August’s Word of the Month: Consistency

Ok, I know that Consistency isn’t a very sexy word…but the alternative is chaos. I believe consistency is key, especially for people in recovery; building a collection of actions and habits that contribute to your daily success. If we leave things to chance, our subconscious slips into the driver’s seat, and impulses and whims seem to sound like a good idea. Maybe I’ll workout today, or maybe I’ll have a margarita by the pool. So this month, I want to lean into the potential of living a with consistency. It’s an ideal time to focus on creating routine, as I return to work and the kids go back to school. Things get really busy, really fast and if I’m not intentional, I end up hopeless, hands in the air, harried and overwhelmed.

As I mentioned in my book review on The Magic of Momentum by Stephen Guise, long term wins start with building achievable behaviors and doing them with consistency. At the beginning of the school year, I am tempted to make ambitious, somewhat vague goals that quickly get filed into the “all or nothing” category in my mind. I want to be better. I want to stay on track. But goals such as, “I’m going to eat healthy,” and “I’m going to exercise every day, ” and “I’m going to have an amazing morning routine,” are well intentioned but never end up sticking. Life happens. We run out of groceries to pack a healthy lunch. We get sick when we return to classrooms full of germs. We are up late at sports practices or finishing school projects and end up setting the alarm to the last possible moment. And these are best-case scenarios. Let’s not think about the unexpected bombs that hit us at the most inconvenient times.

So, in a way, it is even prideful, or slightly stupid, to make big fat goals with unrealistic expectations attached. Sure we might be able to follow them at first, on an ideal day. But once we are derailed by life…it is so difficult to correct our course. The Yiddish expression, “when [wo]men make plans, God laughs,” comes to mind.

So out with plans and goals, in with small, consistent actions that I can stick to, even on my worst days. And after these achievable actions are repeated long enough, and consistently enough, our minds are programmed to see them as “business as usual.” The business of my day, therefore, is going to be made up of actions that I want to be permanent; behaviors that contain significance and identity.

First, I need to identify what is important. There are so many unimportant things to fill up a day (some of them necessary, yes) but I want to focus on the essential components living a rewarding life, one little piece at a time. I’ve given it some thought and these are the actions I consider most important:

• Strength Training: Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows how fed up I am with my body in this stage of my life. Never has it been more difficult to lose weight, or easier to hate my appearance. In Menopocalypse, Amanda Thebe explains the many benefits of staying strong as we get older. I had an ah-ha moment: I don’t have to accept weakness as I age. I can be strong in my late 40s and beyond. As Thebe writes, “don’t let the old lady in!” I am now starting week 3 of her 12-week weight training program, and am starting to shift how I see myself. It’s 20-30 minutes, three times a week of difficult but doable circuit training. The other days of the week I am focusing on staying active and achieving my 10,000 step goal. I’ve abandoned the scale, and beating myself over the head with it, and am focusing on strength and health.
• 30 Minute Morning: A dear friend of mine wrote that she was changing up her morning routine because it fell apart when her circumstances changed. It made me realize that my morning routine, that I swore by as a key component in my sobriety, had also fallen apart, or disappeared. So the behavior I need to stick to, re-instate, is waking up 30 minutes early, and going to sit in my quiet place with my journal and my Bible. I’m trusting that the rest will fall into place.
• Mindful Eating: This is a series of small choices, made consistently, that will move me in the right direction. My readers know I don’t do diets anymore. Instead I am consistently looking for ways to tweak my diet so that I am eating healthy at least 80 percent of the time. These small tweaks include: drinking lots of water (64-80 oz. per day), eating fruit or raw veggies with lunch instead of chips or crackers, including protein with every meal, eating whole wheat or whole grain bread, rice or pasta and sweet potatoes as complex carbs, reducing portion size at meals and eating slowly, paying attention to hunger cues, limiting snacking to Skinny Pop popcorn, fruit or nuts of I am actually hungry. If craving “dessert” I’ll have a small piece of chocolate, fudgesicle, or mini ice-cream sandwich (all 60-100 calories). One regular dessert splurge on the weekend: (Crumbl or frozen yogurt). This is more about a mindset shift; a way of eating that I can feel good about, like I am doing my best and that will pay off slowly if I practice it with consistency.

And these are the actions I am committing to practicing with consistency this month, and in the months that follow. I hope that you make the time to think about small, doable actions you can take in your life and incorporate into your day in a consistent manner. I’ll sign off with a few of my favorite quotes on consistency:

I pray to be like the ocean, with soft currents, maybe waves at times. More and more, I want the consistency rather than the highs and the lows.

Drew Barrymore

Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.

Dwayne Johnson

A consistent soul believes in destiny, a capricious one in chance.

Benjamin Disraeli