Written by: Alaina Schwartz, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Consistency is the Number One thing that holds people back from achieving their next level of success, even at 6-7+ Figures.
Most entrepreneurs who come to me are working 50-80 hours a week. There’s no question that they are busy. Yet few of them are actually highly productive. They tend to do a lot of busy work (and also have a lot of distractions). When we dig deeper into how they spend their time, even though they may be constantly working, they are not consistently taking the type of action that really moves the needle forward.
Why is that?
I believe underlying inconsistency is a belief system, elaborate excuses concocted to be good but not be great. Of course, it doesn’t feel like excuses. It feels like reality because they’re working hard.
Our subconscious mind has created patterns, mostly from the time we were younger than seven years old, to keep us in our paradigm. Our paradigm is our assumptions and beliefs that determine how we see the world and ourselves, how we look at things. Our subconscious mind knows how to address the problems that arise in our current paradigm. Therefore, it knows it’s going to be safe. Its number one job is to keep us safe and alive.
Being consistent requires accepting one hundred percent ownership of and responsibility for our actions AND results. It’s so much safer to come up with excuses why we won’t succeed than to accept that we aren’t yet willing to pay the price our dream asks of us.
By paying a price, I don’t mean working more or harder. I rarely advocate for people to work harder. In fact, people hire me to help them work significantly less. We created our paradigm to help us survive our childhood, but that belief system no longer serves us as adults and prevents us from reaching our goals. Usually, paying the price means letting go of that old paradigm and adopting a new empowering paradigm, instead. Very simple, but not necessarily easy.
“That person is succeeding because ____, but I’m not that lucky.”
“That strategy works for that person, but it won’t work for me.”
“I’m doing everything I should be doing, but I’m still not seeing the result.” “You don’t know what I’m going through, what’s happening to me is different.”
Please don’t feel bad, because EVERYONE does this.
Everything we want, all of our goals, are outside our comfort zone. Because our comfort zone is safe to our subconscious mind, it wants to keep us in our comfort zone. And our subconscious mind is a million times more powerful than our conscious mind.
I often liken our minds to a computer system. We have this database stored in our subconscious mind of all the experiences that we've had over the course of our life. When we go to do something that we haven't done before, like take action on a goal we’ve set, it searches the database and tries to figure out “How have I done this and survived?”, except because we haven't done it before, it doesn’t have evidence of how we survived it. There’s no record of what we did to survive it in the database. Therefore, it doesn't believe we are going to survive. It will then create some form of self-sabotage in our life so we stop taking the very action that would move us towards achieving our goals.
Because our subconscious mind is trying to prevent us from taking the kind of action that would move us closer to our goals, we take the right action inconsistently. By way of example, we may take the right action but not get the outcomes we want and expect from that action.
Believing that we should have gotten immediate results, we create a narrative that the action isn’t working and give up either temporarily or permanently. Most of us haven’t learned that mistakes and perceived “failures” are part of the journey of success; they’re not moving us in the opposite direction. It’s like driving a car with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. It’s easy to see that it would be challenging to arrive at our destination this way or take far longer than we anticipated.
Integrity in business is when our values, words and actions are aligned. When we say we’re going to do something and don’t do it, we create an Integrity Gap. To be able to override the subconscious belief that the goal, and the action to get there, are unsafe, the Integrity Gap needs to be closed. That means taking the right action CONSISTENTLY without regard to the fruits of that action.
A person could have five tasks that they commit to doing today. If they only complete three of those five things, they are widening the Integrity Gap. They haven’t done everything they committed to. It’s important to only commit to what we know we will do in the time frame we say we’ll do it. Doing this consistently eliminates the Integrity Gap. It allows our subconscious mind to build trust in us - that we will do what we say we will, when we say we’ll do it.
When we shift our mindset and understand that what we want is so much closer than we think (and it is), and be consistent in our actions, we see growth quickly. Seeing different results with regularity is what allows us to override the old programming so that the subconscious mind expands our comfort zone. It now knows that the goal and the action are safe and can trust us to get there.
When we show up, follow the right systems, put in the focused effort, over and over again, our success becomes inevitable.
It is a choice.
So what are you choosing?
If you’re a purpose-driven entrepreneur and would like to scale with lightning speed while shaving 20+ hours off of your workweek, I invite you to connect with me here on LinkedIn.
Here’s a free case study to watch.
For more info, visit Alaina Schwartz and follow Alaina on Facebook and Instagram.
Alaina Schwartz, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Alaina Schwartz is the Founder & CEO of Alaina Schwartz Enterprises. She’s a speaker, author, and Business & Mindset Mentor. At 14, Alaina suffered a traumatic brain injury, and her mother was told she’d have permanent brain damage. Her mother retrained Alaina’s brain for a full recovery. Then, after 18 years as an attorney in the music industry and the EVP and Exec Board Member of the largest independent music company globally, she walked away from it all to discover her purpose. Her personal life completely unraveled. She became hyper-focused on building her life purpose and rewiring her brain again for success and fulfillment. She has created multiple six-figure companies and a beautiful life since. As a business and mindset coach/mentor, she uses those experiences and her training as the foundation of her work with entrepreneurs, helping them scale their income & impact while working 20+ hours a week less. Alaina’s mission is to help people remember who they truly are so they can live their purpose and full potential.
