Do you ever feel like you just want things to happen right away? You don’t want to wait, you don’t want to work for it, you just want it to magically happen.

I felt this way when I was transferring my blog over from Blogger to WordPress. I didn’t want to take the time to learn the ins and outs of a new system. I still don’t want to have to go through every post to clean up the residue left over from the transfer. I would much rather get back to writing and back to the routine I had before, but life doesn’t work that way.

 

In the same way, taking care of our home, raising and educating our children, advancing our business, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle won’t just happen on their own.

We’d like to think our children will grow up to be responsible, respectful and hard working adults without our careful and consistent parenting, or that we’ll just naturally be healthy and thin without working out and eating healthy food.

While we’d like to think we can just passively go through life and all of these things will happen without any effort on our part, we know very well that we would be foolish to float through life like that yet that’s exactly what we do when we allow busyness and distractions crowd out our ability to be intentional.

Deep down we know that we have to adjust our thinking and our actions in order to get the results that we desire; we’ll have to be disciplined, make a plan and somehow be consistent with implementing that plan, but it’s just so hard.

It’s hard to be on a schedule. It’s hard to choose to do the right thing. It’s hard to have the willpower not to eat a whole container of raw cookie dough and choose raw veggies instead. It is so hard to exercise every day, much less three times a week.

[bctt tweet=”Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, yet that’s how we live each day.” username=”aboundinginhope”]

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, yet that’s how we live each day.

January is typically the month of new beginnings. It’s the month when we write a list of New Year’s resolutions; we tell ourselves “this is the year I am going to stick with it”, and with great excitement and determination we begin to implement them.

But it’s around this time of the very same month, mid-January when our list of resolutions goes missing. More than likely, it’s mixed under a pile of bills or tossed in with the junk mail.  The truth is we may not even know what happened to it.

The daily exercise routine that began on January 1st has now become a burden that weighs on us and makes us feel guilty every time we look at our sneakers.

The choice to eat healthily has been postponed, at least until this next project is done, or the kid’s stop demanding so much, or maybe “just today” turns into weeks and then months.

It truly does take consistency to make any good thing last. It takes work and many times, it’s hard work.

How in the world do we stay consistent? How do we choose each and every day to work hard towards the goals we know we should? How do we work towards our dreams so that they don’t get pushed down and die out?

While some things in life are easy for me to stay consistent with, other things are very difficult. I’d like to pursue this idea a bit more in future posts. Let’s explore ways we can be more consistent in life because consistency leads to progress and accomplishment.

In the meantime, what are some ways you have disciplined yourself in order to stay consistent with what you want to accomplish in life? Leave a comment below, I’d love to hear from you and next time I’ll share my some of my struggles and some of the ways I stay consistent.