The Secret to Consistency Is Knowing When to Stop

I think this is an interesting way to think about how you can become super consistent in your goals. And it is to think about what is the most consistent thing that we kind of rely on, or maybe one of the most consistent things that we rely on in life. Think about like travel. What's statistically speaking the safest, most consistent form of travel? And it's airlines, if you're flying somewhere, chances are you're probably a lot safer and you'll get there safely much more consistently than with traveling by car or something like that. So let's look at that. What is it about airline travel that makes it so consistent? And how can that inform your strategy of being consistent in your own life? So this ties in with my approach to personal productivity, which I outline in my latest book. If you don't show up, you can find it below. But the idea is that you stop. You stop trying to fix, you stop recommitting as easily as maybe we did in the past. But stay with me for a second. I think there's a valid, useful point here from this idea. So think about it for a second. When an airline is trying to become consistent, there's a whole industry around making sure all airlines are consistent and safe. But in order to become consistent and safe, there isn't a hopeful strategy. It's not okay, let's try our best and hopefully things will go well. There's a system built in that takes into account when something goes wrong, what happens? A very detailed procedure that is followed in the event of something going wrong. So it's not assumed that everything is going to go right with air travel. It hasn't been for decades. It's assumed that things go wrong, and if they do go wrong, we're going to respond or react to it in a specific type of way. And with that strategy, it has become incredibly consistent and safe. So let's look at what they don't do. Okay, there's not a hopeful strategy. But let's say there is an accident. What do the airlines do? They don't say, oh, well, the most important thing there is that we have to continue flying. Let's send another plane out straight away before we figured out what's actually gone wrong. It's the opposite. What happens is if there's a serious event, usually the fleet is grounded until there's a reflective and investigation done into what exactly went wrong there. And that has led to, over decades, that strategy has compounded into so much information about air travel safety, that it is the safest form of travel. So if we're going to become consistent, you see, we don't do that typically. What we're told is you keep trying. So something, let's say you have a strategy, a plan, you're going to try and implement it. You can think of it as your flight plan for the day. The wheels come off, there's a crash, the day falls apart. And what we do is we go, well, I have to rescue it. I have to fix this and I have to keep pushing and I have to keep recommitting and keep re-promising, usually within the same day. What my book suggests is that is the problem. It's not the inaction. The failing to follow through isn't the problem. It's the wheels have fallen off. Where is the investigation? The attempts to recommit, to salvage the day, if you like, are the very thing that is making you lack consistency moving forward. So the book invites you to try and approach for five days, which is basically, okay, had an intention, didn't follow through. Instead of going into re-promising and recommitting to salvage the situation, we pause and we give ourselves some space to do a deep forensic investigation, if you like. Why exactly did I not do that thing that I said I would do? Instead of judging ourselves or, again, recommitting. Recommitting is the big problem. It's the hidden problem. It's been the problem all along, except it never gets talked about because it's so counterintuitive. The intuitive thing is to keep trying, come on, get back up on the horse and give it another go. But that's actually unhelpful. Imagine again, if that was the strategy with airlines, how consistent would we be at this stage with airline safety? Not very. So we take that lesson and we can apply it in our own lives. Instead of forcing and trying to rescue, we get interested and we don't go into self-judgment. We go into, what happened there? A curiosity to do an actual investigation. Not like an interrogating yourself type of way, but in a way where you're just saying, okay, right now we're not doing anything. We're going to figure out what happened there. And that usually involves giving yourself a little bit of space and time away from trying or making additional commitments. You can go and do something else maybe that wasn't that thing, but you're stepping away from that task. Right now, in my experience, what you will find probably eight times out of 10 is that what went wrong is that you over-promised things. You stretched yourself too far. Now, it's not the only reason we failed to follow through on things. There can be boundary issues and there can be self-talk issues. There can be things where you over-complicate the project and things like that. But by and large, the main thing is that we over-commit, we over-stretch ourselves, we put too much pressure on ourselves to follow through. And the nervous system gets very guarded. Even though you think you want to do it and you could be able to do it, it has this different reaction to it. So usually that's the reason. But we don't usually find that reason. We don't usually even come to understand how overwhelmed we are if we are in this busy thing of reflexively re-promising and re-committing, trying to salvage the situation after there's been a catastrophe. We feel like right after we failed to follow through, it's not a catastrophe. I'm being dramatic here to make the point. So this is what you're asked to do with this approach. It's not to try harder. It's not to mean it better than you did before. You meant it the first time. It's just you were lacking a little bit of insight into what will make this journey or this attempt have the best possible strategy. And again, the biggest one by far is the tendency to overwhelm yourself. Take on too much at once. Because that's our conditioning. It's to do more. More is better. More isn't always better. Certainly if you're trying to be consistent in life. Really with consistency, what we're looking for is small, small, small to be consistent. You can't be consistent with big, big, big. That doesn't work. Nobody is consistent with big efforts. So I'm talking about consciously chosen goals, right? If you wake up in the morning with a conscious goal of I can do a small bit in this thing today, you will stay consistent in it. But if you're waking up and consciously you know that you're about to attempt something quite large and intimidating, you may be able to stick to it for a while, but you won't be consistent with it. So the huge part of becoming consistent and overcoming procrastination is learning. And usually we have to learn it through failure because the condition is so strong it's going to tell you, it's going to convince you after a few days and a few weeks to take on more. And you're going to run into a problem with it in that there's a lack of, there's a lot of resistance now coming up and you're not following through. Usually step back from it and you'll realize, yeah, there was, it came back, the conditioning came back and I put way too much pressure on myself yet again. But it's much, you get out of the cycle of procrastination a lot quicker if you can catch yourself doing that, going to reflection and realize, okay, happened again, no problem. But once you start to step away from it and reflect on it and see the thing happening again and understand that it's not to do with you being lazy or lacking motivation, it's a tendency to overwhelm yourself. You get good at recognizing it and you don't get derailed by it for very long periods of time. Okay. So the idea in this video is a pretty simple one to be consistent. What is required is not further efforts. What is required is to take a step back and reflect on without judgment, what happened? Honestly, what happened there? So keep in mind the link for the book after you don't show up is below and it goes into 160 pages. It goes into this one idea really, which is why I think the is like, it's not like a 15 step program. It's just one idea. The problem is the recommitments we make after inaction because I define procrastination. It's not as a problem of inaction. It's a problem of reaction to inaction. It's how we react to when we don't follow through that causes this to become a chronic problem for us. So the link is below. My information is below if you want to reach me also. Thanks for being with me. I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.