Consistency

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One of my favorite analogies for resilience is the Bop Bag Toy. Generally, no matter how often you knock it down, it comes right back up. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that consistency is a close cousin. For the longest time, consistency = every single day, not an untypical expectation when you consider the anxiety-fueled perfectionism that lies behind the thought process. This applied to professional and personal pursuits: Didn’t workout? Fail. Didn’t do a great job at presenting in a team meeting? Fail again. Snapped at someone: Don’t even bother.

Of course, the flipside of the All or Nothing cognitive distortion is that it makes us stop making any effort. And all the research shows that something is better than nothing. A little bit of exercise will ALWAYS be better for your body and brain than not doing any at all. Not doing well at something once or few times isn’t a failproof predictor of future-failure. You may have messed up in a conversation, and you may have done something stupid or perhaps even bad, but that does not equate to being a bad person.

Consistency for me has become the follow-up to resiliency: you face a setback or life has been such that some things have not felt within reach for a while but it isn’t permanent. The normalcy of that experience is in deep contrast with how lonely we can feel within it, as if we alone find it hard to do the things we want to do.

Right now, I find myself in a patience-deficit; mostly with myself and occasionally with others. It is a trait I am working on but if I were to look at a day-to-day comparison, I wouldn’t feel that I am improving.

As I wrap this up, I am ABSOLUTELY certain that this viewpoint isn’t for everyone. There are people out there for whom consistency is all-or-nothing, and equally importantly, if it works for them and isn’t harmful to others, then that is A-Okay. If there were rules for life, I think an important one would be that not everything is for everyone.