Hello! Seiiti Arata. Today we will talk about effort and consistency. Whatever your plan for a new life, a completely new year, or the best year of your life, you will need consistency to accomplish the actions you need to do.
Consistency has always been important for anyone who wants to accomplish goals. But today, with so many choices ahead of us, consistency has become even more important.
Think of your parents’ generation or your grandparents’ generation. There was less information available, fewer choices. Usually, after you chose a field of study, you followed that career until you retired. Consistency was almost automatic.
Today, it is very common for people to enroll in one college, interrupt their studies, enroll in another completely different college. And often if they graduate, they may end up working in an area unrelated to the degree received.
In this world of great change, where new options come up all the time, consistency is very important as we have been trained to switch areas of interest all the time.
Consistency is being persistent in what you are doing.
There is a famous phrase that says that madness is doing the same action several times expecting different results. This means that when you are not reaping the results you want, you need to change your attitude and approach.
Be very careful because this sentence is often misunderstood. Imagine your goal is to cut down a tree. You strike an axe and the tree does not fall. You strike again and the tree does not fall. And again. And again.
This does not mean that you must abandon the plan. If you don’t have a chainsaw available and the only tool you have is the axe, you just have to have the sharp axe, know how to make the right blows and simply have the consistency to persevere because you will keep advancing and sooner or later the tree will fall.
I like to use this example of the tree felled by the axe because in this case it is not crazy for you to insist on the same action, in case you hit the tree again and again, expecting different results. For some types of goals, the result will only appear after a certain time by consistently applying the same action.
The problem is that nowadays people don’t have the patience to reach the result. They see a transformation on television or on the Internet and want to have the same result quickly, but without the same effort.
For example, if you start a diet to lose weight and want to lose that fat that has accumulated over the years with just one week of dietary change, this is a sign of a lack of patience.
If you start learning a foreign language and want to be fluent in a few days, you are out of patience.
Of course there are techniques for you to speed up your results. In addition, there are also techniques that are proven to be inefficient and will not bring you the desired results. That’s why you should identify inefficient practices and avoid taking those actions that take longer.
You must keep away from what is easy.
Staying away from what’s easy is an essential concept for you to have a good life and I’ve talked about it before [ arata.se/therearenoshortcuts ]. In the future I still want to talk about my critical stance on so-called life hacks, shortcuts to success.
Basically, when you are addicted to looking for shortcuts, you stop practicing the training that is necessary for you to develop and acquire important skills. Life hack is no substitute for skills, you need to have the consistency of focusing on the fundamentals.
If you really want to sharpen the ax, you must push and repeatedly press the blade against a hard rock. There will be a need for a dedication, a habit, a ritual performing what is not easy.
We must be willing to face resistance and friction. Keep this symbology in mind, you must be prepared for physical, mental and emotional exertion. Just look at the world of sports and you will see that no great athlete who is well known for high performance has come where they are without dedication, consistency and effort. In any area of human activity where there is great competition, only the most consistent can stand out. Resilience will help you.
Anxiety and laziness are enemies of consistency
Unfortunately, we are living in an anxious society that wants instant results and wants more convenience and less effort.
I will give you two examples. Reading and feeding.
There is a laziness nowadays to read some article on the internet. You do a Google search and find that you have an article, but you are too lazy to click to read because you know that after clicking that link you will first have to accept cookies, you will have to agree to the privacy policy, you will have to say that you do not want to receive notifications from that site and only after doing all these clicks the article will appear and often the article does not appear entirely and yet you have to click somewhere to read more and expand the text and close the pop up ads. So laziness takes place.
And when it’s time to feed? Today, it is no longer good to offer in the supermarket for example a frozen meal that you can just put in the microwave… or vegetables already washed and cut. People want food delivery and often are too lazy to order food delivery because they have to open the door to receive the delivery or choose what to order from the app. Is that your case? Share with us in the comments your stories of laziness.
Why is there such laziness and need for shortcuts and convenience?
These facilities of modern life do not allow us to naturally develop consistency. Evolutionary human nature itself wants to save energy so as not to do activities that cause fatigue.
Observe children or even young animals that live running, tripping, jumping. All of this is influenced by hormones that give young mammals a stimulus to learn movement, gain balance and especially with this physical activity begin to develop the muscles needed for adulthood. Once adulthood arrives, it will live a life seeking to save energy and thus find convenience and ease.
Corporations know this and take the opportunity to offer us products and services that save us time and effort. I’m not saying companies are evil and have a strategic plan to make us lazy. The goal of companies is to make a profit. Companies simply understand what we need, what we want and develop solutions that meet our needs.
Therefore, you first need to be aware that in adulthood you are living within an environment that will favor your laziness and not providing the proper encouragement for you to be a consistent person. Awareness is the first step.
This is why in episode 142 we see the importance of understanding the difference between process goals and outcome goals. You cannot be the type of person who wants to achieve the result if you do not like the process or are unwilling to perform the process.
Consistency requires practice and skill.
Many people come to me for business mentoring and when I talk to them I see that many of them have studied hard, followed influencers and entrepreneurs who share business tips and have read many books. These are people who have a lot of knowledge, but have no practice.
These are people who have never implemented anything. They do not yet have a product or service that can be sold. They don’t have a marketing campaign yet to sell. In other words, it’s no use you spending hours and hours learning theory if you don’t put it into practice. No matter what you know, what matters is what you do with what you know.
It’s no use saying that you already know what mental triggers make a person want to buy.
If you’ve never closed a sale in your life, if you’ve never talked to a real customer, sorry, you don’t know anything. True knowledge happens when you put your theory into practice. Otherwise you will simply be a marionette on a stage, a person who talks a lot but accomplishes little.
Consistency can’t just depend on motivation.
Another common mistake is to let consistency depend only on motivation. The problem with relying on your motivation is that some days you will not have the motivation to do what has to be done. Because of this, you should also above all build routines and habits that put you in automatic mode to overcome the laziest days or the days you don’t have the motivation.
Within our Better New Year course, I bring you in an organized way how you will achieve consistency in different areas of your life. This is a very important step. You need to be specific to know which areas of your life need the most consistency to become who you want to be.
You need to raise your awareness so that you can better objectively evaluate what you have been able to accomplish so far, and also other aspects where you have not yet achieved the desired results.
When you make this assessment, it is very important that you can make the difference between the real reasons and what your excuses are. You need to be clear about the process of confabulation and rationalization that we tend to undertake that keeps us from the truth. Only with good information and real and objective data can we make better choices.
In this process, you have to be very careful about the ego traps that will try to keep you from the truth. And it is guaranteed that you will stumble along the way, that your defects will appear, that many obstacles will have to be overcome. The process of finding your own shortcomings is part of your path of improvement.
Daniel Kahneman shows us that we have loss aversion. We want to avoid the feeling of pain associated with losing. That is why we often make incoherent and irrational choices.
Take, for example, the case of a company that is not making a profit. Instead of accepting the fact that that market is not suitable for that product, the entrepreneur insists on error and increases the financial loss. The right thing would be to close that company until you find something completely different, or a new product or a new market. The lesson here is that you have to be careful how your brain works because there is often a tendency not to recognize your own mistakes.
What would your life be like after a year of consistency?
Let’s finish by doing a little imagination exercise. If you need to, take a break. I am going to ask you to imagine what your life would be like in a year if you could maintain the consistency to realize your big dreams.
If you were about to enter the best year of your life, what would you do differently? What results would you like to achieve? What is that you no longer want to repeat in your life?
What are the areas of your life where you need to be a better person? So you can offer a better life to those around you?
What are your areas of interest in which you have acquired and accumulated too much information and put too little into practice?
Above all, what actions do you need to take consistently, in practice, in everyday life, to bring into the concrete world those dreams that are just in your mind today?
Imagine what you’re going to be like in a year if you remain consistent in making the right decisions. To be consistent with the good foods you eat, the exercises you practice, the books you read. Being consistent in the actions you take, the relationships you maintain, the way you manage your finances.
Try to answer these questions in writing. Now it’s time for you to prioritize and put together realistic planning within your calendar.
You can prioritize what is most important to you or, if you feel it is necessary, you can prove to yourself that it is possible. You can prioritize activities that are simpler and smaller because when you complete these activities you will increase your level of motivation.
Throughout the year, it is important that you examine how your planning is and how dependent you are on motivation. This is what I call the motivation audit. You have to make sure that your plan is good and that it doesn’t depend on whether you are motivated or not.
Year in and year out, something I always hear when someone describes themselves as being very intelligent, having great potential, but the problem is that they can’t dedicate themselves enough. In other words, this is lack of consistency.
If you are consistent throughout the year, you can be sure that you will live the best year of your life in any area, it can be at work, in relationships, in your own health, in love, in finances. Make sure consistency is what will bring results to you when you are doing what is right and what should be done.
For those of you who are interested in having the best year of your life, I invite you to know our online training Better New Year by visiting https://arata.se/betternewyear