Is Consistency Better Than Inconsistency?

I am going to be writing about consistency and inconsistency and the reason I am writing about this is because this is something that has plagued me for quite a long time. I have been thinking about it recently and I am going to share what I have learned in the hopes that maybe something of what I am sharing will help you in your life too.

I tend to be a fairly inconsistent person. I have lots and lots of ideas which make me excited and energised. I then tend to expend lots of energy and if I am not carful I can then become overwhelmed and depleted. This means that my life has generally gone up and down in a of wave like fashion. I tend to feel very energised and am very active and creative and then I go through periods of reflection and relative calm. One of the things that made me aware of this rhythm was creating these blogs/podcasts and YouTube videos. Originally I tried to do them on a weekly basis but as I do them from the heart I found that I was not always in the right space and in the right energy. I found this very frustrating because I knew that there were advantages of being consistent - being consistent builds trust and dependability. It allows people to believe in you if you show up consistently. When I first started doing this about 4 to 5 years ago I knew that I wasn't doing this. I was quite hard on myself about this for a while until I realised that these were the positive things about consistency but that there were also downsides. Being too consistent can be boring, it can feel slightly stagnant and predictability can turn people off because nothing interesting happening. After pondering this I started to think about inconsistency differently. Inconsistency is where I tend to lean towards. The positives of inconsistency is that it is exciting, vibrant and interesting. The down sides are that it gives the impression of being flaky, unreliable and uncertain. 

What I have realised through pondering all of this over the last few weeks is that it's not about being consistent or being inconsistent it is about learning to balance the two. For me in doing this and through doing these blogs for you I have realised that when I am full of energy and I am feeling creative I can make multiple blogs/podcasts and videos. Then when I am in a more reflective mood I do not feel pressured to perform and I can use my time for pondering, reading, connecting and allowing space for inspiration. If I work with my natural flow and allow myself to surf the waves of energy then I am able to be both consistent and inconsistent which allows me to honour myself and to honour you too. 

If I was to force myself to be consistent and to do this every single week at a certain time I would feel very constrained and even writing about this makes me feel like my chest is tightening. I feel slightly suffocated and slightly hemmed in. I am sharing this with you because I think it is about balance. It is learning to be consistent but in a way that validates your natural rhythm as a person. As I was writing about all that I wanted to share with you it became very obvious that this talks directly into Tony Robbins’s human needs that I talked about in 1 Trick To Overcome Your Ego. The first two that he shares which are; 

1. The need for certainty 
2. The need for variety 

and the ability to balance these within our lives. Normally when Tony talks about these he is talking about our need to have these met by external circumstances. What I have realised in writing all of this is that it is not just our need to have our external circumstances meet our needs but it's actually what we need within ourselves. Let me explain - I have a need for certainty/consistency this means that I need to know that I am going to wake up tomorrow morning and be able to survive in this world. That I will have food and shelter and I will be able to survive in it, but I also have a need for variety. As I said before if there is too much certainty life becomes boring it becomes stagnant it loses its vibrancy it loses its aliveness. However if I have too much variety and too much uncertainty then I would most likely become incredibly stressed because I wouldn’t know how I would be able survive. What Tony Robbins was saying in regards to this is about external circumstances meeting our internal needs, but what I am sharing with you is that who we are is either consistent or inconsistent and we need to find balance within ourselves. We need to know our natural rhythm to know if we are more consistent and steadfast in which case we need to balance that with a bit of variety and a bit of excitement or whether like me you tend to towards inconsistency and this can cause life to be a little too exciting in which case there needs to be a little bit more consistency. The trick is to balance it so that you feel alive and not controlled or too out of control so that life is scary.

Have a fabulous week with so much love from me to you

Britt