Are you consistent with your goals? Consistency can be a difficult concept for some because it involves time and commitment. Successful people didn’t wake up to be successful in one go. Brian Covey inspires us to start small and make the changes we need to make in order to commit to a goal. He says that the main thing about being consistent with your goals is to build successful habits that are aligned with what you wish to achieve. Be ready to make those small shifts in your life and learn to be consistent with your goals.
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The Small Shifts You Need To Make To Be Consistent With Your Goals
These are the Conversations with Covey that I want to share with you. I’m learning lessons just like all of you. There are probably a lot of things that have gone well and things that haven’t gone well for us. I’m celebrating our daughter’s birthday and I want to make sure that I share some of the things that I have taken away but also tie them into our amazing, our firstborn. I’m going to tie in a couple of things that have resonated with me, conversations I have had with other people. I’m sure you have had some of the same and you end up leaving those conversations. They get you to think in a constant that has been coming up. It’s this word, consistency, that has come up for me. You can’t avoid it.
There are few things that have resonated with me as I’m talking to people. In our industry, the market has changed. For most people, 2021 has changed from 2020. What I continue to hear and see not only myself but in others is, “How consistent are you with your goals?” Let’s take working out. It’s an easy one. I had a friend who reached out and he was like, “I need help with this.” I will give you a tip that I have been using as I have been going through this recovery post-surgery and all that. I believe there are some gaps in consistency that exists in our life now that if we were to be, number one, aware of them, number two address them, and then number three, recognize those patterns. When they come up and we start to lack consistency and how we respond in those moments, our life could absolutely change.
I’m going to share this quote with you that I pulled up from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, which is awesome. It says, “Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.” Think about that. Let’s unpack that. For many of us, we want to hit the home run, the whole stadium cheering for us. Maybe even a grand slam. We are just trying to knock it out of the park. It’s not how life works for many people. Hitting the lottery, that home run, that’s not something that you repeat every day. If you look at that, that’s something that many of us are looking for. It’s that shortcut to success that we believe exists because we see people on social media tell us that that’s possible of how they’ve got there. When the reality is we all know behind the scenes the hard work, effort, time, doing things when you don’t feel like it, that’s what has led to their success.
It’s the hard work, effort, time, and doing things when you don't feel like they lead to success. Click To TweetLet me give you some insights into this and talk about working out. One thing that I have added to my routine was the WHOOP. There are some things that I recognize with having surgery and I had some friends who were using it that I needed to start tracking things that I was not tracking before. What that has led for me is a bit of accountability. It’s a way for me to track my progress every day to know where I am not only with my sleep but my heart rate, activity and all the things that I’m doing in many other areas. It also allowed me to join a community. You can join different groups and things there that provide additional accountability. This takes us back to this whole, “I believe that power and association and who we are around matters.” The people who I’m going to surround myself with and the communities I’m going to surround myself with are other fit people doing things that I want to compare myself to. I’m not comparing myself to average or people who are not working out or not even using it. How many people probably bought something for their fitness goals and didn’t use it?
The same is true in our financial goals. Working in the mortgage space, I deal with people all the time. Something that has come up is the consistency of people who can make money but not save and invest money over the long run. They wonder why consistently they don’t have enough money to go do certain things they want to do or consistently they can make money but they look and go, “I don’t have a retirement plan or things built up there.” They are not consistent in the small things. When we go back and look at the actual fundamentals of where we are, it could be you are wanting to pay your house off sooner. Something consistent you could do is add a little bit extra one payment a year and you pay the house off sooner, typically between 8 and 10 years. You can look at the math and run that amortization. It’s the little things that we start to add that will be the game-changers but they have to be consistent as we are there.
I will give you an example in my life that I have been doing. I wasn’t walking a lot before because I was working out and doing things. I have started to add in one extra workout a day, which for me is a walk. It’s typically a 30-minute walk where I can get out, clear my head and do those things. With that consistency, you can start to track and you will see results from it. I would guarantee you this. If you look at people in your life who are successful, you will see a pattern of successful habits that are consistently repeated throughout days, weeks and months. What the challenge would be for you is to go back and audit your time and look at where you have spent time. If you were to pull up your schedule, which I’m a firm believer in that, I will cover that on a different blog.
If you were to look at where you spent your time, is it consistent? If someone were to look at it, can they tell what your priorities were? That’s where things would show up regularly. Would they know what you valued? I believe where you spend your time, energy, efforts, money, relationships, finance, health and all of the things, we are learning and growing together. The challenge as you read this message, what I want you to take away is, as you look back, what are the changes that you need to make that aren’t consistent but you are doing a little bit of them? Is it reading a book? Is it putting away money and saving? Is it investing in your retirement? Is it expanding your real estate portfolio? Is it that extra 30 minutes working out? Is it drinking more water? It’s all these things. Are you paying attention to your mental health that’s there?
Consistent Goals: As you start to get disciplined in one area, watch how that will spread into other areas of your life, and you will continue to learn and grow.
These are the small shifts we make in our life that start to cumulatively add up. That is where you will find greatness on the other side. As The Rock was sharing here, we are not pursuing greatness without doing the fundamental steps along the way. People don’t get to a level that we look at that they are unstoppable. We look at them and say, “They are the GOAT. They have achieved a level of greatness in any area of their life without going through the steps.” I believe this is, “The Brian of now needs to continually evolve and grow to be the Brian that I need to be as a husband, a dad, leading my team, growing myself personally, being the person in my community and my markets that I need to be years from now.” I have shared this story. When our team was small of 20, 30 people and as we grow and we are a team very soon of 300 people, that leadership lid needs to be blown off. That will be something that we are all pursuing our potential and what is there.
Consistency is the theme. I would encourage you to look back in areas in your life where that is. Share those with me so we can learn and grow together. I’m giving you a few areas of my life that I’m leveling up that I need to continue to look at and how I’m tracking those because the accountability piece and how we track our consistency matters. Look for areas in your life you can make those adjustments and watch how they start to compound in other areas of your life because that discipline, as Jocko Willink shares, “Discipline equals freedom.” As you start to get disciplined in one area, watch how that will spread into other areas of your life and you will continue to learn and grow.
This has been another edition of the Brian Covey Show, Conversations with Covey edition. I’m loving sharing these with you. Thank you all for your feedback here. A couple of reminders, make sure you go on, like, subscribe and leave us a comment on the show. If you haven’t picked up your copy of Conversations With Covey with ten amazing guests we had in season one, you can learn from them not only hope, inspiration and motivation but tactics of how you can win at life. Make sure you check that out on Amazon. Have a good one and I will catch you next time.
