Comet Nwosu: How to Achieve Personal Development Through Consistency

Consistency is a sign of dedication and passion towards a particular thing. It means repeatedly engaging in something, even if others don’t see its value or if it doesn’t bring immediate rewards. Consistency helps you keep moving forward until you achieve your ultimate goal. However, if you stop in between and create an imbalanced flow, it leads to inconsistency.

There’s another aspect of inconsistency that you may not be familiar with. It gives the impression of consistent effort, but it’s not. If you started a project, stopped midway, started again, dropped it again, and then finally completed it, you’re being inconsistent. It doesn’t matter if the project was personal or professional, or if it had a deadline. What matters is that you didn’t maintain a consistent flow towards its completion.

Meanwhile, on a general scope of things, life doesn’t always offer many chances for redoing or restarting something that could have been completed way before. While optimism allows us to use hope as an effective tool to believe that we can still achieve what we couldn’t do, no matter how long it takes, life goes on, people age, and time ticks. Therefore, whatever you choose to do or accomplish must be something that you consider important enough to put in the right amount of time and energy to achieve it. It deserves the right amount of consistency. If you plan to study, you must be ready to face your studies and consistently do your best to achieve desirable results in the end. If you plan to get married, you must also be prepared to navigate life with the person you choose, keeping in mind that it will have its ups and downs.

To be a consistent person, you must have a set way of doing things, your habits, your patterns of being, and accomplishing your goals. You must ensure that they’re positive reinforcements that enable you to reach the finish line. On the other hand, an inconsistent person forgets their values and visions, leaving their mission incomplete. They go back and forth, making them unreliable and untrustworthy, unlike a consistent person who is predictable and reliable. I believe being consistent means having foreknowledge of the pros and cons of what you want to achieve and being ready to deal with any challenges that come your way and still keep pushing.

I have experienced inconsistency in several areas of my life, including my relationships with loved ones, my professional life, and my writing aspirations. At times, I set goals for publishing articles each week but became demotivated by various factors that derailed my progress. However, I am beginning to identify the root causes of my specific and general inconsistencies, and I am working to become more consistent in every area.

The first step in changing from an inconsistent to a consistent person is recognising your patterns and forgiving yourself for any past mistakes. It is important to dig deep and determine the root cause of your inconsistencies, whether it be learned helplessness or a lack of motivation. Once you have identified the underlying issue, you can then define a mission with your values and vision as your guide and constantly remind yourself of your purpose to stay on track.

Consistency aids success in many strata of life, business, work, or our personal life. It solidifies our intentionality to keep showing up and putting in efforts toward something we deemed fit in the first place, most importantly, not allowing the downsides of the journey to knock us out of it, although we might get knocked off-track sometimes.

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