If you are struggling to reach your goals or find it hard to stick with the habits that are supposed to move you toward the future you want, this is where everything starts to change.
By understanding consistency in a practical, realistic way, it becomes something you can actually build instead of something you constantly feel guilty about lacking.
My name is Cicilia Ben. I am the CEO and founder of lifeinspohub.com.
I have built, scaled, and sold three businesses by the age of 28, reaching a net worth of over $500K, and today I run LIFEINSPOHUB.com, a portfolio of companies valued at more than $100K.
The single skill that made all of that possible was not talent, intelligence, or motivation. It was consistency.
Consistency is making a commitment and seeing it through.
It is aligning your words with your actions over a long period of time.
It is not complicated, but it is difficult.
Over the past 15 years, consistency is the one thing I believe I have done exceptionally well, whether in my workouts, my diet, my marriage, my business, or my relationships.
That is why I break consistency down into clear, tactical practices that anyone can apply.
Step One: Set Clear Goals Anchored to a Vision
The first step to being consistent is setting your goals. Surprisingly, many people fail here before they even begin.
They say they want to be more disciplined or more consistent, but they cannot clearly articulate what they are actually working toward.
What is the vision for your business? What is the vision for your body? What is the vision for your marriage or your life?
It is nearly impossible to be consistent if you do not know your destination. Even worse, you can be highly consistent in the wrong direction.
At a qualitative level, you need to define who you want to be and what that looks like. I will share a personal vision that I rarely speak about.
I see myself fifteen years from now sitting on the set of one of the world’s most well-known talk shows, talking about being one of the top five women on the Forbes list.
I know exactly how I look, how I sound, and the confidence I carry. I know what I am talking about. I am explaining how
I built a company through praise instead of punishment and how I helped reshape workplace culture through both my content and my leadership.
In this vision, I am healthy, fit, confident, and happy. I have good energy, I look put together, and I feel grounded.
That mental snapshot becomes my anchor on the days when I feel uncertain or resistant.
When I do not want to do the work, I return to that image.
Once you identify your future snapshot, the next step is to reverse engineer it.
Ask yourself how you want to feel, how you want to show up, and what you want your life to look like.
From there, you turn that vision into both qualitative and quantitative goals.
A vision without a plan remains a dream. To make it real, it must become structured.
I break my plans down into yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals.
When I was trying to lose 100 pounds, the idea of that amount of weight felt overwhelming.
So instead of relying on a vision board alone, I created two boards: one for the vision and one for the goals. I defined what success looked like for the year, the month, the week, and the day.
On a daily level, that meant knowing exactly how much water I needed to drink, how often I needed to work out, and how many times I needed to strength train.
On a monthly level, it meant tracking strength increases in the gym and fitting into certain clothes. Breaking it down into daily actions made the vision believable.
It transformed something intimidating into something manageable.
Many people stop at the dream stage. They imagine a powerful future but never do the work of turning that future into actionable steps.
If you want consistency, you must pull your future self into the present and let that version of you guide your daily actions.
Step Two: Choose Supporting Behaviors
Once your goals are clear, the next practice is choosing behaviors that support those goals.
The reality is that most people are already consistent.
They are just consistent with behaviors that work against what they want.
I have been there myself. I was once consistently drinking, consistently using drugs, and consistently wasting hours on distractions.
That was consistency, just pointed in the wrong direction.
Many people think they lack discipline, when in reality they are disciplined about habits that sabotage them.
The simplest framework I use when changing behavior is asking three questions.
What do I need to start doing to move closer to my goals?
What do I need to stop doing because it interferes with my progress?
And what can I continue doing that is neutral or helpful?
At this stage of my career, I know that as a CEO I can easily become the bottleneck in my company.
We are growing quickly, which means I have to evolve how I work.
That evolution requires changing habits that once served me but no longer do.
To figure out what needed to change,
I spoke with friends who run companies at the scale and impact I aspire to reach. I asked to see their calendars.
When I compared their schedules to mine, one difference stood out immediately. I had hour-long meetings. They had 10 to 15-minute meetings.
They were not working more hours. They were getting more value from the same amount of time.
That insight led to specific behavior changes.
I eliminated hour-long meetings entirely. All meetings defaulted to 10 to 15 minutes. At the same time,
I kept 30-minute one-on-ones because investing in people consistently produces the greatest return.
When my people grow, the business grows.
Supporting behaviors are not about doing more.
They are about doing the right things consistently and removing what no longer aligns with where you are going.
Step Three: Engineer Your Environment for Success
The third practice of consistency is making it easy. You do not rise to the level of your goals.
You fall to the level of your environment. Your surroundings either support your habits or quietly sabotage them.
The question becomes how you can design an environment that makes good behaviors easier to start and bad behaviors easier to stop.
One of the first times I applied this principle was early in my career when I realized my emotional reactions were affecting my leadership.
I am expressive, and my face often shows exactly how I feel.
I noticed that when people brought me bad news, my facial reactions discouraged them from being fully honest in the future.
Even if I said nothing, my expression communicated judgment or frustration.
To fix this, I placed a sticky note on my computer that simply said, “Be neutral.”
That one small environmental cue changed how I showed up for my team for years.
It reminded me that most problems are not catastrophic, just inconvenient.
By staying neutral, I created psychological safety and gained better information, which made me a better leader.
Behavioral research suggests it takes about 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic.
Until then, your environment must carry the burden.
If you do not engineer reminders, systems, and cues, you will default to old habits before the new ones stick.
Step Four: Reward Consistent Progress
The fourth practice of consistency is rewarding progress.
Behaviors that are reinforced positively tend to repeat. This is true whether the reinforcement comes from yourself or someone else.
In fact, recruiting a third party dramatically increases success.
This is why the most effective programs for fitness, nutrition, and behavior change involve accountability partners, coaches, therapists, or supportive family members.
External reinforcement keeps your attention on progress rather than on the discomfort of change.
One example comes from when Alex was writing his book, 100 Million Dollar Leads.
He spent six to eight hours a day writing with very little immediate feedback.
Writing can feel punishing when there is no reinforcement. Knowing this, I made it a point to consistently acknowledge and praise his effort.
That reinforcement made it easier for him to stay consistent during a long, demanding process.
Consistency thrives on encouragement, especially in the early stages when results are not yet visible.
