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The Power of Consistency: Achieving your Goals Beyond Motivation

Get ready to amp up your goals with the ultimate weapon – consistency! In a world where discipline triumphs, discover the key to sustained success. Dive deep into seven tactics to sidestep burnout and stay steadfast in your goals.

Have you ever heard the famous saying: “You will never always be motivated, so you must learn to be disciplined”? The reason why many people frame it and put it on their walls or pin it to their Pinterest boards is that it perfectly sums up how we’re wired as humans.

 

Researchers from MIT have found that goals with delayed rewards are much harder to stay consistent with than those with quick wins. When we put a lot of effort into ditching our harmful habits or into building good ones but can’t see results quickly, our brains might tell us to stop.

 

While you need motivation to get started, it will eventually fade. And if you solely rely on it, you’ll experience lots of ups and downs. Unless you fancy a roller coaster ride, it’s best to focus on maintaining consistency. It will help you stay on the path towards success even if you don’t entirely feel like working towards your goals.

 

One of the best ways to stay consistent is to know how to recognize and address burnout.


What is Burnout?

Have you ever experienced overwhelming, physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion? That’s what burnout feels like. It kills your desire to do anything, even the things that you normally enjoy. It’s caused by continuous stress and can lead to reduced motivation and lower energy levels. You might feel hopeless, helpless, and even resentful. Being in such a state can wreak havoc on your ambitions.


Why is Consistency so Important When Building New Habits and Establishing Goals?

Staying consistent is your only ally when your initial motivation or excitement starts fading or when laziness creeps in. Plus, it has the power to rewire your brain!

Not so long ago, there was a common belief that humans can’t change their habits and behaviour past a certain age. But that was before the world of neuroscience proved the existence of neuroplasticity, i.e., the ability to change our habits and convictions at any moment in life.


There are two types of neuroplasticity – “experience-dependent”, which is about doing the same things and cultivating your habits on autopilot. These can be good things you’ve picked up throughout your life, like waking up in the morning, putting your trainers on, and heading out for a run. Or, it can be harmful behaviour, like waking up and, well, lighting a cigarette right after getting out of bed.

Then, there’s “self-directed neuroplasticity”, which is all about doing something deliberately over and over again and observing how being consistent about it makes you feel. These can be subtle changes, like noticing that ever since you’ve started eating more vegetables your skin has become radiant. This self-reflection gives you the motivational boost to keep going and avoid burnout.

Also, here’s the good news – if you keep at your new practices long enough, there’s a chance you’ll start doing them on autopilot, too!

 

You’re surely wondering – what does ‘long enough’ mean? Studies say that it can take anywhere between three to four and a half months. When you think of how these new habits have the power to stay with you for a lifetime, it doesn’t feel that long.

 

So, stay consistent and don’t let your old ways ruin all the progress you’ve made – once your new neural pathways set in, they’ll become much more of a ‘default’ behaviour.


7 Tactics to Avoid Burnout and Maintain Consistenty with Achieving your Goals

Here are some of the things you can do to find the motivation to progress in your new goals:


1.   Break bad habits first

Some of your existing behaviours can undermine your newly-found goals. For example, if you want to start falling asleep at 10:30 PM, then watching TV until 9:45 PM is probably a bad idea since you expose yourself to a lot of blue light. A great tactic to stay away from your harmful behaviours, especially at the beginning of your journey, is running a journal or using post-it notes. You could write in your notebook every day before going to sleep to reflect on your habit-building and habit-breaking journey. Or, you could even stick a post-in near your TV to remind you why you’ve decided to avoid screen time late in the evening.

2.   Take regular breaks to recharge

Burnout happens because we don’t know how much effort and energy we have to put in to progress quickly and achieve peak performance. We often assume that if we work harder than others we will reach our goals faster. While this might work short term, eventually it will lead to exhaustion. That’s why it’s so important to find time to recharge regularly to give our brains and bodies a few moments of rest.

It’s key to take breaks at the right time. If you’re most energetic in the morning, then that’s when you should work towards hitting your goals. Irrespective of whether it’s career progression or getting more muscle mass, tackle your most challenging tasks first when you’re the most productive. When your energy levels start to go down, take a breather – go for a walk or lie down and listen to some relaxing music.

3.   Talk to other people

When we’re burnt out, every little task we have to do seems like a massive challenge, and it’s hard to find the energy and motivation to deal with it. But, believe it or not, we have a lot more control over stress than we think. Sometimes all it takes to feel better is to talk to our friends or family. Social interactions are the best remedy for stress relief. Having a face-to-face conversation with someone whom we trust and who is a good listener will quickly calm down our nervous system.

How so? Social support has a positive impact on balancing hormones. It increases oxytocin levels, which decreases anxiety and activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which has a relaxing effect on us.

Bear in mind that the person you talk to doesn’t have to find a solution to your problems, all they have to do is listen to you empathetically, without judgement.

4.   Have an accountability partner

If you want to stay consistent, then it’s worth finding an accountability partner. Someone who will hold you responsible and encourage you towards hitting your goals. Whenever you lose motivation, they might give you a little pep talk to bring you back on the right track. It has to be someone whom you trust and who you won’t get offended by when they tell you off for not trying hard enough.

They might call you once a week to ask how you’re doing. Knowing that you’ll have to report on your progress might keep you more motivated to stay consistent and avoid procrastination.

5.   Turn your goal into a habit

If you manage to turn your goal into a habit, you’ll have a higher chance of maintaining consistency, because you’ll approach it differently. A habit is something we do without even thinking about it. Here is how to do it:

●     Write down your goal. It will be easier for you to visualise it and, ultimately, to achieve it.

●     Figure out the steps you have to take to reach your goal – it’s OK if there are a few, write them down. For example, if you wanted to boost your strength you might have to go to a gym to lift weights, have the right diet, etc. These will be your habits.

●     Then you’ll need to understand how often you’ll have to perform each habit to achieve your desired result, for example, hitting the gym 3-4 times a week.

●     Initially focus on one habit for 30 days and ignore the remaining ones.

●     If there are a few habits that you’ll have to develop, start on the second one after a month. Concentrate on one habit at a time, until it’s fully established.

●     After you develop all the key habits, your goal will be on autopilot.

6.   Stay well nourished

Eating well can help you boost your motivation levels and help avoid burnout even when your goals have nothing to do with physical exercises. Your brain needs nutrients and energy to keep building new neural connections and redirect your attention to the behaviours that matter to you the most.

Usually, just to maintain its “standard” operations, your brain will use up around 20% of your total daily calorie intake. When you’re challenging yourself with learning new skills or practising the willpower to stay away from harmful behaviours, it might need even more nutrients to adjust to the new circumstances.

If you follow a monotonous diet, then your brain won’t have the fuel to support your ambitions. When you constantly struggle with a lack of energy, it will eventually lead to burnout. So, pay extra attention to what you eat whenever you’re challenging yourself with a new goal.

7.   Don’t punish yourself for messing up occasionally

Lastly, don’t beat yourself up if you hit a rough patch here or there. We all have better and worse days, so if you mess up occasionally, remember that there’s always tomorrow! There is a popular ‘80-20 rule’, which means that if you stay consistent 80% of the time, then you’ve got nothing to worry about. Also, if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed, consider taking smaller steps to avoid burnout. For example, if you can’t dedicate 30 minutes to your goal every day, perhaps 15 minutes will be more realistic? Prioritise consistency over drowning in too much ambition.


Staying consistent is key when you lose motivation

Excitement always wears off; people who succeed “trust the process”, i.e., they’re consistent and disciplined in their goals. A person who is incredibly smart, but lacks discipline, will lose to a person who might be less capable but is consistent with their efforts. 

What’s very motivating when you set a new goal is that it won’t always feel so challenging to keep up. Remember that it takes only about 3 to 4 months to turn a new habit into a routine, and these are much easier to keep up with and can last you a lifetime.

We can implement new habits regardless of our age since our brains are more flexible than we previously thought. And that’s great news! So, good luck in achieving your goals, whatever they might be.


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