The Power of Consistency in Life

No matter what your business, your career or personal life is, there's just something about being consistent and steady over time that not only leads over the long term to outstanding results, but also gives you internally a greater sense that you're on your path, a greater sense that you're doing the right thing, more likelihood that you'll find some mastery or fulfillment in the process. When you're steady, showing up day after day, staying focused, doing your best, being a good person, I think that one thing that really makes a difference every single week is that old idea that steadiness wins the race. Be steady, you win the race. And I think that's such an important thing these days, where we all want such immediate payback. You know, we want to put in just a few days or weeks of really hard work, and we want to have some extraordinary payoff. When we just started. Who are we kidding? You know, we want to be able to, you know, good job making the kids some lunch today. Well done. And you've done that day after day, month after month, and you're just steady at it. You're consistent at it. And you want the kids to come in with glowing hugs and compliments. I love you, Mom. I love you, dad. Oh, you're so great. And yet sometimes they don't say nothing. And no matter what your business, your career, your personal life is, there's just something about being consistent and steady over time that not only leads over the long term to outstanding results, but also gives you internally a greater sense that you're on your path, a greater sense that you're doing the right thing, more likelihood that you'll find some mastery or fulfillment in the process. When you're steady, showing up day after day, staying focused, doing your best, being a good person. I was recently talking with a dear friend, and they were struggling in their career, and they were struggling in such a way that they felt always stressed. They had outsized success in some ways, but they said that they were tired of being so successful, but also miserable. And we were talking about their weekly rhythm, and what became pretty clear is that their life was always in a reactive mode. And they were always doing lots of things, but it was always kind of like reacting or fulfilling someone else's obligations. And they weren't steadily marching to their own beat during the week. They didn't have a rhythm that they had set up for themselves. And so they suffered that sort of ruinous feeling when you're always reacting to everything. Now, listen, we've all had jobs where, you know, things were put on our plate. We had tasks we didn't want to do, and we thought, oh, well, it's just the boss telling me what I have to do. But the truth is, we still got to set up the day. We still had the choice of what our morning routines were. We had the choice of when to take a quick mental break throughout the day. We had the choice of the quality of output that we would create or the quality of interactions we had with other people. I've had jobs where my job was all day just calling people. Leads would show up, I had to call people. I've had jobs where I just had to reply to emails all day. I've had jobs where it was just kind of dictated by the customer or the client. And yet I never felt like I was out of control. I never felt like they were in command because I knew I could command myself of how I showed up. The quality and nature and attitude and service that I brought to the world. And we all have that choice. I'm asked all the time, including by my friend the other day, Brendan, after 16 years doing what you do in one of the absolute hardest industries there are that, you know, for entrepreneurs, where you're both the CEO and the chief marketing officer and, you know, creating content and in the public eye and running teams, and very few CEOs are also the content creators who are also the managers of the people. Those are hard jobs to do altogether. And, well, I put that in perspective. For me as a kid who my first job was painting chicken coops and then a truck driver and then, you know, some really difficult, hard, just, you know, dirty, difficult work? I don't look at it that way. I look at content creation and leading a team and everything as. As an extraordinary blessing and privilege. And isn't that it? Isn't that the thing that keeps us steady, that we have gratitude for what we are doing and we have perspective about what we are doing, and we have the internal wherewithal to choose our own attitude and the quality and nature in which we show up each day, that's been part of the secret. But for me, being steady for 16 years, unbroken in terms of creating content every single day for 16 years, probably even more than that. That's only the 16 years I've been paid for it, that I'm a steady person. And while I don't always get as much done as I want, just like anyone else, I'm pretty steady. I'm steady in my friendships, I'm steady in my relationships, I'm steady in my health. Practices. I'm kind of a boring guy. Probably if we got to hang out, you'd be like, wow, you're pretty steady, dude. And sometimes I think people wonder how to be so steady in what they're doing because it's so easy to get discouraged or distracted in this modern world. So here's a couple ideas about being steady. Number one, trust in a hard day's work. I think there's so much value in having a hard day of work or, you know, a challenging day where you show up and you're kind of like, you know, juggling the kids, the career, the life, the spouse, the bills, just the neighborhood, the chaos of the world, and just showing up and working through it with a delightful attitude and in care and compassion to others. But there's something about if you know you gave your best that day, and that's what I mean by a hard day's work, you gave your best that day. When you go to bed at night, you lay your head down, you give some gratitude, you think about your major questions of your life. I want you to feel like that was a great day's effort and trust that the future will take care of itself. See, the reason so many people aren't steady is because of that discouragement or that projection into the future where they feel like, I'm doing all this stuff, but it's not paying off or it's not paying off fast enough. And so the next day, the habit is to disengage, to stop, to feel discouraged, to feel overwhelmed and stressed and think we're not doing enough. And so instead of staying steady, we find distractions, addictions, ways to quit, ways to bow out of our responsibilities, obligations, and those commitments we've made to ourselves and others. But being steady means you wake up the next day and say, here we go again. I'm going to give my best today. I'm going to choose a great attitude. Today. I'm going to treat others with respect and kindness. Today, I'm going to do my absolute best. And tonight, I'll lay my head on the pillow again, say, good job. It doesn't mean you have to be perfect each day. Far from it. It doesn't mean that everything has to go your way that day. Nope. Ups and downs, turmoil and chaos. It doesn't mean that you always have to be confident and know every step. It means you show up, you do the work, you lay your head on the bed at night and think, all right, I trust that by giving my best each day, the world, the universe is Going to open more doors in the future than I can ever imagine. And then I guess that's it for me. In some ways I always just trusted that by showing up every day and following a plan and working that plan and learning from others and always staying in self improvement, that doors would open more, abundance would appear, better health would appear, new relationships, new opportunities, something would open. I always feel like when you are grateful and you are striving with a positive trust, you are a faithful warrior, that the future does tend to hold good things for you. What I found is if you have breath today and you have the blessing of listening to this voice, you are far better off than one you might imagine. That's hard to say, I know, depending on what you're going through in your life, but out of 7 billion people in the world, a couple hundred thousand didn't wake up today and have another day on this planet. And you did. You got another day. That in itself is a blessing. Trust in a hard day's work. That's something about learning to be steady, having that faith, having that trust to go at it again, to give again, to serve again, to be kind again. Steady, steady, steady. Second idea is that at the end of each day or the beginning of the next morning, in your morning routine, when you do your morning mindset journaling that you learn before you enter that day, you release the disappointments, the tension, the discouragement, the drama. As many of you know, I practice what's called the release meditation technique, where I literally say the word release over and over in my mind as part of my meditation, part of my mantra, release, release, release. And I repeat that self, releasing the tension in my body, releasing the thoughts that come across my mind as they come up, and just returning the mantra, release, release, release. And I created that now famous meditation because for me, I carried those things sometimes into the next day. You know, you have a fight with your spouse or your partner or your friend one night and the next day you wake up and you're still sour about it, and you go halfway through the day still upset about it, or someone cuts you off in the traffic and four hours later you still on edge about it. Or you tried that project, made that move, or did that promotion, and then the next day or the next hour it failed. And so you get upset and so you allow yourself to get distracted. But if you can learn to release, discouragement, disappointment, drama, as the days go on, you're way more likely to be steady. Think about this. If you're going for a long walk and as you're walking on that long path, you pick up all these boulders, these boulders of discouragement and disappointment and drama. And every time something happens, you pick up another one. Well, as you can imagine, not too long into that walk, you are weighted down by an unsurmountable heaviness on your body, mind and spirit. You can't walk as long you're not as steady. And soon you fatigued and exhausted yourself when all along those were just emotional boulders you had to learn to release, to stay light emotionally, to stay light spiritually, and to keep walking released. It's something you can feel in your body and your mind and your spirit. Every day I show up with a released, free spirit. Even though it was difficult yesterday, even though I've had traumas, even though we've got dramas, even though stuff happens in life, it's showing up with that renewed spirit each day. That's not just the gift that we have from our creator, though it is. Obviously that's a choice we make every day. You're the one architecting your mindset. You're the one architecting your habits. And that's a great gift every morning. That's why the morning mindset is so critical for you to establish so that you're entering the day an intentional, sort of like centered way. Learn to release those boulders that you're carrying. Find your freedom each morning, find your freedom at night to let it all go so that you can go again the next day. You can be steady when you learn to release the stuff next being steady. I believe an UN championed topic in this world today is the idea of building peers. You know, I like that word, building or that phrase, building peers. I know the common term now is build community. Build community. Build community. Well, you know what, where I come from, community is a couple houses. You know, it's like for four or five houses, it's like we're all on a journey together and it's 10, 15, 20 people. But I think the secret is building peers. People who are like you and striving forward towards something like where you are trying to go. And what I mean by that is there's a common destination and its peers doing the same thing. Whether that's, hey, on your block, there's five other moms and they're also strolling around. Or it's hey, also there's five other moms on the block and they also are running their own business. Or hey, it's like 10 other people and they are also in your field of expertise and you build relationships with them, but you also build them up. You help not just be part of a community, but. But you build the individuals in the community that you get to work with. People, say all them. Brandon, how are you so steady? I mean, 16 years daily of creating content. How, dude, how is that possible? I'm like, I'm totally inspired by my peers. I've had the opportunity of elevating a ton of diverse voices in this industry for 16 years. I've learned from diverse voices. I had that opportunity to. To seek out, reach out, and mentor people in my own industry. And so I've got this incredible peer group of people who I'm on text strings with, who I exchange daily audios with, who I get emails champing it on. Like, it's that social encouragement that makes it easier to be steady. But see, we all want that social network to suddenly develop around us, as if we're, you know, walking down the street and people are attracted to us. But the reality is, you got to build your peers. You got to seek out clarity for your dreams and find people on that path. They don't got to be like you in the sense of your, like, your personality or like your background or like your age, race, nationality, gender preferences. No, no. It means they're like you in that they are also seeking a similar dream. Talk to them, encourage them, cheer them on, give them advice, brainstorm with them as you build up peers. Those peers become a community and then an unstoppable force. Last idea in being steady, which I just think is probably the most important thing I can say is you've got to calibrate every week. You got to calibrate every week. What does that mean? It means every week you've got to get to the end, like today, and you've got to calibrate. Okay, was this week something where I had clarity, where I was generating energy? I was raising psychological necessity to stay focused and motivated? I was productive, influential, courageous. Yes. Again, I'm encouraging you to score your week and a journal on your week and use growth day for that. So you would go to the life score section, and you'd click the weekly review. And when you click that weekly review, you're going to see the high performance habits, and you're gonna be asked five questions for each habit. For example, the first, you know, habit is seeking clarity. It's gonna ask you these questions and having you rate yourself on these statements. I should say I was intentional in how I acted this week. I knew the feelings I wanted to generate this week. I stayed Focused. As much as I wanted to, I made this week meaningful. I determined something I can get better at this week. These simple questions of your weekly review, scored over and over week after week after week, gives you these trend lines in growth day. They also give you recommendations to improve and calibrating yourself each week to make sure that you're practicing the high performance habits. In terms of any research I've ever seen, these are the most important performance variables for long term success. Positive well being and positive relationships. And so recalibrate. Am I on path? Have I finished the things I said I was going to finish this week? When you get to the end of Friday and you go towards the end of the workday, looking back, okay, what is still undone? What could I have done? What should I be focused on next week? What can I learn about myself? What can I learn about other people? How did I do in my high performance habits? Just asking these questions. I promise you it's so important. Because being steady doesn't mean you're steadily walking in the wrong direction. Being steady means you are steadily marching towards a desired destination. One foot in front of another. Even if you're new at it, even if you're unsure, even if you have a bad day, that next foot is in front of another and another the next day and the next day and the next day. You show up each day intentional. You show up each day with the willingness and the attitude to do your best, to treat others kindly, compassionately, with respect, to serve at your highest levels, to be even a role model for others. Every day. Every day. Every day you have a bad day, that's okay. Next day, release that discouragement. Start fresh with your mindset. Work in the morning again. Trust that that day's hard work will pay off. Build up the people around you. Calibrate where you want to go and move towards it again. Repeat, repeat, repeat.