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Welcome to the Ivy League Prep Academy podcast, where we help you make a meaningful impact in your communities and get accepted to your dream university. Becoming the person that Ivy League schools recruit is more enjoyable and meaningful than you ever imagined. Come find out why.

Welcome again in to the Ivy League Prep Academy. Today we're talking about law five, the law of consistency. This is part of our series on the 15 invaluable laws of growth by John Maxwell.

And today, Steve is going to tell us a little bit more about the law of consistency. Motivation gets you going. Discipline keeps you growing.

Steve, why don't you take us away with or take it away with law number five? Well, here I think this is just so important. There are so many people who get started, have the willpower, have the excitement, maybe some passion around making some kind of change. And that's fantastic.

That's a critical first step. And yet you can get discouraged if this happens over and over and over again because you lack the discipline or the self regulation. You lack whatever it is that keeps you going.

And consistency is all about this, taking you from passion and an idea to a finished product eventually. And so think about this. A couple of questions just to begin as you're listening.

Do you know what you need to improve? Above all else? You need to improve yourself. And so how do we improve ourselves? Improving ourselves involves the choices that we make. It involves our own self discipline, our own attitudes.

So how you think and what you think about where you're at and where you want to go is going to lead to some choices that you make. And ultimately, we want to improve our strengths, our abilities. One of the critical strengths or one of the critical skills to develop is self regulation or self discipline.

And this is something that we should build wherever we're at right now. We need to start by building on that and becoming a little bit more capable of regulating ourselves, regulating our emotions, regulating our thoughts and disciplining, right? So we take action not based on maybe what emotion we are feeling in the moment, not based on the weather that we can see around us. We take our own weather with us.

We change our emotions when they don't fit the activities that we need to perform. And we act, we do the things consistently that create success. That's what self discipline is about.

And that is law number five. Usually when I think of consistency and motivation and something we talk about a lot, just overall effective productivity and making the most out of life, I think of these external factors, these external measurements that indicate how well you're doing, whether it's with your exercise, whether it's with your goals in the job place or in school or in whatever kind of activity you're setting your goals in. I think of these external measurements.

What you seem to be talking about is internal measurements and internal seeing yourself and understanding yourself enough to improve yourself. Is that right? Yeah, well, absolutely. Think about self regulation just in general.

Extreme self regulation breakdowns lead to gambling problems or overeating drinking problems and even excess shopping, things like that. But on a slightly less serious scale, you have things like procrastination, or you have things like losing steam when you once were really excited about a goal or a dream that you had. But before you really see any results from your efforts, your efforts wane because you've lost that discipline and you're just not taking one step at a time.

You took a bunch of steps and then you stopped. And so, yeah, a lot of what stops us from growth, from getting to that kind of finish line is those little micro decisions that we make along the way. And this is something that I think we go into quite a bit of detail in the Ivy League Prep Academy course, right? We have our defeating procrastination course where we talk about your intentions do not have to be met by your emotional state, right? If your emotional state does not support your intention, the task at hand, that doesn't mean that you put off the task at hand.

That means that you develop the self discipline, the self regulation, the emotional intelligence to say, well, I don't feel like it, but the truth is I'm not going to feel more like it later either. This is a task that's not pleasant for me, but it's important for me to do it's important. If I want to grow, I need to develop this skill set.

And that requires that I take these activities, I take these actions that are not necessarily pleasant right now, and I'm not going to feel more like doing it later. And so now is the time to do it, and I'm not going to delay that just because my mood doesn't match my intention. I think another really good example here is elite athletes, right? So if you're going to be elite as a student, as a business owner, or an employee that wants to move up, then you have to treat your project, your growth, like an athlete treats their sport.

And a runner is not going to say, well, today it's raining or it's really cold outside, I'm not going to go run today. The weather doesn't meet my intentions. No, an elite athlete is going to practice in the rain and the snow.

They don't get put out by changes in their external world. They bring whatever they need with them, and they do it every day consistently. And that's what creates elite levels of performance.

I think oftentimes we consider motivation to come from sometimes like a singular event or some very compelling sort of experience that we go through, which is why motivational speakers do so well in their industry, because some of those moments have the ability to really make us look inward and change something about the way we're approaching life. But what you seem to be describing is more of an effect from daily habits and routines and disciplining through the small activities or the small decisions, small compounded efforts that really make it so that you're consistently going in the direction that you want to be growing. Yeah, I like the way you put that.

Think about our three podcast series on Atomic habits by James Clear. I mean, just a brilliant book. I think that he kind of gives us the framework, he gives us the strategies and the tactics that we can use to remove friction is the way he puts it.

Remove friction from the activities that we should be doing and add friction to the habits that we want to stop. And it's true, consistency and consistent action towards your end result can become a habit. Once you self identify as someone who runs every day, I'm a runner, then you don't change that because it's raining outside.

You go and run in the rain instead of running in the sun and you don't change based on changes around you. That's an identity driven habit, an identity driven behavior. And so absolutely, those are three fantastic resources for developing this self regulation that gets you to the point where you can be more consistent.

Another thing that you touched on is where does motivation come from? And absolutely it can come just from listening to a podcast like this. Your motivation can be sparked or you can just get an idea out of the blue and it feels really exciting to you. Absolutely.

You should use wherever that excitement comes from. Use your motivation to generate activity and to move towards your goals. However, if you really want to get to consistent success, it's important to have some achievement along the way, right? So a lot of people feel like the motivation comes first and then we begin to achieve.

And what research shows is that when you achieve things, it motivates you. And so if you're at that stage where you've got a great idea, you've started acting on it, but you haven't put in enough consistent effort to see any results from your ideas yet, from your activities yet, then it's important to try to find ways to generate some success and generate some achievement so that you can keep yourself going and ultimately, consistency. You have to find ways to keep putting 1ft in front of the other.

And if, for example, your project is just too big and it's going to take months or years before you start to see any kind of achievement, maybe start focusing a little bit more narrowly. Find ways to focus on something that can show that your activities are achieving something in a much shorter time frame. So instead of creating the huge project, start by creating a much smaller project.

Create that impact and then scale the project. Those are kind of some important strategies to stay excited, to stay motivated even when you get months into your activities. And sometimes that motivation just kind of dies out.

Consistency is critical if you want to see growth. Yeah. And having that momentum kind of pull you along as well.

You never feel worse than when you've constructed a habit. And you have fostered that habit. You've developed it completely and for months at a time.

You have done spectacularly well at keeping that habit going. And then something happens. You get sick or there's some kind of life change or some kind of emergency that throws you off and you just think, oh no, the momentum of these months of creation and fostering this habit could all be undone in this moment of time.

And that's where that momentum is playing in to. The fear that you feel at that moment and let that fear propel you toward not letting that emergency get in the way of destroying your long term habit I think, is an important thing to remember as well. Yeah, sure.

Well, and there will be surprises, right? Maybe a runner doesn't stop because it's raining, but should probably stop if there's a hurricane or there's a tornado. And certainly a global pandemic is going to change some projects. Some people have lost jobs and some people have had ambitions to create businesses or to create projects that make a difference that now suddenly because of something outside of our control, there's been a massive change.

And that's certainly going to happen. But what I like is this section still is relevant and Law Five, the law of consistency, doesn't say that if you are consistent, you will absolutely reach your goal. It says if you are consistent, then you will keep growing.

Right? And if you are not consistent, you might grow and then you'll get stagnant. Here's a quote from John Maxwell that I think helps to tie these ideas together and help us understand there are external factors and we need to be realistic about them. But that's really not the focus of being consistent.

We want to be consistent so that we can experience that growth. So he says in his book, he says all the time, I see people with purpose who are inconsistent in their progress. They have the ambition to succeed and they show aptitude for their job, yet they do not move forward.

Why? Because they think they can master their job but don't need to master themselves. And so sometimes we have projects that we're excited about, we have goals that we're ambitious and we're motivated by, and we focus so much on the external that we forget about ourselves and the need for self regulation, the need for consistent activity so that we can grow, so that we can match the moment, right? If our ambition is grand, then we need to grow to a stage where we can match that ambition or we're not ready for it, we're not going to be able to step up and make it happen. And so that personal growth is something that is within our control and it's critical to our success.

If there was some overarching point or some overarching takeaway that we should pull from this podcast episode to get to know ourselves or to develop the discipline and the consistency that we need, what would you say it is? Yeah, fantastic question, and I think we could go in a few different directions here, but for me, I think that the goal. I think what John Maxwell is getting at is, one, having some internal clarity around why you want to do what you're doing. Why are you motivated, why do you want to dream big? Why do you want to have this impact that you want to have? How are you making a difference in the world? And why is that important to you? And once you understand that, use that clarity to set intentions around your own personal growth so that you can grow into the type of person that can handle that kind of project, right, that can handle that kind of impact, you're the kind of person that is ready for it and you can make that impact.

So in order to grow and in order to become greater than your current abilities and attributes, allow you to be as far as impact in order to grow into those shoes, so that you can fill those shoes, to make that impact, you need to buy into this idea of self discipline, buy into the idea of self regulation, of emotional intelligence. Understand your emotions, understand your thoughts. You mentioned understanding your fear and being strategic about creating habits that can enhance your personal growth.

And remember, this is all about you. This is all about your growth. So if external variables get in the way and derail your original plans, it doesn't mean that there's a disaster.

It doesn't mean that you've been derailed. It means it's time to Pivot. But all of the growth, all of the skills that you've developed, all of the attributes that you have been embodying is still with you.

And when you Pivot because of this external change, when you Pivot, you are a more capable person. And that growth is still valid. It's still relevant to you and your new project.

So that personal clarity, the why, the impact you want to make, and the personal growth, it's all still there. And now if something external threatens to derail you, like a global pandemic or a hurricane or something crazy, you can Pivot and still make that impact because you've had that growth. And that's what discipline gets you.

I love that. So get back to the why. Tie the why into everything that you're doing, the goals that you're setting, the action plans, the reason for you doing whatever it is that you're wanting to do.

And accomplish. Bring the why into it so that it's top of mind, so that you understand why it's important to you, how it shapes you as a person and it helps you understand yourself because it is the why of why you started that particular project to begin with. And then with that as your foundation, choose to be self disciplined.

Because you know that's the way that you're going to grow into those shoes that you need to fill in order to make the impact you want to make.