Written by Natalie Macaluso, Consultant at Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?
In a world where a lot of people seek the quick fix, sugar rush, life–hack solution, why is consistency still important?
You can’t train for the Olympics with a hack.
You can’t learn a language by bingeing Duolingo in a week.
A company doesn’t become a unicorn just by writing an Initial Public Offering.
Results, in any walk of life, come from consistent steps and processes. Consistency over time starts to have a compound effect. You create massively increased results by making small, smart choices over time.
When the world is in flux and the winds of change seem beyond your control – recession, plummeting foreign exchange or instability in government – the one thing you can control is your consistent approach to take action, and it does pay dividends.
Simple, Focussed & Hard Work:
Eliud Kipchoge is a long-distance runner that transitioned from the 5000 meters to marathon distance and on the 25th of September 2022 at the Berlin Marathon he shaved 30 seconds off his own world record finishing at 2:01:09. His name is currently THE name in long distance running.
His training is managed around three principles: simple, focussed, and hard work.
The facility he uses in Kenya is basic and everyone training, including Kipchoge, mucks in to maintain it. He could train anywhere in the world but chooses this because it removes distraction. His carefully constructed training plan follows a 5–6-day schedule but he rarely looks ahead beyond that week. This allows him to put his full focus into improving the tiny details in his performance at a day-to-day level. He has a group of highly experienced training partners and friends around him, successful in their own right and many of them comment on the time and volume he is prepared to put in. He works hard.


My 12-Week Plan:
I recently completed my first marathon in London on October 2nd. If you had told me to do one 18 months ago, I would have politely told you to jog on. I liked running but why on earth would I want to do such a thing? Moreover, the notion of actually running that far seemed like a physical impossibility. With a good enough reason, that of raising awareness for a condition a friend was recently diagnosed with, my mind was changed. When I signed up in March, I hadn’t even run a half-marathon.
I embarked on a 12-week training plan which involved some form of training almost every day, and a voracious commitment to carbohydrates. Whilst I did have the notion of a time in my head, I wanted to enjoy it and finish injury free.
I didn’t go from zero to ten miles overnight, but I did start to notice when 10k was classified as an “easy” run for me. Mind blowing. I have always been quite fit, but I stopped focusing on distance and started focusing on time on feet. That seemed easier or more manageable. Each week on my long runs I would add between 10-15mins more time on my feet. Consistently adding small increments started to really add up.
In my training, I only made it to 18 miles but somehow trusted that the consistent time on my feet through the 12 weeks would carry me through. I finished with a smile on my face and a spring in my step. They say the crowd carries you, and while that is true, they can’t carry you the whole way. Had I not chipped away for 12 weeks, I know it would have been a very different ending.


Businesses that think, plan and know that a consistent acquisition of customers is directly linked to consistent and rhythmic marketing activity, see year on year growth.
Below are just three examples of organisations who have seen the rewards of strategic consistency:
1). Lush’s Happy Soap Builds Credibility:
You have probably walked past the retail cosmetics company Lush before. Even if you haven’t seen them, you have probably smelt their potent products wafting out onto a high street near you. For 27 years Lush has stated “We believe in making effective products from fresh, organic fruit and vegetables” and “We believe in happy people making happy soap, putting our faces on our products and making our mums proud.”
If you walk into a Lush store, touch, try (and sniff) their products, everything is consistently aligned with this belief. Natural, simple and usually with a sticker of the face of the person who made it. The company has grown from its first small store in Poole in the UK to 951 stores worldwide.
The scents may have evolved, but if you know Lush you know its consistently what it always has been and that is why customers keep voting with their feet, and face wash. Those that weave consistency into their fabric can build credibility and trust with their customers and that deliver long-lasting relationships.


2). The McDonalds Model: Simple, Logical & Repeatable.
Ray Kroc was a door-to-door salesman, selling anything from paper cups to ice cream blenders. One day his consistent door knocking (and consistent door slamming) paid off.
Aged 53, he followed up when a highly unusual order came in for 8 blenders. In 1954 Kroc travelled to San Bernadino California to see who could possibly need such an order, as it was about 100% more than he had been selling to date. The restaurant was calledMcDonald’s and Kroc saw an opportunity before him.
The brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald owned the restaurant and had decided to focus on 9 items, and only nine items to perfect them. They developed their “Speedee System” which allowed them to operate at high speed and efficiency whilst still serving a great hamburger. This model, which underpins fast food delivery as we know it today was simple, logical and repeatable. It could be consistently franchised making McDonald’s what it is today.
Whether you choose to darken the doors of the golden arches or not, (personally I am in the not camp but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognise what they do well) there is absolute consistency in the product they offer.


3). Growing a 10M Audience – The Diary of a CEO:
Steven Bartlett is a 29-year-old entrepreneur, the youngest Dragon on BBC’s Dragons Den and the host and creator of ‘The Diary of a CEO’, now one of the highest rated podcasts across Apple, Spotify, Amazon and YouTube. He is prolific and attributes much of his success to consistency.
This is particularly true of his podcast. He started it in 2017 and if you look back to the very beginning, he released them in a sporadic fashion. Different days, with different lengths of time between each one. He did this for the first three years. Whenever he was consistent and published an episode every Monday for a few months, the podcast audience immediately grew. The growth was compounding. He could see from the data that if he took a holiday, stopped, and came back, he was starting from square one again. So, he decided that no matter what, he would publish an episode every single Monday, which meant recording them in advance. By doing so, the podcast audience base exploded. Figuring out how to create sustainable consistency was the key to unlocking incredible growth.


How do you build a consistent plan?
You might be thinking “These are all nice stories and now I remember I need to buy Mum’s bath bomb for Christmas, but how do I get started with building consistent action for myself?”
Here’s how:
1). Focus On What’s Important
When it comes to your business, your fitness plan, or the dream you have about turning your garden into a Grand Designs Masterpiece, there are so many things you could do, but will they really help?
It is impossible to focus on everything, so to get started, be decisive (and perhaps a little bit ruthless) with what you need to focus on most.
Once our Co-Founder Ben Hunt-Davis and his rowing crew had decided they had their sights set on winning gold, they did just that. They cut warm up runs and circuit training out of their plan. They realised that for the time it took, it wasn’t giving them the return they needed to make the boat go faster.
Imagine a band that came up with their name and then started designing t-shirts and trying to book gigs. Might be a good idea to start writing some songs first, no?
Focus on what is most important for you, right now, to get you started on achieving your goal.
2). Make It Simple, Make It Fun and Set The Environment Up For Success
You may have a mountain of a goal to climb but start on the path of least resistance. If you can make it simple, fun and set your environment up for success, you will be on to a winner.
In my marathon training, I didn’t enjoy the interval runs. Those that required me to go fast to increase my aerobic and anaerobic capacity. Wait, before I lose you…
Simple: I realised that an interval was exactly that. All I had to do was get through each interval, and then I would have a rest. I stopped thinking about the 30 mins of total work and instead simply concentrated on the 1,2,3 or 5 mins that lie immediately in front me.
Make it fun: I love music and I love dancing, so I made a banging playlist of my favourite floor fillers and reframed the activity more as a dance rather than a horrible load of fast running. I probably ended up expending more energy than I should have waving my arms around and shouting “Chooooooone” in the end.
Set the environment up for success: “I can’t run very fast, and I give up when it gets too hard.” Not the most useful mantra when I was out pounding the pavement, but this is what was going through my head.
I was training through that huge heat wave we had in the UK this summer and one of the record days that was hitting 40 degrees just happened to be an interval day on my calendar. It would have been so easy to avoid it, sensible even, but I knew the benefit the activity would give me. So, I called a local gym and asked if I could buy a day pass to use the treadmill, with air conditioning!
It was the best interval session I had ever done. Having the treadmill somehow shut off that voice in my head and I was able to run faster without quitting. After that I did my intervals on the treadmill!
3). Constantly Review What’s Working – Small Changes Along The Way
When I joined Will It? as a Consultant, having read the book, the Performance Review seemed to be the stuff of legend. Simple, but so important. Ben and his crew did one after every session, (yes, including the day they won gold) and as such they were able to adjust along the way.
Once you get into your consistent rhythm, whatever it is, things might need adjusting but you won’t know if you don’t review. We do this at Will It? all the time, which includes at the end of every session we deliver for a client. There will be a small huddle in the room where we ask ourselves three simple questions:
- Where did we perform well?
- Where could we have performed better?
- What will we do differently next time?
If the only consistent thing you do is ask yourself or your team, these three questions after meetings, events, or the end of your working day, you will consistently build your confidence and unlock potential.
Where do you need some consistent rhythm to grow?
It is a known fact that you can ‘crash diet’ to lose weight, but if you do, you will re-gain that weight much faster as soon as you stop and eat normally again. If you do it consistently and with a process, you are more likely to lose the weight and keep it off.
Consistency doesn’t always seem to be the fastest option to choose, but it really does deliver much better results over time.
Considering how much flux there is in the world right now, is it not better to employ a strategy you can control, maintain and is proven time and again to deliver sustainable results?
If you look at your business or your life right now, where would you benefit most from establishing some consistency?
What would that look like?
What is the simplest way you can get started?
What might you get as a result?