Episode 34: Intentional Sporadic Effort

All right, y’all, today on The Work Of Becoming podcast, I want to talk to you about something that I call intentional sporadic effort. I’ll say that one more time: intentional sporadic effort. And this is actually the opposite of consistency, and the reason that I am talking about consistency a lot is because that is going to be our theme this month inside of my Change Academy membership.

So, if you are not inside of Change Academy, this is one of the last months you’re gonna be able to join at the current price, and if you join at the current price, which is $22 per month, you lock in that price. The price is going up. It is going up quite a bit because we just offer so much value in that membership. There’s a community. You can ask a coach and get a personalized response. There is a workshop and resource every single month. It is an amazing educational hub. It is like getting a membership of self-help books with amazing impacts every single month for super cheap. So, we are underpricing it, and although I believe in underpricing and over-delivering, it has come time for us to raise the price of Change Academy, but if you join this month or next month, you can lock in that $22 per month price. So, I highly recommend jumping in.

But today, really, I want to talk about this opposite of consistency, the idea of intentional sporadic effort, and so, in order to kind of illustrate that concept, I ‘m gonna talk about the way I do content.

So, here’s how I do content. Let’s say it’s the month of November. For me, I work on content one month ahead of time, and I do that very intentionally because I want to be able to be inconsistent. So, if I was doing content week by week, then I would have to be consistent in working on content every single week in order to get the following week prepped. I would have to have time. I would have to set aside time every single week, and I would have to follow through on that time every single week in order to get the content that I need out there. But because I expand the timeline into a month, yes, I do need to work on content every single month, but within that month, there is a lot more wiggle room of when that content can happen.

So, let’s say that I need to create 30 reels for the month of December, and let’s say it’s the month of November. It takes me probably a full day to come up with and film 30 reels, and a full day for me is about 6 hours. What I do, I’m not joking here, is I literally sit around doing other things. I work on other pieces of my business until the inspiration strikes, until I wake up one morning and I am in the mood to curl my hair and put on my content outfits or until I’m feeling particularly inclined to speak and be creative. Sometimes I will even plan the reels ahead of time and then I will just wait to film them.

So, it is completely inconsistent. I do not do it on the same day every month. I do not do it on the same day of the week every time. Sometimes it’s a Monday. Sometimes it’s a Wednesday. Sometimes it’s at the beginning of the month. Sometimes it’s at the very last minute. But it always happens within that month, and so, this is what I call intentional sporadic effort. I know that I like my content better when it comes more naturally to me, when I ride that sense of inspiration that I am sometimes gifted with. If I had to, I could sit down, and I could manage my mind, and I could create my content across time because I don’t believe you always need to be inspired, and I believe you always should be capturing things when you are inspired.

So, I don’t think you have to create content this way by any means, but I am intentionally allowing myself to be inconsistent. I am intentionally allowing myself to be sporadic in my efforts. I am intentionally creating a world where my own inconsistency is not only accommodated but it thrives. It actually fuels the machine. It creates the content. It is not tolerated but celebrated.

And so, that’s a reframe that I wanted to give you today. I wanted to ask you what is an area that you could embrace your own inconsistency. How can you change, not yourself, not your approach, but how can you change everything around you in order to accommodate, celebrate, even thrive off of that inconsistency?

Another example of a way that you could do this is let’s say that you don’t feel like meal prepping very often, but every once in a while you wake up on a Sunday and you’re feeling really good about that. On that Sunday, maybe you pull out freezer recipes, and instead of meal prepping for just the next week, you meal prep three or four things you can toss in the freezer so that in future weeks when you don’t feel like meal prepping, you still have something on hand.

You could even do this in terms of weekly exercise a little bit. Maybe if there’s a day — maybe you know there’s usually one day a week where you’re feeling really motivated, maybe wait and maybe you do all your lifts — I’ve actually been doing this recently. There’s usually a day or two each week where I’m really inclined to go to the gym rather than workout at home or walk or do yoga or something else, and those days I will go to the gym, and I will do my main lifts on those days because I’m taking advantage of my sporadic desire to go to the gym rather than working out at home.

So, I really want you to think about that today. What if inconsistency was neutral? What if it’s something that we could use for good? What if it’s something that could be celebrated? What if it’s something that we can work with? What if, instead of working against it and trying to change ourselves like we’ve been trying to do our whole lives, what if we could learn to use that as our greatest gift? What if we could learn to use inconsistency as our biggest weapon in order to get to the life we want? That is what I’ve been doing recently. That is what has made my business and our content thrive over the past six months, and I promise you it is something that I bet can help in your life as well.

I’ll see you in the next one!