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Productivity / Well-being

The key is habits: How to make consistency your ally for success

March 17, 2023
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They say that when motivation is low, consistency is what matters for success. Think about it. Motivation is such a fallible thing. One morning you wake up grumpy and “puff” the motivation is gone. However, if you’re consistent, you can still get stuff done, even if you do not feel like doing anything. But how do you make consistency work for you? After all, it can be difficult to get up and stretch every morning, and sometimes we are tempted by that piece of chocolate even though we promised we would eat healthier? This article will give you the secret that has helped successful people make consistency their ally and allowed them to stop relying solely on motivation to reach their goals. Spoiler: the key is habits!

What’s the big deal about consistency?

Remember the last time you set a goal. You were probably very excited in the beginning, and you told yourself “I will make this happen”. And you started really well, your motivation was high, you were productive, and you were sure this rush to chase your goal will stay with you. But, after a while you probably didn’t get as excited about your goal,  hurdles got in your way, maybe you ran out of time, or chasing your goal was just not as rewarding anymore. So, you lost your motivation and stopped working towards your goal. And after a few weeks or months you remember that you once had this goal, so you get excited again and repeat the cycle. 

Unpopular opinion: chasing your goals should  not  rely only on you being motivated to pursue them.

Motivation is great to help you get started, but motivation is also full of highs and lows, that are influenced by a myriad of things in your daily life. Instead, you want to rely on consistency as something stable and secure that will help you stay on track even when you do not feel like it. 

Consistency is especially important when you are chasing a long-term or difficult goal such as staying healthy, getting a promotion, or making your side-hustle a business that can pay your bills. That is because when you are consistent, you gain momentum. The more consistency in your goal-oriented actions, the easier they become. This is the key to understanding why consistency trumps motivation any day. The more consistency you have, the easier it becomes to eat healthy, meet your deadlines and spend time on building your business. When you create regularity in your actions, you reduce the need for consciously deciding between a healthy or an unhealthy snack, scrolling on social media or getting that presentation done, or binging Netflix versus budgeting your future business.

Sounds amazing right? But how do you actually get there? 

The key is habits! 

The best way to be more consistent and reach your goals is to create habits and routines. Habits and routines are so present in our daily life, in fact 42% of our daily behaviors are habitual. This means that a big chunk of what we do daily happens without effort and motivation, but rather because this is something we’ve been doing the whole time. By creating habits and routines that feed into pursuing/achieving your goal, you make sure that you already know what to do and when to do it, and it basically becomes your second nature. This way, you keep consistent towards achieving your goal, and you are actually doing it without even realizing.

Now, how can you create habits and routines that work for your goals? Here are 3 tips:

1. Start easy.

Habits that work are not very complex behaviors, but rather easy to implement actions that help you work towards a complex goal. For example, your goal is to be less distracted at work. It is so difficult and exhausting to monitor your behavior all the time and make sure you are not scrolling on your phone and forget the passing of time. But if instead of doing that, you decide to leave your phone out of sight, you make sure that the behavior is easy enough to stick in your brain. With time, you won’t even think about putting your phone out of sight, it would become something automatic, something habitual. This way you achieve your goal of being less distracted at work without a lot of effort and without relying on conscious motivation all the time.

2. Make it rewarding.

Habits are more likely to stick if they are rewarding. In other words, when you engage in a good habit and you reward yourself afterwards, your brain will think “this behavior is good for me, I should do this more often”. This way, your habits are likely to stick and become effortless even faster. Remember that rewards should not be complicated or overwhelming, they can be as simple as practicing gratitude or feeling proud after you have engaged in a good habit. 

3. Become a creature of habit

No, this doesn’t mean that your life becomes boring all of a sudden. It means that you are fulfilling your body’s and mind’s needs for predictability and structure. Our brains and bodies prefer regularity because this makes us feel safe and in control. Consistency in habits also relies on the principle of regularity. Once you create regularity in your life you will feel like you have your life together, you will nurture the power of discipline and consistency and you will reach your goals in no time! 

Get the support you always wanted

We know that sometimes, small actions of reflection like the ones we suggest in this article, quickly slip our mind and before we know it, we forget about them altogether. If you need an occasional reminder, follow us on our Instagram and Facebook page – we use it as an interactive way to help each other implement the advice we suggest in our blog posts. And we love to hear about your experiences and thoughts!

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This article is based on the following sources and academic articles:

McCloskey, K., & Johnson, B. T. (2019). Habits, Quick and Easy: Perceived Complexity Moderates the Associations of Contextual Stability and Rewards With Behavioral Automaticity. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 1556. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01556

Papies, E. K., & Aarts, H. (2011). Nonconscious self-regulation, or the automatic pilot of human behavior. In K. D. Vohs & R. F. Baumeister (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation: Research, theory, and applications (pp. 125–142). The Guilford Press.

Wood, W., Quinn, J. M., & Kashy, D. A. (2002). Habits in everyday life: Thought, emotion, and action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6), 1281–1297. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.6.128

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