Consistency is an important factor in success, but it’s also the thing we tend to struggle with the most. In this post, you’ll learn how to be consistent with workouts (and anything else in your life)…without being an asshole to yourself.
You’ll learn why you’ve had such a hard time being consistent and get a framework to help you develop the skill of consistency through compassionate ownership (yes, it is a skill that you can learn!).
When it comes to consistency, we can be pretty hard on ourselves. Instead of being curious and exploring why we aren’t sticking to our plan, we get really mean and blame ourselves for not having enough willpower or discipline. We blame our age, our lifestyle, our hormones and anything else we can come up with. We think that a lack of consistency means there is something wrong with us.
So we try to guilt and shame and bully ourselves into submission in the hopes that if we’re disgusted enough with ourselves, we’ll be inspired to make a lasting change.
Somehow, we’ve figured out how to be ]really mean to ourselves while also getting really good at coming up with excuses and rationalizations for why nothing can change. It’s a ruthless combination.
An all-or-nothing mindset also gets in the way of consistency. When you set the expectation at perfection (which is super common), you just can’t maintain it. Something is going to go wrong (a sick kid, a flat tire, a busy week at work, etc.). And when you have not given yourself any wiggle room to be less than perfect, the whole thing comes crumbling down. You might think, “Well, if I can’t do it all then there’s no point in doing any of it.”
The Skill You Need To Develop Consistency
After working with hundreds of women and seeing the exact same patterns play out over and over and over again, I coined the term compassionate ownership.
The reason you feel so stuck so often is because you’re missing those two pieces of compassion for yourself and ownership of your results.
When we pull out the excuses, we’re trying to project our perceived failure onto the rest of the world so it isn’t our fault.
But inside, what you’re thinking is, “I failed again. I fell short…again.”
You deserve compassion, and you deserve to live up to your full potential.
And that means accepting yourself where you are, while also acknowledging it’s okay to want to change from here and doing it from a place of love. Compassion is going to make you a lot more successful than trying to hate yourself into change.
How To Be Consistent With Workouts
As you practice compassionate ownership, you learn how to be accountable to yourself, be intrinsically motivated, and be honest with yourself about what you need and what makes sense for you right now.
Step 1: Acknowledge that compassion and ownership exist on a spectrum. Sometimes we need a little more kindness and understanding. Sometimes we need tough love, but there should always be a combination of the two.
Step 2: Cultivate the habit of pausing to think and respond to what is happening rather than reacting impulsively. This skill will serve you in so many areas of your life, far beyond workouts and weight loss. Take a moment to get clear about why you’re feeling the way you are and how you want to approach the situation.
Where do you want to go from here? What do you need more of right now, compassion or ownership?
Step 3: Set realistic goals. You are an imperfect human, and even if you manage to have a “perfect” week, it’s not going to last. That’s just reality. Be a little conservative with your weekly goals and plan. Look at the week ahead and see what is reasonable to expect from yourself.
When you set the bar too high, there’s always this little voice in the back of your mind offering you doubt and telling you that you can’t do it. It’s a lot easier to take ownership when you believe that you can accomplish your goals and have some wins under your belt.
Step 4: Choose to respond to the inevitable slip-ups with compassion. No single slip-up is monumental. What makes a big deal is how you respond to it afterwards.
You can tell yourself that you are a worthless POS, that you always do this, that you’re out of control, you don’t have willpower and there’s nothing you can do about it (which leads to a pretty dark doom spiral).
OR you can respond to yourself the way you would talk to another person in your life, like your daughter or a friend. This might sound like, you’re a human, there’s nothing wrong with you, it’s not a big deal.
One slip-up does not have to mean anything about your success or what’s going to happen in the future.
Step 5: Choose what you make your slip-ups mean. Notice that I’m using the term “slip-up” rather than “failure”. Look at them as lessons and opportunities that you learn from and take ownership over.
We can’t keep letting ourselves get caught off guard by things we know are happening on a consistent basis. If you want a different outcome, you need to see and shift the patterns in your behavior.
It isn’t a one-and-done. You’ll have a slip-up or notice a pattern and brainstorm solutions. Make an adjustment and see how it goes. Then, continue going through this process of reflection, problem-solving and making adjustments along the way.
This is the key to breaking free from living in between extremes. This is how to be consistent with workouts without being an asshole to yourself.
Commit to the process, and you’ll get better results more consistently by giving yourself the perfect combination of compassion and ownership as you need it.
Inside the Gone For Good coaching program, you’ll learn and practice the skill of compassionate ownership alongside the tools and habits that lead to lasting weight loss. Learn more at www.estheravant.com/coaching.
