How to Be More Consistent Even When You Don’t Feel Inspired

Quick share before I dive into today’s article…

I just spent two hours cleaning up and organizing folders on my laptop. Which, of course, is not really important at all. Moral of the story? We’re human. We make mistakes. And, we want to develop the awareness to be able to catch ourselves when we go off track and get back to the task at hand as fast as possible (hello, meditation).

Forgive and recommit style.

I could easily have moved on with my day and decided that I didn’t have time to write this article. But I’ve made an upfront commitment to myself and to you to write a new piece every morning. Period. And if that’s my goal, I need to be the kind of person who writes consistently every day.

In fact, consistency is what I was planning to speak about before I got sidetracked this morning.

So here we are.

I was chatting with a friend of mine yesterday and I mentioned to him that this whole writing experiment has been really fun. But it’s also been a great reminder of showing up no matter what.

When I was still thinking about starting this daily writing habit, I had all these doubts and self-sabotaging thoughts about how I could possibly find something new to write each morning, what I would share or say, or what I would do if I wasn’t feeling inspired.

I was looking for ‘know-how‘, instead of adopting an attitude of ‘no how‘.

The truth is, inspiration actually has very little to do with consistency when you’ve made a commitment to stick to something that’s important to you.

I heard a story about a famous author recently (whose name escapes me) who was asked about his writing habits and routines. He answered that he only writes when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it shows up every morning at 6 am.

In other words, don’t wait for some external validation or justification before getting started. Do the work first, and the inspiration will follow (another example of coming from the place you’re trying to get to).

Another great takeaway from this story: if something is important to you, do it early in your day and make it a non-negotiable.

I’ve experienced this personally in my own work, too. Over the course of the last two years and 100 podcast episodes, I’ve missed exactly ZERO weeks of hitting publish (which made consistency one of the top lessons I learned from my podcast). The only breaks I took were for Christmas and New Year. Sure, I had to get creative some weeks, but that’s how you roll when you’ve made an upfront commitment.

And finally, if you’re still struggling to be consistent, remember why that thing is important to you and why you started in the first place. If you keep slipping up, it may not be as important as you think, or there may be an invisible competing commitment that’s keeping you where you are.