I find it really hard to stick to a certain schedule. I'm very much a go with the flow person, but one of my friends said it this way and I think that it's really valuable how she presented it to me. And that is to start, instead of jumping straight into a daily routine, start with a monthly routine. What are the things that you want to get done on a monthly basis? And when do you need them to be scheduled in throughout the month? Once you have accomplished that, then you move to a week by week basis. say, for example, on a weekly basis, you want to work out three times a week in order to achieve some kind of health or fitness goal you have. You can schedule those in the week where best suits you and try your best to follow that. And once you feel that you have a good handle over your monthly schedule and then your weekly schedule, move on to your daily schedule. It's about starting small, as we were talking about with the micro habits. The worst, well, I guess the easiest way to derail any goal that you have is to go all in too quickly and to exhaust yourself and completely change your life. That's going to feel really unnatural. Our brains and our minds and our bodies like comfort. They like what is known. They do not like novel new experiences that kind of shake our core and our sense of kind of convenience and comfort. So if you immediately have this goal in mind and you change everything about your life, it's not going to be sustainable. So starting small and building up to the big is an incredible way to ensure that you are consistent with regards to your goals. Also set reminders for yourself as well. If you've got something in mind that you want to achieve, one of the best ways to keep your brain engaged in that long-term goal and to stay consistent in the habits that are required for its success is to remind yourself as often as possible your reasons for being invested in this and your vision. When I was at school, actually, one of my teachers told me to print out pictures of my dream university and the literal numbers of the grades that I wanted and place them around my desk. And I thought that was a little bit insane. I was like, that is, I do not want to be consumed by this goal. But what it actually did was allow me to stay more motivated because I had a visual cue and a visual reminder as to why I was pursuing a certain set of habits and a certain goal. And so on those days when it was harder to really get out of bed and it was harder to not give in to that instant gratification and go on my phone. That visual reminder acted as a safety net for my lack of motivation and it was incredibly powerful. I also think that it's important to surround yourself with people who have similar goals and that will inspire you. This was advice that was given to me by the wonderful Violet Benson. She hosts the podcast Almost Adulting and she told me that the easiest way for us to fall off the bandwagon and to give up on our goals is to be surrounded by people who don't believe in them and to be surrounded by people who don't believe enough in their own goals. That is one of the worst things you can do because we have to remind ourselves that we are an amalgamation of our five closest people in our lives. Our five closest friends, our family members, our partners, those people are what makes up our identity and from our identity stems our motivation. So it may seem harsh, but if you are around people who are going to pressure you into sacrificing your work to go and have fun all the time or are going to pressure you into feeling like your goals and your ambitions aren't worthy or don't deserve or don't deserve your time, I guess, you're kind of not really setting yourself up for a great start there. You're not really setting yourself up for success. So really closely examine where you sit and where your goals sit in regards to your environment, including your relationships. And it doesn't mean entirely cutting people out. That's ridiculous but I think what it does mean is knowing what it's going to come at an expense of and reminding yourself perhaps more often why you can't go out and drink and why it's probably not great to spend every night clubbing or every night hanging out with these people because you have a bigger goal in mind and you want to stay consistent. I've spent a large portion of this episode really rattling on about consistency and motivation and I think maybe we need a breath of fresh air from that because this is your daily reminder that not everything is about being productive. Our society is very success focused and success orientated. And I think that that can be dangerous because it convinces us that our outputs and our successes are the sole source of our worth. And that's not true. We can't forget that we are more than our achievements. We are more than our consistency. We are more than our habits. It's very easy, I think, especially in our 20s when we're really consumed by this pressure to be successful and to achieve all these amazing goals and amazing milestones. it can be very easy to think that the only value that we have to society is what we put out and that our success is the only thing that matters. And that's not true. You need to see that your identity and you need to recognize that your identity is more than just that it's actually made up of five core buckets it's made up of your relationships of your hobbies it's made up of your values your characteristics and then your achievements and as someone who gets very hyper fixated on one goal and can find that everything else around me kind of gets blocked out by this like hyper fixation. Sometimes it's really important to deliberately remind yourself that life is more than that. Life is more than your grades. Life is more than your career success. It's more than some fitness goal you have. It's also about enjoying your life and pouring as much as you can into every single domain so that you are happy. But back to what we were speaking about today, let's quickly summarize those tips. All of us want to be consistent. And I do think, like I said at the beginning, consistency is the easiest way to sustain our motivation and to stay focused on our long-term goals, but also enable us to enjoy life. So in order to build consistency, we need to focus on our micro habits, the small everyday things you can change in your life. We need to set both long-term and short-term goals, including focusing on delayed gratification and incremental gratification. We also need to rest. We need to not focus on our small setbacks and our small failures. They are not what matters. And we need to create a reasonable routine, something that is actually very easy to integrate rather than going all or nothing straight away, because that is the easiest path to burnout and to kind of falling off the bandwagon. your goals. We are such an ambitious generation, I think, and a lot of us have these grand ideas in mind. And like I've said so many times throughout this episode, you're not going to get there without consistency. The secret to success is consistency. And that is what's going to sustain you even when your motivation fails you. So I hope this has given you some practical, tangible advice and habits that you can implement in your own life. I'm rooting for you. I know you're going to get it done. I know you're going to achieve everything that you want. So hopefully with some of this information and some of this psychology, you can make some of those dreams a reality. And as always, if you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening right now. If you have a friend in mind who needs to hear this episode, send them the link right now. You should send it to them. It might help them out. It might make their day. And if you have an episode suggestion, like I always say, please feel free to follow us at that psychology podcast I love hearing from you I love hearing what's going on in your life and how psychology and science can explain some of those experiences so please feel free to share over there and give us some feedback or just come and say hi whatever suits you best and we will be back next week with another episode As a parent, no two days are ever the same. At Care.com, you can find trusted and flexible sitters to help manage your family's ever-changing schedule. Care.com can even help you out with housekeepers, dog walkers, senior caregivers, and more. So you can find care for all you love. And 100% of caregivers who use Care.com have been background checked with CareCheck, a key first step in hiring confidently. To get the help you need to make it all work,, whether you shop in-store or online. Download the Baker's app now to save big. Baker's, fresh for everyone. I'm Jay Shetty and welcome to the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast. In this week's episode, I sat down with media personality and businesswoman Kim Kardashian. Once you realize that this life really isn't about you and it's about helping as many people as you can, all these doors open up for you and it's a really great place to be.