Consistency is key... Or so I've been hearing from everyone and myself when it pertains to anything, whether it be related to our work or our lives... It's a word that has been used so many times that it has personified the meaning of consistency.
If I'm being honest with you all, I too have been in this loop of saying that I need to be consistent with what I'm doing, I need to keep working or living in a certain way, and that expectation that's been created by saying this to myself has at times come at my own detriment.
While I am someone who would fall in the camp of 'I need to push myself to achieve what I have set out to achieve', I would also say that the idea of being consistent and having this mindset makes you set a bar for yourself, a benchmark that you want to meet and exceed every time you pick up a new project and one that can become toxic in its nature. In this case, the idea of consistency comes in the form of consistently wanting to outperform yourself, great to want to do that, but not one that should be enforced.
Over the past two years, I have been struggling with this simple concept. As you all might know, we here are working on a collective based around creativity and all that it entails, which requires us to be consistent in posting, creating, planning, strategising and so much more, plus considering this is a passion project for us here, we have other things that we work on too like many others out there who have been giving their lives to their work, passion and so on.
The fact of the matter here is that we are required, at times, to create even when we are not in the right state to do so, required to work on projects when not in the state to do so, many times not by anyone else but ourselves and that can get suffocating as we want to fill in all the outlines an empty box but the thing is, we are almost out of ink... So, what do we do?
It's during times like these that we end up shutting down completely, halting everything that we were doing with some additional mental and physical damage... Sounds great, doesn't it?
This does not just end at work, it also pertains to our lives outside of it all, where we want to portray a certain self and be consistent in our relationships too, so why do we let ourselves get to this point?
From what I can understand and I may be wrong here, we have truly been influenced by everything around us, from our peers on social media, the messages that we see every day, our work and their expectations, and our own dreams, and passions that we want to work towards, there is so much of it around us that we get swept into it and while it isn't a bad thing to want to work hard and do our best at everything, this little notion also does not leave any space for us to be ourselves. There is a requirement that is created to consistently have our motor running and that in itself is the cause for our breakdown.
This idea of doing it all requires us to put in our maximum effort and while I too want to do that, I also need to realise that to be able to put in this maximum effort and to be consistent with my work and everything in my life, I also need to allow myself to simply live... and to allow ourselves to do that we need to learn to break that cycle we have all been stuck in.
So the question remains, how do I do that? I wonder if you all are asking yourselves this question as well. One day we will definitely find the right answer to this, but till then, our search continues.
Hope you Sheeples liked this article and maybe could relate to it too. Let us know your thoughts about it all in the comments below!
This is Ayushman Jain aka 1000Minus7 signing out!