223 Consistency and willpower: how to build one without needing the other

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Whether it's with workouts, with food, or even just getting to bed at a decent time. How many times have you said to yourself that you just need to be more consistent?

And how many more times have you managed that consistency for a while until life got a bit messy, the routine went out the window again, and you told yourself that you just didn't have the willpower to keep it all up?

But what if willpower actually has very little to do with real life consistency, the kind that will actually start to feel manageable, achievable, and just a normal part of your everyday life?

Because the real reason you can't quite get a handle on that consistency has very little to do with being lazy or lacking motivation or willpower or discipline. It's simply that we're trying to build it on something that was never meant to hold it for very long in the first place.

So in this episode, we're going to get really clear on a better way to build consistency into your life so that it holds even when things get busy.

Welcome to the Busy Woman's Guide to Wellbeing, the podcast for women who are done with the hustle and are ready to feel at home in their own skin.

I'm your host, Alix, Life, therapeutic and fitness coach for busy women who want to do less, live more, and feel good from the inside out. Every week I'm going to help you to cut through the noise, challenge the shoulds, and find new ways to live and move that actually feel like you.

Hello and welcome back to the podcast. This week, one of my favourite subjects is what we're covering today, which is consistency.

Now, this is definitely something that I've spoken about more than once on this podcast before, but it's also something that fully deserves a revisit and some new perspectives. Because I don't know about you, but I sometimes need to hear something more than once for it to really sink in.

What I want to do today is I want to bring a different perspective, maybe a different perspective than the ones I've brought before around this idea of willpower and consistency and sort of bring them together actually as well, because I think I've spoken about consistency and I've spoken about willpower separately, but I really want to bring those two things together because I think that we often think of being consistent as a willpower led thing, as something that requires that force of effort from us to keep going and to stay in that consistent routine with whatever it is in life, whether it's, you know, regularly getting our workouts in, whether it's eating in a particular way for a longer period of time, whether it's any other habits that we are trying to create, we often see these things as kind of going hand in hand. And it's almost like the willpower works until it doesn't.

And then we can spend a lot of time feeling frustrated with ourselves for not having enough willpower and sort of sitting there waiting to regain the willpower, regain the motivation, regain the discipline so that we can get back to consistency again.

But what I really want to talk about today is how we create, I suppose, a different idea or a different belief around consistency, which is actually going to help us in the much longer term because it's all very well being "consistent" for a few weeks, but what we actually want to do, what most of us want to do is feel like we have that long term consistency, that sense of these things are just a part of my life.

This is just the way that I exercise, this is just the way that I eat, this is just the way that I go about the healthy habits in my life, for example.

And I think it would be true to say that the majority of us would like it to be like that because once it feels like that, once it feels like it's part of the routine routine, once it feels like it is consistent in our day to day lives, we don't have to think about it as much, we don't have to apply as much thought and effort to that situation and it just kind of happens. And I think that's the place that most of us really want to get to.

But unfortunately it's not how it works, particularly when it comes to the wellbeing side of our lives, to the things that we do to take care of ourselves. Because so many other things in life end up taking precedence over that. And so that's stuff sinks to the bottom of the list all the time.

And it's completely normal for that to happen. Right? Real life has got to happen.

So what I really want to talk about today is how we can have a look at it from a different perspective, I suppose, so that we can create that consistency in a way that allows us to feel more ease and allows us to feel like it's just a part of our lives. It's just a normal, natural part of our lives rather than something that we have to keep forcing over and over and over again.

So let's take an old client of mine. So she came to saying that she just could not get consistent.

She'd do great at the gym for a few weeks, she'd be getting up early in the morning, she'd be walking every day, she'd be eating really, really well, the whole works.

But somehow there would always come this crunch point where she would miss a session or two and before she knew it, she would feel like she was back at square one again. Because it's like the dominoes, isn't it?

It's not just, oh, well, I missed the gym a couple of times, but I carried on eating while I carried on walking. It's almost like that one thing goes and everything else starts to topple after it, because everything feels so dependent on everything else.

And we feel like we've got to do all of those things together if we want to get the result. And so, like I say, there would always come this crunch point where she would miss a couple of sessions and then the whole domino stack.

Is that the right word?

The whole row of dominoes would come tumbling down, she'd be back at square one again, and she'd have to, like, take this massive effort to get motivated to get started again. And the thing is, intellectually, she knew it was ridiculous, right?

She could see that just because she'd missed a session, it didn't mean, or it shouldn't mean that she had to throw the towel in, but somehow she just could not help herself.

So of course she thought that if she had a trainer, if she had somebody that she was seeing week in, week out, it would keep her that bit more accountable. It would really force her to keep that consistency up for a lot longer.

Now, of course, I knew that she needed more than just accountability, because accountability sounds great. Accountability sounds like just the kind of thing you need.

There's somebody else from outside of you who's expecting certain things from you, and maybe they're going to be annoyed or upset if you don't do those things. So you feel that, that extra pressure to get that thing done. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with accountability. Accountability is great.

However, that, on its own, is not going to change everything for you, because we need to have the right found within ourselves first before that accountability is really going to do the work. So I knew she needed more than just accountability, and we did start to work on that.

But she was really insistent that accountability alone was gonna be enough. She's like, this is all I need. This is just the extra little push over the line that I need. And I do come across this.

You know, people want to believe that somebody else can provide them motivation, somebody else can provide them impetus for change for us. But what happened was she soon discovered the same pattern would kick in.

You know, she'd show up at the sessions, but excuses would come out about why she hadn't managed to do any workouts that week, how she'd struggled with the food. And that started to happen after the first few weeks.

So of course we had that really honest conversation, one where we really started to look at what was really, really going on for her and showing her that accountability could only work for her if she was willing to change some of her stories, change some of her belief around what true consistency actually looked like. And if she could stop pinning her worth on how perfect she could be.

And I think that was the thing, like in this particular situation, so much of her worth was based on being perfect. And if she couldn't be perfect, she felt like she'd let herself down and she was not being successful at the things that she was trying to do.

And you know, in the rest of her life she was very successful. She did really well at work, all those kind of things.

And this is what I find with so many of my clients, because they're not lazy people, they're actually the opposite. These are women who tend to achieve a lot of things. They already, they know a lot already.

They know a lot about wellbeing, they know a lot about what they should be doing, they know a lot about what to do in the gym, what to eat, how to look after themselves right. They are really self aware. And this particular client was no different.

But there's this blind spot that I find with so many people around the self worth piece.

Because we're pushing ourselves and pushing ourselves and pushing ourselves to do certain things, to achieve certain things, to appear in a particular light. And one of the reasons we do that is because we maybe don't feel good enough. And of course it comes up time and time again.

And once we start to started to address that with this client, it made a huge difference because that motivation, it started to come from a different place. It stopped being all about willpower and force and somebody from outside motivating her. And instead she was able to just find this better rhythm.

She was able to find better reasons for doing what she was doing. The reasons stopped being about trying to prove herself all the time. And it started to be about how she actually looked after herself.

It stopped being about showing the world that she was completely in control and she knew exactly what she was doing and she had everything sorted.

And it became more about saying, actually this is important to me because of the ways in which I wanna look after myself, because it's important to me that I look after my body. It's important to me, I look after my mental wellbeing.

And once those sort of things started to change and she, she was able to reframe consistency away from this kind of very rigid idea of what she thought it would look like or should look like, then everything started to feel a little bit softer and a little bit lighter. And this is the thing that I find so many of us are trying to power our way through life with willpower and, and all of these things.

Whereas often when we can soften that pressure and we can find different, better reasons for doing the things that we're doing, it starts to change, it starts to feel a bit easier, it starts to feel more in flow.

And so then we do start to find that consistency because we're not coming from a place of force and push and what we should do all the time, but we're coming from a place of a bit more ease, a bit more flow, a bit more rhythm.

And so once we really started to work on that with her, it made a huge difference to actually how she showed up for herself and the results that she got and the consistency that she achieved as well. And you know, I think her story is very, very common.

Except what usually happens is we stop at the accountability piece and then when that accountability doesn't work, we kind of go, oh God, it's my fault, I didn't have enough willpower, I couldn't stay consistent. This thing happened, that thing happened. It all fell because of this and that and the other. And we don't move on to that self worth piece.

We don't move on to that piece of looking at actually why do I have such a rigid sense of what consistency should look like and how could this actually look different to me?

So what I wanna talk about a bit today is about how or the myth of willpower, I suppose the myth of what it can do for us, but then also how we can maybe rebalance or what's the word I'm trying to look for. It'll come to me in a minute. But yeah, rebalance, this sense of what consistency actually looks like. Like look at it from a different perspective.

So I think the first thing to say about willpower is it's not a useless resource, not at all. Willpower absolutely has its place, but it is a short term resource.

It's great for getting you started, but it's really terrible for sustaining change.

So, that's why we manage to use willpower, use those reserves of willpower those first few weeks, but then it starts to fade away and we don't have that anymore. And the problem is what so many of us are doing is we're making this the absolute foundation of what we're trying to do.

If I can just push myself and force myself into this kind of rigid consistency through willpower, I'm going to get the change that I want. But like I say, it tends to fade away.

And so we need other things that are going to sit underneath that that are going to give us a different foundation for it. So I'm not saying don't use willpower ever. What I'm saying is see it for what it is, which is your kind of short term energy resource.

So for example, if you started to run right now, if I said to you, right, I want you to run to the end of the garden and back right now, what would happen is the first few seconds are going to be powered by your anaerobic system, or in other words, your energy system, which doesn't need oxygen. It's using that energy that is stored in your muscles right now.

Okay, so we've got it stored in the muscles right now and we use that short term spurt of energy without oxygen to get ourselves going. But it is a short term resource, it cannot sustain us for very long. Think of sprinters, right? Sprinters are using their anaerobic system.

That's why towards the end of like a hundred meter sprint, their muscles are going to be burning.

They're going to be really having to push themselves through for that last little bit because they've used up that initial energy system in their body. But then what happens is as you continue to run, we switch over to actually the aerobic system, which requires oxygen in our system.

So it's kind of a slightly different fuel source. It's one that requires oxygen to keep replenishing the energy and to keep us moving.

So if you think of willpower as your anaerobic system is going to get you going, it's going to give you that energy, it's going to give you that spurt of motivation to get going. But it's going to start running out after a while. And so we need to then switch over to our aerobic system. We're using oxygen to keep us going.

And so think of it like that, these different energy systems depending on where you are in that process.

And the thing is that that initial spurt of willpower is going to falter when you're tired, when you're busy, when you're overwhelmed, when your resources aren't at 100%. Okay? So a properly fueled body can use that anaerobic system really efficiently for that first few seconds, but then not afterwards.

And if you try to use that and you're a bit tired, you try to use that and you've been really overwhelmed, your anaerobic system is not going to be functioning as well because you haven't stored up as much energy. You haven't been able to do that because your system is a bit depleted. Same thing with willpower.

You're going to falter if your resources are not at 100%. And that's the thing with life, isn't it? Like we're not always at 100%, we can't be. It's not physically possible to be.

And so that's going to fade. It's going to come in and out, depending on your particular resources at a particular time.

That willpower is going to work best when your nervous system is able to support you. In other words, when you're regulated, when you're relaxed, when you're not chasing your tail on a million things a day.

And of course, life is not like that. Life is not going to allow us to have 100%, 100% of the time. It's just not.

And the problem is, when we're relying on that willpower to sustain us, it requires a lot of force. Continued force isn't a particularly efficient way to create consistency because it takes a lot of energy to sustain.

It requires us to stay very well regulated. It requires us to have very good conditions to continue to support us.

And when those conditions change, you know, we have less time or our attention is focused somewhere else. For example, those things that sustained our willpower are not going to hold it for much longer.

So the foundations for that willpower start to look a bit shaky and our consistency is going to start to falter. So that's why after a while, after those first couple of weeks, we need to switch over, we need to switch over to a slightly different energy system.

We need to get our energy from a different place. We need to get our motivation from a different place. So instead we want to think about how we can reframe this idea of consistency.

So first of all, consistency is something that happens over the months and the years. It's not the days and the weeks.

We often find ourselves getting very micro focused, very focused on ensuring that every single part of what we do is perfect in that very short space of time. You know, this week, the next few weeks, we're getting really micro focused on perfection.

We're not looking at the bigger picture, we're not looking at what's happening over the months and the years. And over the months and the years there are ebbs and flows over the months and the years.

There are times that we're going to have more energy to put towards this and times when we'll have less energy to put towards this. But we often don't consider this when we're getting started again, do we? We consider ourselves as having the same amount of energy all the time.

And it's just not the way that our lives work. It just isn't. Consistency is not rigid. It has allowances for our lives to flow in it, to flow around it.

And I want you to think of it as waves on the beach. Okay? So it's the waves, they're coming in and they're flowing out, they're coming in and they're flowing out, right?

It's this constant movement, it's this constant change, it's this constant flow, right?

So there's always something there, there's always something going, something moving, but sometimes there's more of it, sometimes there's less of it and those things are okay. That's what consistency is all about. It's not just about turning on a tap for the strongest flow possible for as long as possible.

That water's going to run out eventually. It's not going to be there anymore.

The waves on the beach, they're going to keep going day in, day out, week in week out, month in month out, year in, year out.

So really think about consistency as this longer term thing, as two workouts this week, five next week, one the week after, depending on what's going on in your life, it's focusing on that longer term return on investment that you are going to get. It's like putting your money into an ISA.

You put 500 quid in the ISA tomorrow, in a month's time you might have gained a little bit, but it's not going to be much.

But what happens over time is that compounds like every bit of interest that you earn, every return on investment that you get gets reinvested and then it grows a little bit more and it gets rid of it.

So in a few years time you're going to have a lot more than if you've gone, oh, that's not working very well, I'm just going to withdraw it all and Forget about it, right? You've got to leave it there. You've got to let it keep going. You've got to let it keep building. You've got to let it ebb and flow.

And of course, those investments are going to go up and down as well, right? Sometimes you're going to look at them and they're not going to be so great.

But it would be a big mistake to take all that money out because your investments didn't do very well over the last few weeks. Because chances are that at some point in the future that's going to improve again.

And you will have lost so much more by taking that money out than you will have done by keeping it in debt and staying consistent with it and staying consistent with your investment. And that's what I want you to think of consistency as. It's a consistent investment.

It's what you invest over the months and the years that counts, not what you do in the next few weeks only. So think about consistency as something you get to consciously create rather than force. You know, ask yourself, how is this going to look in my life?

What's really realistic? Or what's a realistic way for me to be consistent?

How can I focus on creating the best conditions for consistency rather than trying to shoehorn it into your existing environment? If you are trying to shoehorn something in to your existing life that is just not going to work for you.

You're never going to get beyond the willpower state.

But if you're going to go, actually, this is my life and this is the way that I live and this needs to fit in with me, you're going to get a different result. Consistency with food, for example, is not going to happen if you use this exact same shopping list each and every week.

You know, you log into your online shopping and you've got your weekly list that you use and you just repeat it next week and the week after and week after.

And then you wonder why your intake of food is not changing, why you're not able to eat healthier, because you're having the same things to keep choosing from each and every week make.

So in order to be consistent, you need to look at, okay, how can I create a better kitchen environment, a better cupboard environment, if you like. For me, I'm going to start buying a few new things. It's going to be 80% the same.

There's going to be 20% where I'm going to add some new healthy ingredients in so that I'm creating that kitchen environment. For me to be able to eat more healthily, more consistently.

Really thinking about as a long term thing, bigger picture, thinking the months and the years, not the days and the weeks.

Thinking about consistency as having ebbs and flows, not just switching on the tap to the strongest flow, but the waves on the beach coming in and out and in and out. It's allowed to change, it's allowed to ebb and flow, it's allowed to adapt.

And then thinking of consistency as something you consciously create rather than forcing.

So just changing that environment or adapting that environment around you to maintain, make those things easier to do, to make those things easier to be consistent with. Thinking about how it's going to actually look like within your life.

Not the idealized version of the life that you think you should have, but the one that actually exists at this point in time, that's how you're going to create that consistency. And how once that initial willpower falls by the wayside, you've got something else to fall back on.

And I think the thing I really want you to take away is real consistency is not about control, it's about connection. It's not about trying to prove yourself, to prove that you can be consistent no matter what.

It's about actually connecting with who you are and what you truly want to achieve underneath all of the shoulds, underneath all of the expectations.

So reconnecting with that flow, reconnecting with what it is you actually want for yourself, and reconnecting with the rhythm of what consistency really means, rather than what you think it should mean. Because they're often two very different things.

If this is resonating, by the way, do head back and have a listen to episode 209, which is called why allowing yourself to be inconsistent could be the best thing you do for yourself this week. So I'll pop the link into the show notes as well. But it's a nice little episode to listen next to this one if this is an area that you do struggle with a little bit.

But before we finish, I want you to ask yourself a couple of questions.

So think of one area of your life right now where you keep saying you need willpower and you need to be more consistent. And then ask yourself what's actually making it hard to stay consistent in that area?

Is it actually about willpower or is it about trying to force something that doesn't fit my life right now? Is it about needing to make some adjustments to my environment?

What's something I can change in my environment right now that would help me. How do I feel emotionally about that habit as well? You know, does that habit feel like it's something that's got to be forced and it's got to be pushed?

Or is it something that I genuinely feel that I want to have in my life, that I genuinely feel is going to make a difference to my life?

So really thinking about what is making it hard, rather than I just need to push myself, just need that willpower, just having an honest conversation about yourself, about why you're finding it hard to be consistent in that area, and then also asking yourself what would change if you could lighten your grip on this idea of willpower and consistency now?

How would it feel if it was more about flow, if it was more about that bigger picture, rather than on judging yourself for every micro moment, every micro decision that you make each and every day? So have a think about that and have a think about how you can reframe your success in that area or how you deem to be successful in that area.

So that rather than thinking about whether you stuck to it perfectly every single day, think about whether you honoured your needs today, think about whether you created that rhythm for you that is actually going to work, that is actually going to sustain you once the willpower has left the building, because it will. And it might come back again. Right.

And you might have certain weeks where you're on fire and the willpower is strong and you're feeling great and you're really pushing yourselves. Fantastic. But those weeks are not every week. Those weeks are probably less common than you would like them to be. And that's okay.

That is absolutely okay.

So just to wrap up today, remember, the more you stop fighting for consistency and trying to force that willpower, the more consistent you will become.

Because you're going to allow it to flow more, it's going to be less rigid and you're going to get to make it work within your life rather than trying to shoehorn it into or rather than trying to shoehorn your life into this rigid framework. It's just not going to work. You need it to adapt to your life.

Also, I want you to remember, consistency, or lack thereof, is not a character trait that defines your self worth. Okay? And I really, really, really want you to hear that.

Because we think our lack of consistency is directly linked to our success or to how other people see us, or to how. How successful of a person we are. And it's got nothing to do with that. It's not something you either have or you don't have.

It's something you get to create by creating that greater trust with yourself, by letting go of those rigid boundaries, by creating that environment that really supports you, that really supports the woman you're becoming. And that long term consistency happens best when it is not tied to willpower, but when it's about creating harmony inside your life.

Right, wrapping up now.

So if you're ready to stop trying to willpower your way to more consistency, do come and join me inside the body you'll love living in, where we will rebuild that consistency from the inside out. And with all of that said, I'm going to love you and leave you. And I'll see you back here again next time. Thank you, as always, for joining me.

If this episode has hit home, share it with another woman who needs to hear it. And come connect with me on Instagram @lifeeditwithalix for more real talk, mindset shifts and daily inspiration.