me that I will need some time. Or it could be something like someone came in as I was about to do the thing, and they wanted a conversation, and I felt uncomfortable about telling them that I needed some time to myself. Okay, now a whole host of questions are coming up. Why do I find it difficult to ask for space? Do I feel it's selfish of me if I'm asking for some time to do something that I think is important for me? These types of things emerge, right? And that could be all about informing your boundaries or the way you communicate with people around you. See, it's a world apart from I'm this lazy bad person or I'm disorganized, right? Or I'm not trying hard enough. Or I don't want it enough. None of that's true. But in order to get to the truth, which can inform your strategy to become consistent, we need to stop trying to save the day. We need to allow ourselves to fail, to show up even. There's nothing. That's okay. That's not the problem. The problem is what we do after it, which is why the book is called After You Don't Show Up. And it's what we do after we don't show up that kind of gets in our way. It blocks the feedback for us. Okay, now you would try this strategy for a while. Now, you still try to show up, right? You can make your best attempts to show up for a thing. But if you don't, what you're asked to do in the book is to say, okay, let's just pause and really figure out what happened there. Not necessarily analyze the crap out of it, right? But just step away from it for a while and let something come to you to say, okay, that's really what was going on there in that situation. You do that for a while. Your strategy will be radically different going forward. You're going to get real lessons, real useful information that can actually help facilitate consistency in your life. Okay, do that for a week. Do that for a month. You're now a very, very different person, a much more informed, insightful person as to what it requires for you to be consistent in action. Okay, so there's a lot in that. I'll leave it there for now. I encourage you, if you have a weekend coming up and you've ever struggled with procrastination, I'm going to sell the book to you. I'm sorry, but I need to tell you that this book could be a game changer for you because it's a different thing. It's not what you expected me to say at the start of this video. It's a very different strategy in terms of overcoming procrastination. In other words, becoming consistent in something that you think is important. So check out that book. It's not a long book. You can read it in a weekend, let it sit with you and take all the details about how to implement what I've just talked about in that book. So check out the book. The link is below. If you like the book too, leave a review, an honest review, whatever you thought of it, but whatever you think of it, it helps me a lot with the book. And thanks for being with me. Hope that's useful. And I'll continue to talk about this. And if you have any questions or comments, leave them below also. Helps me to stay in touch with what you guys are thinking about this and maybe inform what I can talk about in future videos. So I'll leave it there. Take care of yourself. Talk soon. Bye-bye.