Staying Consistent At The Beginning
When starting a new project or going for a new goal, we don’t think too much about staying consistent.
That’s because motivation drives us forward.
But when the initial motivation eventually wears off, something else must take its place if we want to keep moving forward.
This something else is consistency.
Staying consistent is another key factor for the success of any goal, besides defining your target audience.
But how do you stay consistent when there are no results in sight yet?
Besides believing in yourself, you must have a plan and a process in place.
Results do come, eventually.
Here’s a process for staying consistent:
- Taking Action – publishing constantly
- Get Initial Results – search results, keywords, conversations
- Learning From Initial Results
- Plug Initial Results Back Into The Action Step
- Now we are taking directed action
- Repeat the process until the desired result is achieved
It’s a process of calibrating, learning and adjusting direction.
It requires you to adapt and be flexible and to continuously use any intermediary results to adjust your actions.
The Minimum Necessary To Stay Consistent
To stay consistent, we must have a plan in place.
There is a minimum set of actions we must perform daily, if we want to keep advancing our projects.
Somedays, we will feel we can conquer the world.
And other days we’ll feel like good for nothing slobs.
This minimum set of actions is for those low days.
No matter how we feel, there is always something achievable and within our reach.
To stay consistent, we must take action even when feeling very low
A writer should write everyday, even if it’s only ten lines.
A voiceover must practice diction and train his voice.
There is a minimum set of actions you to do everyday to be successful.
The interesting thing that happens is this: when doing the minimum set of actions, we’ll almost always want to do more.
Having a minimum is having a plan and accountability.
Staying consistent requires repeated, predictable actions. Knowing which actions to take.
Even if it’s mechanical at first.
It gets you started.
The alternative? Not doing. But it makes you feel bad. It kills motivation and progress.
Stay motivated. Have a plan. Results compound with time.
Milestones For Staying Consistent
If the result you’re reaching for is too far, too hard to achieve, it’s hard to stay consistent.
You should have intermediary milestones.
How does it help you with staying consistent?
Achieving something faster keeps your motivation alive.
Getting results faster motivates you to keep going.
You should have milestones to:
- Know what to aim for next
- Keep your motivation alive
After the initial motivation wears off, we are responsible with keeping our goals alive.
We must tend to that fire.
If we don’t, we’ll just quit on our goals and burn out.
This is the path to regret and disappointment.
What your next achievable milestone, within your reach?
To stay consistent, help yourself.
Measuring Results
They say that what we measure, increases.
Well, not everything, but you know what I mean 😉
To stay consistent with your goals, tracking our actions and measuring results is a must.
And we must measure only what is under your power to control.
For instance, the size of an audience is not that much under our control.
Nor is the subscriber count. People come and go. They subscribe to countless sites.
But the number of articles we publish – that’s measurable.
The number of practice sessions – that’s measurable.
The number of consecutive days we’ve been writing – that’s measurable.
The number of reps at the gym – that’s measurable.
You can measure your output.
My intermediary goal for this site is to publish 60 articles.
Why 60? It’s measurable. It’s achievable.
It’s something I can do.
My initial milestone was publishing 30 articles.
I’ve reached it and I have initial results – searches in google and keywords.
The next step is to plug those results back into my creation process.
Not Giving Up Too Soon
Keep Going! That’s the most important thing.
If you are the type of person who loses interest if they don’t see results too soon, don’t give up!
Find a way to keep going. Even if it’s not satisfying initially.
Until the initial results show up, look for satisfaction elsewhere.
There’s satisfaction in the process.
There’s satisfaction in getting better at your skill of choice.
There’s satisfaction in seeing a project grow in time.
Losing interest and giving up too soon is the key to disappointment in yourself.
Protect yourself from that. Keep going. Find a way to do what.
It takes work, but find a way to get over that initial hurdle.
It’s definitely worth it!
Consistency is the key.
