Author: Xiaojie Qin
Time: 2023
If consistency requires tremendous effort and self-discipline on your part, you might not be pursuing the right thing. Just as your stomach doesn’t require your conscious effort to be consistent about eating, your mind inherently knows what it wants and desires. Therein lies your potential for fulfillment and loving your life.
We have collectively been starving our minds for so long, and we over compensate with self-discipline. If you dare, for a moment, set aside the goals, the endless pursuits that have gotten you to this place of disliking yourself, not enjoying the things you do.
Try stopping.
It's unthinkable, I know. It requires courage. But when you get through that intense fear, you will meet the passionate and life-loving you on the other side. When you let passion fuel your consistency, you will tap into that unconscious flow.
Find your effortless consistency.
“What I admire about you is that you can do one thing over and over again, to the point of excellence for which you are paid”. My friends say this to me sometimes. I have never spent as much time enjoying hearing this as I should. There’s always a part of me that tells me to be humble, a part of me that has the ‘imposter syndrome’ and shuns compliments, and a part of me that doesn’t know how to respond to them.
Today, I decide to take a different approach- a proud one. This summer, just out of the blue, I started recording yoga videos after 10 years of regular yoga practice. In just a couple of months, I’ve recorded over 40 videos in different parts of Beijing, and in multiple other countries. I wouldn’t call it ‘hard work’, despite the fact that it required me to get up around 5am on many days and get to the location before security guards start working. My casual summertime yoga videos amounting to 40 surprised me. I never really count the numbers. I simply find myself consistent with the majority of the things I do in life, including my work with CandleX, my hobbies as a dancer, yoga practitioner and teacher, my meditation practice, etc.
I always find the concept of ‘hard work’ to be problematic. I invite you to take a different perspective looking at people who can day in and day out do one thing over and over again. Perhaps they also adopt this ‘effortless consistency’ as I do.
Perhaps, you may find a different relationship with the things you do.
Special thanks to Katie Lai, our newest member of our teen mental health mentorship project , for putting this video together with patience and delicacy.
Xiaojie Qin
Oct 2023