The fastest way to make a change in your life is to focus on it everyday.

Sounds simple enough.

Take exercise for instance. The body has a rapid positive reaction to 15 – 30 minute daily work-out. The trick is the consistency part.

It’s common knowledge that in order to create a new habit it requires about 21 days of conscious attention. When was the last time you were able to do something everyday for three weeks?

All it takes is missing one day and before you know it, a week has gone by. Look, I’ve written before about how our perception of time (or time itself) has sped up. Since three weeks seems to blow by pretty fast, you’d think being consistent about something for that period of time would be easy.

Guess what? When you consciously focus your attention on something, it actually slows down time.

So that 15 minutes of exercise seems like the longest thing you do all day. You start to become hyperaware that you have to exercise. It’s not surprising that your “resistance to change” starts throwing up distractions which sets you up to miss a day.

How do you achieve consistency?

Don’t do the same thing in the same place everyday. Do something that takes your attention off the time your spending, like listening to your ipod. Turn your consistency into a game you’re playing and winning.

If you fall off the wagon, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get back on board. Don’t let yourself feel guilty. Guilt will lead to avoidance and reinforce the feeling that you just can’t do it. The truth is, you can do it but you have to be aware that there are forces that are working against your making a change. They are the multitude of habits which already occupy your day to day life.

Your biggest challenge is going to be keeping your existing habits from preventing you from creating the new one.

-Bob Baran