It’s a new year and a new year means more work than ever. If you want to become successful, then you need to become a better version of yourself every day which means to be more consistent, but what is consistency?
Everybody Starts From Somewhere
When you start working on improving yourself, you might feel excited and motivated. You might start new habits like journaling, exercising, and meditating.
It’s great at first, but then suddenly, you might not be doing these things anymore. You might fall back into old habits and feel surprised and disappointed in yourself.
This experience is common, especially when you’re new to self-improvement.
For example, you might decide to start a habit like not watching adult content and exercising regularly. But then, you might have a week without exercising and you start watching adult content daily again. This can be confusing and frustrating because you thought you were past that stage.
Being Consistent isn’t what you may think it is…
However, the issue isn’t about being consistent every single day.
It’s more about your overall progress over a longer period, like a year. Think about it this way: before you started improving yourself, you probably didn’t do any of these good habits.
But after starting, even if you’re not perfect, you’re still doing these habits more than before.
Consistency isn’t about never missing a day. It’s about how many times you do something beneficial over a year. If you’re improving year by year, that’s what matters. For example, in your first year of self-improvement, if you meditate 100 times, that’s great progress compared to zero times the previous year.
Life and progress aren’t straight lines; they have ups and downs. Some weeks you might do well, and other weeks you might not. That’s normal. Over time, as you keep at it, your ‘down’ periods get shorter and less frequent.
For instance, if you miss meditation for 21 days once, maybe next time it’ll only be 17 days, then 12, and so on. Eventually, missing just two days might feel like a big deal, but that’s a sign of progress.
It’s important not to be too hard on yourself. Even people working on self-improvement for years don’t do these habits perfectly every day. It’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll change your entire lifestyle overnight just because you watched a motivational video or read a book.
But it always helps if you take inspiration from the right role models and self-improvement podcasts, like Chris Williamson or Andrew Huberman who upload podcasts on every self-improvement aspect you will ever need!
In summary, don’t expect to be perfect when you start improving yourself. Measure your progress over a year, not day by day. Celebrate the progress you’ve made compared to before you started. Remember, self-improvement is a journey with highs and lows, and that’s perfectly normal.