Consistent Choices

Building from the differentiation of conscious vs unconscious choices comes consistent choices.
Now, let me ask you. If you know someone who say he'll do one thing but instead he does something else, what will most of us think of him? That guy is not reliable. He says one thing but does another. He is not trustworthy. I'll never do business with him again. In short, what we'll say of him is that, he is inconsistent. And as human beings, we have the need for being seen as consistent. Because, we want others to see us as honest, reliable, trustworthy, and most importantly, consistent.

Of course consistent makes us 'look' good. There is another extremely important reason why consistency is great. Imagine if you decide on going on a diet. So because of impulse, (maybe it was something that someone said) you decided to lose weight. The first day you starve and even exercise. All those around you were cheering you on and you're feeling pretty good about yourself. Then the next day you decided to lower your food intake again and start taking the stairs. And this goes on for another day. Then what happens? You probably feel tired and now your body is aching. The hunger pangs start striking again. You feel like you needed a break. You then decide to stop exercising and that leads to you gaining back your weight and you start saying to yourself, its no use. So, you give up.

What happened here is a classic case of individuals who decide to go out and do something because they were either motivated by something someone said, or they were influenced by their friends. They do it for a while, then stop. By being inconsistent, we fail to reach our goals. Yes, we all slip sometimes, but until you decide to get on your feet again and commit to working on it again, this is when you really FAIL. Of course, one of the reasons why we slipped back to our old ways was because we have not changed something at a deeper level or we have not satisfied the intent with another more resourceful behaviour, this will be discussed later.

Being unaware of unconscious choices will cause us to get results that may not be consistent. For those of you who've been shopping with your little ones, you'll know what I'm saying. You go with your little ones to a supermarket, get approached by a sales person who invites you and your little ones to taste a particular food or snack in small cups or scoops. You then turned to them and asked if they liked it. They nod in agreement as their chorus of "yeahs" rang through the aisle. You buy it and when you feed them back home, they don't want to eat it after the first time. Now you're wondering if you've been duped into buying something that differs from what you've tasted. What happened here is that as you are unaware of your unconscious choices, you will have difficulty trying to figure out why something happened like this one day and then its totally different another!

And what if you are a salesperson. Because you are unaware of how you make certain choices, you are not able to consistently replicate your results over and over again. Think about that!
Now, if you want to be able to make consistent choices, then you'll need to be aware of how you arrive at those choices so that you are able to either replicate it (if its useful) or stop doing it (if its not useful).

Challenge for you: Identify your consistent choices!

Step 1: Identify one useful and one not useful choice that you've made consistently up until now.

Step 2: State how has this useful choice been helping you and how this not useful choice has been hurting you.

Step 3: How else can you apply this useful to other areas in your life where you can see some benefits? As for the not useful choice, what might be your intention behind this behaviour?

Love and respect,
Melvyn Tan