Your Need for Consistency Keeps You Stuck

I replaced consistency with massive progress, and you can too.

Photo by dylan nolte on Unsplash

Here’s how life should be:

First comes school, then college, then either further education or a first-steps kind of a job, then success.

First comes the flirtation, then the dates, then the proposal, then the happily ever after.

It’s a natural progression that makes us feel safe and in control. We’re always looking for the logical sequence of how things should be. First comes A, then B, then C. First comes 1, then 2, then 3.

Now, consciously, you know life doesn’t really go like that. But that doesn’t matter because subconsciously, you prefer consistency over most things.

Robert Cialdini confirms it. He looks at consistency in his book Influence: Science & Practice.

“Behavioral consistency is a judgement heuristic to which we default in order to ease decision making: it is easier to make one decision, and stay consistent to it, than it is to make a new decision every single time we are presented with a problem. From an evolutionary standpoint, behavioral consistency also serves us well: in a social environment, unpredictable people are less likely to be liked and to thrive among others.