How To Be Consistent: Want to make a change and STICK to it? Read this.

By Colton Stollenmaier

Disclaimer: Previously published as ENOUGH! Stop Failing, Start Following Through by Colton Stollenmaier.

You know the feeling. If you didn't, you wouldn't be taking the time to read this. A million times you've committed to a change. To a new direction. To that thing that you know you should be doing, that you've been wanting to make a part of your life for too long for it not to have happened yet.

But yet, again, you couldn't make it stick. And it seems that no matter how resolved you are, how strongly you commit, or how deeply frustrated you are by your failure to make it happen, you just can't make the change last. It's enough to make you quit. Except you still want it!

How To Be Consistent is for you. And for everyone who is tired of letting themselves down. You're not just ready for change, you're desperate for it. You've been ready for a long, long time. But being ready and hungry hasn't been enough.

What if you could make the behaviors you need to follow through on to succeed as automatic as brushing your teeth or putting your shoes on? What if that habit you've been wanting to build could be put on autopilot? This book is a guide to accomplishing exactly that; using the tools of motivation, behavioral priming, habit-building, and reinforcement to automate and perpetuate the change you want to see in your life.

If you're done with trying and failing and want to find something that will work, once and for all, then you need to learn the tools held within this book. Their value in your life will be beyond measure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Pursuit of Purpose Group
• Release date: Aug 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201498344

Colton Stollenmaier

I was born in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee in 1990. Born poor, I witnessed firsthand how, through hard work and an unwavering vision, parents could pull themselves out of poverty and create a better life for their children. I was living in South Carolina when I delivered my first public speech at the age of 12. From the very first speech, I knew I'd found something that felt like...life! As Howard Thurman put it, "Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." When I speak, I come alive! My first international speaking engagement was a 2 and a half week series of presentations in Nicaragua at the age of 18. A year later, I accepted a 1-year contract to speak and serve in Australia, where I met my wife, Joanna. Today, I am an international speaker, trainer, and coach. I have been blessed to speak on 5 continents to audiences from every socioeconomic background and age group and just about anywhere you can gather a group of people, from convention centers and meeting halls to campgrounds and courtyards. My mission is simple: inspire, motivate, empower. My vision is clear: a world where every person is afforded the opportunity to pursue their purpose and takes advantage of that opportunity. This is what drives everything I do. Colton Stollenmaier is a speaker, trainer, and coach on mindset, success, and achievement. His life mission is to inspire, motivate, and empower others to pursue their purposes and chase their dreams.

Book preview

The Case for Consistency

AN OBVIOUS QUESTION to ask me is why I believe consistency and habit are the keys to success. Well, you will find numbers ranging from 40% to 98% depending on the definitions used in the research, but one thing is becoming clear: a majority of our daily activity is habit. In other words, most of your life is spent with an illusion of decision, but with a reality of programming. Routines, tasks, reactions, even many of our choices are actually predetermined by the programming we have set up in our brains.

I think it’s a fair judgment to say that whatever things you spend the majority of your time doing are the things you will become best at. Still more obvious, the more time that you can devote to the practices you desire to develop, the better you will get at them. So now let me ask you a simple question: if the majority of your time is spent acting out of habit, wouldn’t the most obvious way of impacting the direction of your life be to hijack your habits?

You’ve probably heard the phrase force of habit before. It’s usually used as an excuse when you do something inappropriate to the situation without thought (Sorry, it’s a force of habit!). What you’re really saying is that the behavior in question has become automatic—involuntary, even—by repetition. This is the power of consistent action; it can develop over time into an activity that you engage in automatically, maybe even involuntarily, without even having to think about it. The repetition, like a steadily flowing river, has carved the activity deeply into your behavioral patterns.

Imagine the progress you could make toward your goals if you began taking the consistent actions necessary to achieve them automatically! Forget about decision fatigue. You wouldn’t have to decide to do it anymore! Forget about overcoming inertia. You wouldn’t have to make a start anymore!

Let me take just a moment to express how valuable auto-engaging your target behaviors would be in your daily productivity.

Decision Fatigue

When you think about making progress on your goals and becoming more consistent in your behaviors, you might not give too much thought to how much decision-making could be holding you back. But it turns out, it could be messing things up for you a lot worse than you think.

A lot of what holds us back is our limited tolerance for decisions. Think of it like this: if you go to the gym and pick up a weight, you can only lift it so many times before your muscles will run out of steam. Your brain works the same way with decisions. You can only make so many before it needs a break.

As I write this in 2018, the amount of decisions a person makes each day is absolutely staggering. Furthermore, while many people think it’s a relief from their day's demands to pick up their smartphone, a torrential deluge of decisions await you there at any given moment. Reply or ignore? Like or don’t like? Open or don’t? Scroll on or stop to read? Comment? Deal with now or later? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It does not take very long at all before your decisive powers are severely weakened. And while there are many steps to take to reduce decision fatigue, how much better to make sure that it will never be your excuse for failing to follow through on your most valuable goals?

Now of course, there are always decisions to be made, every step of the way. But, getting your butt into action doesn’t have to be one of them. Instead, harness the power of habit! If you can turn the actions that you need to take to reach your goals into habits, it won't matter how fatigued your decision-maker is; the action will be automatic—no decision required!

Don't allow decision fatigue to interfere with your progress towards your future; hijack your habits, and make that progress (and the success that comes with it) automatic and inevitable. If you can just make a start, inertia will help you carry it through.

Inertia

Remember this one from high school? Inertia is the tendency for an object at rest to remain at rest, or an object in motion to remain in motion, unless acted on by an outside force. Exactly. You’ve got it. But inertia applies to a lot more than rocks in the dirt. Two types we need to talk about are behavioral inertia and decision inertia. These two related concepts are not good or bad—they simply are. How you interact with them will determine whether they are great allies or even greater obstacles in your path to success.

First, behavioral inertia: the tendency for an organism to continue enacting a certain behavior, regardless of the outcome. Let’s be real: you know it’s the fast food and the late night potato chips making you fat. And you know you should be at the gym instead of binge-watching tv shows. But it’s just so dang hard to break the cycle! Why can’t I resist the urge to pull into the drive-thru? Why can’t I stop the TV when this episode finishes (and why does it autoplay, damnit?!)? The answer is, in part, behavioral inertia. Once you have established a given behavior, it will persist unless altered—and because inertia is the tendency to remain constant unless acted upon, it takes far more effort to alter the behavior than to engage in the behavior.

Similarly, decision inertia is the proclivity to make the same decision on repeat, once again without regard for the outcome of that decision. You know it’s a bad idea to compare your spouse with their parent, but you just keep doing it every time they do something that annoys you. So far, you’ve ended up fighting every time, and they haven’t stopped doing that frustrating thing yet! Common sense would say stop, decision inertia says it’s easier to just keep doing the same thing.

As you can see, behavioral and decision inertia are very closely related and are usually working together. Decision inertia is about the mental process (the choice) and behavioral inertia is about the physical expression (the action). Combined, these two forms of inertia create a powerful force for maintaining consistency in your life.

It’s important to say here that learning to actively make informed decisions is, of course, vital to success. That is not the subject of this book. My purpose is to learn how to make positive use of these psychological systems. These mechanisms are tools—that is, things that make a function easier. They are utilized by your brain, and by you, to make your daily operations more efficient. Which makes them useful tools.

As we will continue to discover, your brain (and for that matter, your body as well) operates as an efficiency machine; any time it can save you energy or effort, it will. And this is a good thing. Because it saves you a whole lot of work. If your choices and behaviors are good, and lead you toward success and achievement, then these processes will serve you well. If your choices and behaviors are bad, however; these processes will debilitate your progress and perpetuate your circumstances until you learn to overcome them. But if you have to overcome them every single time you want to take a single positive action, your battle will be long, slow, laborious, and in a human lifespan, potentially unattainable. Instead, let’s learn to harness these processes; to rewrite their programming, to transfer their energies, and to build success on their backs.

It is unquestionable that achieving our goals will require many, many, many steps to bring them to bear. Consistent action is the only way to ever reach the top of the mountain—and there will always be another mountain waiting. Learning to start stepping and to keep stepping, as simple as these lessons may seem, are the most valuable lessons you could ever learn if you want to make progress in your life.

That’s why consistency.

Introduction to Behavior Change

BEHAVIOR SCIENTIST Dr. BJ Fogg developed a behavior model for explaining why a desired behavior does or does not occur based on three factors: Motivation, Ability, and a Trigger. The simple formula to describe this model is B=MAT (Behavior equals Motivation times Ability times Trigger). That is to say, if you want a certain behavior to occur in your life, you need to make sure there are three things present: motivation to do it, the ability to do it, and something to get you to do it.

Triggers are anything that initiate the behavior. It can