The Power of Consistency: Small Steps That Change Everything
The ability to be consistent is perhaps one of the most undervalued forces available to you for personal change; it shows how taking the smallest actions repeatedly can provide dramatic changes in your life across time. When you learn how consistency works, it can change your health, profession, relationships, and overall success in ways that great spurts of effort might never deliver.
In our culture of quick fixes and instant gratification, a vast number of people ignore the value of consistency in exchange for effort that gives the appearance of rapid change but rarely sustains change. There is scientific evidence that consistency is a necessity of significant goal attainment through the extraordinary effect that small actions have over time when performed consistently.
Consistency works through the compounding of the small action performed over a long enough period of time to create momentum, and then, at some point, by becoming a habit becomes an automatic action. Present-day psychology is aware of the fact that consistency makes use of neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to build new neural pathways through repetition.
The power of an individual action is not so much in the size of the action, but merely that it is acting consistently. Merely taking a small action every day for a year would yield much more of an impact than trying to make a heroic effort during different times of the year.
Neuroscience shows that consistency creates lasting changes in the brain that enable future progress. Studies demonstrate that consistent repetition strengthens neural pathways, while inconsistent attempts leave neural connections weak.
Research on habit formation suggests that consistency is the defining factor for whether or not the behavior becomes automatic. Studies show that performing an action at the same time every day greatly increases the probability of creating a habit.
Why Small Steps Are Better Than Big Jumps
Small, consistent actions are better than large, infrequent actions for the following reasons:
Sustainability – Small steps are easy to incorporate into everyday life and are manageable
Building momentum – Small successes generate energy to do the next action
Reduced resistance – Tiny actions bypass mental resistance
Exponential growth – Small improvements create exponential returns over time
Compounding Effect of Daily Actions
The compounding effect is another way of explaining how small actions over time create exponential benefits. This principle occurs in every area of life, from finances to health and fitness to the development of skills.
There is mathematical proof of the transformational nature of consistency. Improvement by only 1% every day results in 37 times better in one year. Reading 10 pages a day amounts to 12–18 books a year. Exercising 20 minutes a day gives you 121 hours of exercise in a year as well.
The process of developing skills generally takes a familiar route, where practicing something every day will lead to expertise that cannot be experienced through occasional practice. Research indicates that practicing for 30 minutes every day will outperform 3 hours in a weekly session. Health changes are achieved by making small, persistent choices rather than big, short-lived improvements. Studies have shown that small daily progress will lead to tangible and sustainable benefits.
Common barriers to consistency
There are several psychological barriers that are common and may get in the way of consistency:
All-or-nothing thinking makes people quit after minor setbacks. If someone misses one day, they feel it is a failure and quit altogether.
Lack of immediate results leads to quitting once no drastic changes take place. Most people quit before a consistent pattern of behavior creates visual results.
Relying on motivation for consistency does not lead to consistency. Motivation is a natural ebb and flow, and waiting until motivation strikes to act will lead to sporadic behavior and performance.
Signs you need to strengthen your consistency:
Frequent restarts – You are starting over or beginning again instead of a continuum of slight progress.
Accumulation of excuses – Finding reasons to skip workout sessions instead of thinking of ways to continue to exercise.
Focus on results rather than the process – Your mindset is only on results rather than the steps to getting there.
Dependence on energy – You only perform an activity if you feel energized to do so.
Effective Techniques for Developing Consistency
Building strong consistency requires strategies that address both psychological and practical aspects.
Start embarrassingly small by cutting down the activity to a mini-action that is small enough to feel stupid doing. It will decrease your resistance and generate consistency-building momentum. Want to exercise? Start with one pushup today.
Anchor to current habits by tying your new action to an already established habit. This is an actual strategy to magnify consistency, especially when you say out loud or think, “After I [current habit], I will [new action].”
Reduce friction by changing your environment to stimulate consistent action. Lay out your workout clothes the night before. Put books in a conspicuous and your environment.
Track your streak. Just cross off each day when you complete your action! Researchers have concluded that after having a streak, once you have maintained it, you value your continued streak more than valued than any subjective value before (i.e., the range of value of your action-streak is valued far more than any one day).
The Two-Day Rule
In addition to practical strategies for building consistency, there is a powerful principle of consistency that is a preventive measure for a temporary state of delinquency:
Never miss two days. It is OK to miss (don’t beat yourself up if you miss) one day, but never the next consecutive day.
Make sure to come back immediately after breaking your chain.
When you make the choice to come back to it, just do it. Don’t attach any inner guilt or “beating myself up,” and just take the action again. The trend in reward keeps going.
Establishing Structures That Encourage Consistency
Establishing systems that encourage consistent behavior tremendously increases the probability of success in the future.
Environmental design sets up your environment to make consistent behaviors easier. You can remove the temptation or isolate the behavior in a different space or set it up in such a way that it is automated.
Time-blocking is assigning specific times for consistent behaviors and treating them as non-negotiable appointments. Increasing consistency with timing naturally increases the automaticity of these behaviors.
Accountability Systems, which employ social pressure and support from others. You can openly share your goals, those you want to be your accountability partner, or a group that has a similar target, are all of these are accountability systems.
In measuring progress, you will be able to raise your self-awareness in a simple fashion. Tracking the consistency, or the way you track, gives you tangible evidence for what you are accomplishing.
The Psychological Benefits of Consistency
In addition to achieving goals, consistent behavior creates an intense psychological benefit, which is an enhancement of overall well-being.
Self-efficacy, through showing that you can maintain your commitments regardless of the situation, will build overall confidence that you can carry over to other areas of your life.
Identity associated with consistent behavior can be established with such a commitment. You will be someone who exercises on a daily basis instead of someone who is attempting to become in shape.
Reduction of anxiety is established by knowing that you are making progress time and again through timely actions directed at your goals.
Building resilience / proving that you can move through difficulty
Building patience/learning to trust the process
Building discipline / building your general capacity to self-regulate
The true power of consistency exists in every area of our lives.
The rise in your career–over time–is accelerated by small, daily growth in skills and relationships. Learning consistently, in your own way, is ultimately more effective than an occasional intensive week of learning.
Transformation in your health occurs by being consistent with physical exercise and nutritional choices and NOT by serious, temporary changes.
Financial security and wealth are produced by setting aside, saving, and investing small amounts regularly. The wealth generated from a consistent small amount over time far outpaces an occasional larger investment.
The strengthening of your relationships comes from engaging in small acts of kindness and communication daily.
Establishing your Consistency Practice
Identify 2-3 areas – maximum – where being consistent would produce significant value. Reflect on the most impactful areas where being consistent would result in significant change.
Determine the absolute minimum action consistently taken; define what it is that represents the smallest possible action for that habit.
Create reminders to engage in action consistently. Attach the desired behavior to existing consistent behavior. Making the new behavior feel automatic is desirable because the mind and body function more effectively in habits without distractions.
Prepare your environment by removing barriers to the desired goal and implementing structures to facilitate action towards your goal.
The Neurology of Habit Change
Your brain is a machine for efficiency and is always trying to minimize cognitive effort of copying the same habits, so the brain can use that cognitive energy for something new and challenging. Your brain will begin to record the action as an automatic activity when a specific action is repeated often enough. Your basal ganglia, the brain region responsible for habit formation, executes the habit, transitioning the action from prefrontal cortex effort into unconscious automatic activity that requires less cognitive resources than a few weeks earlier. Brain imaging studies that investigate behavior have established that habitual behavior displays a different neural signature than behavior directed by deliberative control. After approximately 66-day days of consistent repetition, average behavior becomes automatic, and the original action feels like it requires less than half of the cognitive effort. This explains why habits that are established feel easy to engage in compared to behaviors that are new, demanding a significant amount of willpower for execution.
What seems to matter in executing the behavior is not always about the effort, but the consistency of the trigger and the response pattern, regardless of how complex or how long the behavior is. This is because the brain is always predicting, and when there is a similar contextual cue in the environment preceding the behavior in a routine way, the neurological associations become much stronger. This is why getting into a routine of morning habits is an automatic behavior, while a behavior initiated on a sporadic basis does not advance to habitual behavior.
To be aware of the neurological, not psychological, dimension of adapting a new behavior, informs how you think about behavior change.
The hidden expense of inconsistency.
Consistency builds momentum while inconsistency often creates a toxic cycle that stretches beyond the fact that you aren’t moving toward your stated goals. Each time you mismanage a commitment to yourself, you start training your brain to invalidate your future intentions and to degrade your self-trust, leading future attempts at consistency more and more complicated.
This is what psychological research refers to as ego depletion-increasing. Each time you undermine a commitment, your brain starts categorizing your intention as unreliable information. Eventually, it becomes cyclical. As your self-efficacy diminishes, so does your motivation and following effect behavior, thus reinforcing the reality that you cannot stick to something.
Emotionally, this toll accumulates as persistent low-grade guilt, inadequacy, and cognitive fatigue with respect to even simple choices. Rather than acting on an intention with automaticity, you use up mental energy just deciding whether to act or not, thus subverting the willpower that is needed for painstakingly painful decisions.
Worse than that, though, your inconsistency prevents you from being able to accurately evaluate the coherence of something that actually works for your intentions. When you act inconsistently, you lack the necessary efficacy to distinguish between whether the original intention was not effective or whether you simply did not implement the activity with sufficient accuracy.
Conclusion: The Transformational Capacity of Daily Commitment
The capacity for transformation through consistency has proven itself to be the strongest ally in initiating positive change in life. Small steps with reliability, taken over time, create change that you’ll swear is miraculous.
There is scientific literature that suggests that consistency is much more important than intensity and that small actions carried out regularly make lasting change, for the most part. The trick is to get it started by making it small enough that it doesn’t feel too difficult to do consistently.
Consistency requires patience, that’s for sure, but the benefits are more than enough to justify the commitment to consistency. Everything in life pays dividends to the cumulative effects of small, consistent actions over time.
It doesn’t matter if you’re great at something or if you’re terrible at it—if you’re consistent at it, that’s what matters. Each day you set the bar and show up for yourself and practice your small step, you are creating momentum toward the life you want to live.
