Consistency
You've always been consistent.
I used to think too much (still do) and put off so many things because I didn't start early in the morning on a day, and I "forgot" I was going to start on said day. If everything did not go as I expected the night before for me to get up early, or if work/life was too hard for the day, I would simply wait for the next day to come to begin fresh.
Habits that I have not consciously chosen to change have been more of a bane to my existence and a curse than the blessing they could be in my life. Blame and shame hang around me like flies, all I could hear were their buzzes, which only gave me more of the feeling resulting in unnecessary anxiety. When I was in school, I always wanted to play volleyball. I didn't get to play in high school or before then because there was no team at my school for me to even sign up for. But when I got to college, I ended up joining the junior varsity team. My school was so small I ended up always practicing with the girls in the varsity team. You know what that meant? Changing habits I had in order to be more physically able to practice with them, let alone play with them.
That decision to join the team brought me to a higher bar of physical excellence that I had never driven myself to strive for alone. I was clearly around people who had years of skill and mastery. To put it simply, they were so much better than me, but that made me strive to be on another level because of accountability.
I got to attend most of the practices and train like a collegiate athlete. Now that I really think about it, I am grateful to the coach because it was something that allowed me to be better and push myself not only physically but mentally. It was hard to be held to a standard I had never been held to before. I played for two years; we trained early in the morning, I was attending architecture classes, working multiple jobs at a time to support myself through school. When I think about who I became during those years playing and who I am now, I realize how much I have let myself downplay my own capabilities.
All that I do and am are the things I have accomplished, but that's been put on the back burner. Recently, I have found myself evaluating who I have been, what and who is around me, to cultivate my environment to promote who I am working on becoming rather than letting myself coast and drift into a person that is up to par with my potential based on the opportunity I have now in this present moment.
In order to build and change my unhealthy consistent habits, I realized that I need to do three things:
Identify what my priorities are and see which habits are aligned and which are not aligned with the person I am working to become.
Setting parameters and expectations. This is why most people have jobs and respect them but do not strive to do anything else with their lives and live uncomfortably content.
2. Work on one habit at a time and not everything all at once.
This is coming from someone who tries to change their whole life at once. Yet this creates overwhelming feelings and subconscious resistance that simply keeps you in a cycle and on a road to getting nowhere.
Subtract slowly and add gradually.
3. Track and reward yourself for what you are doing.
Let's face it, we all really want instant gratification nowadays. We can do the bare minimum and think we deserve a whole vacation for two weeks. From experience, when you reward yourself for the smallest of things with big rewards, they tend to lose a little of their value in how you appreciate them.
I am not saying not to reward yourself for small things, but look at how you're weighing what you are doing versus what you are rewarding yourself with. Instead of booking that two-week vacation because you sent that one email, maybe reward yourself with a smaller activity on the weekend as a start. This is an example; this applies to different things, and everyone weighs differently. But if we started doing this, imagine how far we'd be on our goals without the stop and go.
Habits are the actions we perform consciously and subconsciously every day.
The goal is to really grow. If you want to be consistent in something, you also need to be accountable to yourself and to others.
Let's get our priorities straight and be better together by being consistent.
