How to Stay Consistent and Achieve Your Goals

Whether you like it or not, consistency is a necessary part of success.

Social media has brainwashed us into believing that you can do little work, find a magic pill and boom success. Unfortunately, success doesn’t happen that way.

And I learned this the hard way.

3 years ago when I was building my first business – a social media marketing agency – I fell into the trap of believing that I could reach my revenue goal in a month or so.

I had two coaches who had been in the game for a while and other online experts and coaches I was learning from.

They or students of theirs had achieved their goals within a month or so, so I believed it was possible for me too.

I believe that if I was consistent for ‘enough’ time, it would happen.

One of my key tasks in growing my agency was outreach.

The recommendation was to send at least 10 cold emails a day on weekdays.

Seemed simple enough, right?

Well, I was in for a big surprise.

Week 1 was okay.

I had spent week 0 collecting different business owner’s information, so all I had to do was send out the emails.

I managed to send 50 emails and their follow-ups and I was proud of that.

I enjoyed myself that weekend, expecting to find calls waiting for me Monday morning.

So when Monday morning came and there were 0 calls in my calendar, I was disappointed.

But again, it was just the first week and I just needed to be consistent for a little longer.

Week 2 went well but I started noticing that I was getting frustrated.

I was frustrated because I wasn’t seeing any returns and I was even more frustrated because I was using the script my mentors gave me.

But I had no results.

By weeks 5 and 6, I couldn’t reach my daily outreach target.

I was feeling resistance towards sending out the emails.

Between balancing that and university work, emails were the last thing I wanted to do, which led to me beating myself up a lot for not doing the work.

By the end of week 8, I was burnt out and ready to throw the towel in.

I went onto a group coaching call the following week and told my mentors what happened.

And that’s when they told me,

“Every person who has ever become an ‘overnight success’ did so, because they were consistent for 10 years or more.”

They reminded me that this was my first time doing anything like this.

So it made sense that the resistance came up, the burnout and that I essentially bit off more than I could chew.

Though, I didn’t achieve my target in emails sent out, let alone my revenue goal, the experience wasn’t a waste.

It was a learning experience that stretched my capacity and taught me to understand how consistency works.

Consistency isn’t a Quick Fix; It’s A Commitment

Consistency isn’t a magic pill that’s going to change your life.

And it doesn’t work overnight.

It’s a commitment.

A commitment to keep showing up until the result you want happens. 

You won’t know how long it’s gonna take for it to happen, so you have to show up with enthusiasm every day.

It’s important to have a clear end goal or vision, because without it’s easy to lose sight of your efforts when you don’t see immediate results.

Start Small, Avoid The Burnout

Instead of going from 0-100 and experiencing resistance or burnout, start small. Like really small.

When you’re working on personal growth and goals, you can set the targets you need to reach. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are in positions you want to be in who will give you a target recommendation.

But they might be telling you their upper limit.

They’ve trained up to that limit. You’re just getting started.

Make your target so easy that you can’t fail. When you make it this easy, you’re building the habit of showing up.

When you master the habit of showing up, consistency becomes automatic and effortless.

And over time, you can increase the reps, workload or time of your target.

This incremental increase prevents you from beating yourself up, building resistance towards the task, burning out and giving up.

Instead, you want to grow and expand your comfort zone and work capacity in a sustainable way.

Stretch Your Time Horizon

The biggest change I had to make to improve my consistency was to change my time horizon.

Instead of trying to get there as soon as possible, I had to extend it.

This was hard because I wanted my goals the moment I set them. Or as soon as possible.

But I had to remember that success doesn’t happen overnight.

The success that I saw my mentors and others like them achieve happened suddenly to me, but took months and years for them.

They had so much trial and error in other areas of their lives that made it ‘easier and faster’ for them to succeed in the chapter of their lives I was watching.

They had to show up again and again until they built up momentum.

Even though they weren’t seeing results for a while, because they had a vision and plan in place.

They were able to stay consistent and in the faith that their success would happen.

So I did the same.

I decided to extend my time horizon to 3-month intervals.

I did this for 2 reasons:

1. To create a time gap that wasn’t too short that I’d feel pressured and that wasn’t too long, that I’d be relaxed and not take action.

3 months was a sweet spot that allowed me to be in that space where I was taking action from a place of focus and trust.

And by doing it this way, I was allowing enough momentum to build as I took action daily.

2. Reviews and accountability

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result” – Albert Einstein.

It’s easy to fall into the trap that if you do the same thing over and over, you should expect results. But this is a very passive approach to making progress.

People who make remarkable progress are people who test, learn, reiterate and test again.

They create a feedback loop that shows them what’s working and what isn’t working. This way they can double down on the things that are working and make greater progress.

At the end of a 3-month interval, I would review all my efforts and see what was working and what wasn’t. Then I could double down on what worked and leave out what wasn’t.

It also acted as a way for me to celebrate myself and avoid burnout.

Every 30 days, I would celebrate my efforts and what I’ve done.

If you don’t celebrate your wins along the way, it’s easier to lose motivation and sight of what you’re working towards.

And experience burnout because you’re constantly forcing and pushing yourself without taking adequate breaks to recharge.

It’s like sportsplayers.

They don’t only celebrate when they win the game or the championship.

They celebrate every goal and that keeps them going and motivated to get the next goal.

For example, the new Avatar: The Last Airbender Series is coming out on Netflix on the 22nd of February.

I haven’t done a ‘big’ celebration for January, because I’m pushing until the 22nd and using that as my celebration.

I’m making it a whole thing that I can reward myself with for all the work I’ve put in since the beginning of 2024.

Being consistent is like growing a plant: when you plant a tree, you water it with the belief that it’s going to sprout.

You don’t dig it up each day to see if it’s growing, you don’t stop watering it because it’s not growing fast enough.

You keep doing what you need to do because you know it’s inevitable.

So like a plant, you need the same approach towards your goals.

You keep taking action and showing up because you know your goal will happen. But you also know that as you show up each day, you’re getting better.

And to avoid the burnout that can come with being consistent:

• Start small and build over time as you increase your work capacity.

• Work with a time horizon that doesn’t put you under too much pressure but that also doesn’t make you too relaxed.

• Create intervals where you celebrate and reward your efforts as well as review your progress to double down on what’s working.

– Shana.