Consistency Compounds: Why We Overvalue Intensity
Hello, friends, and welcome to another episode of the Growth Edge Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Laurie Baedke, and I'm looking forward to a solo episode today, really feeling like I want to dig into a topic that's been a lot on my heart of late, and that is really just this tendency that I think we have to overestimate the value of intensity and underestimate the power of consistency.
We do it with our money, we do it with our health, we do it with learning and professional growth, and we absolutely also do it with leadership. We're drawn to the big move, the dramatic intervention, the bold commitment, a three-day conference, a 30-day challenge, a new certification, the strategic retreat, or a complete reset. Intensity feels like progress, but most of the things that matter most in our life aren't built through intensity.
They're actually built through consistency. And consistency is a much harder sell because consistency is rarely exciting. It's not sexy. It's not slick. We don't see it happen.
We don't see its impact quickly enough. It doesn't make for a very good before and after photo. Nobody congratulates you for investing a little bit of money every month for 40 years. Nobody applauds when you read 10 pages before bed. No one sees the five minute conversation when you stop by somebody's office to tell them that you sincerely appreciated something small that they did that made it made a difference in your day.
Nobody celebrates the ordinary Tuesday when you do the thing that you said you were going to do. Again. But those ordinary Tuesdays add up. And I think we would all be a little bit better served if we stopped asking, what big thing should I do? And started asking, what small thing am I willing to keep doing? Because intensity gets our attention, but consistency changes our lives.
When I think back over my life and career, I think one of the best places I ever learned this had nothing to do with leadership. It happened while I was training to run long distances. I've run a handful of half marathons in my life and one singular full marathon. Let me be crystal clear, I am not a natural born distance runner. I much prefer strength training. But variety is the spice of life.
And there was a season when my kids were much younger when running came with another very appealing benefit. It got me out of the house for extended periods of time, by necessity. So I ran. And one of the things running taught me was how incredibly different two seemingly identical days can feel. I remember days when I would go out and run six miles and feel great. My breathing felt good, my legs felt good. The miles actually passed.
Relatively easily. And then the next day, I could head out for a three or four mile run and struggle almost from the beginning. Same person, same body, same general level of fitness, completely different experience. And of course, there are explanations for that: weather, temperature, sleep, nutrition, hydration, stress, recovery. But I remember being fascinated by it.
Because if I had judged my capability based only on one of those bad runs, I might have concluded that I wasn't a very good runner. Or I wasn't cut out for a half marathon or a full marathon. If I'd waited to run until the weather was perfect, I'd have missed a lot of training days. And if I'd decided that every run needed to feel good in order to count, I certainly never would have made it through the full marathon training schedule. The training worked because I kept showing up.
Not because every run was good. In fact, the bad runs were equally part of the training. And I think that's something we forget about growth. Consistency doesn't mean consistently excellent or perfect. Consistency means continuing to engage when today's effort isn't as good as yesterday's. It means recognizing that a bad day is data, not a verdict. Some days you execute well, some days you struggle.
Some days you learn what works, and some days you learn what doesn't. But all of it can contribute to your becoming if you stay engaged long enough to learn from it. And running isn't unique in that regard. In fact, there's another area of life where we are consistently reminded that individual days can be wildly unpredictable, while the long-term trajectory tells a very different story. We understand this principle pretty well when it comes to financial investing.
The markets go up, they go down, sometimes they move rather turbulently. And when markets fall, our emotions can urge us to do something reactive, to get out, to protect ourselves, to wait until things settle down, then get back in when conditions feel safer. The problem is that by the time conditions feel safe again, we may have already missed.
Some of the recovery. Fidelity recently looked at a hypothetical investment in the SP 500 from 1988 through 2025. Their analysis found that missing just the five best days in the market during that span would have reduced long-term gains by about 38%. Five days out of nearly four decades. That's a pretty compelling argument for resisting the temptation to believe that we can perfectly predict.
When to be in and when to be out. There's a reason we hear phrases like time in the market rather than timing the market. Starting early matters. Staying invested matters. And time allows compounding to do what compounding does. And so I think growth works in much the same way. It's tempting to want to optimize every individual day.
When what may matter much more is remaining invested across thousands of them. And yet, when we move from our investment accounts to our health, somehow we become convinced that the opposite strategy will work. Instead of trusting repetition and time, we go looking for the reset. Think about physical health. Society is obsessed with resets, cleanses, fasts, detoxes, 30-day challenges.
Aggressive workout plans. And I'm not saying that intensity never has value. Sometimes a period of focused effort can create momentum. Sometimes it can help us either break an old pattern or establish a new one. But you cannot out-intensify inconsistency. A brutal workout on Saturday doesn't replace consistent movement throughout the week. A week of perfect nutrition.
Doesn't compensate for habits that you can't sustain. And the research on habit formation is actually encouraging here. Researcher Philippa Lally and her colleagues studied people establishing new daily behaviors over 12 weeks. They found that repetition in a consistent context helped behaviors become more automatic over time. But here's the part I especially love: missing one opportunity.
Did not materially derail the habit formation process. One missed day doesn't ruin it. Which is important because all or nothing thinking loves to tell us otherwise. And man, if I had a dollar for every time, the little devil on my shoulder whispered in my ear, you missed today, so you blew it. Or, I remember you ate poorly at lunch, so your whole day is shot. Or you missed Monday's workout, so just start again next week.
No. I missed Monday. Tuesday is still available. Consistency isn't perfection. Consistency is returning. And I think that's where this conversation gets especially interesting. Because one of the greatest threats to consistency isn't laziness or lack of ambition. Sometimes it's our insistence on doing something perfectly. Perfectionism is particularly sneaky.
It sits there and masquerades as high standards. We tell ourselves we're waiting until we have enough time, until we're sufficiently prepared, until we can do it right, until we know exactly what we're doing. But sometimes perfectionism isn't actually producing excellence. It's simply producing delay. Research on perfectionism and procrastination has actually found an important distinction here.
Striving towards high standards isn't necessarily the problem, but perfectionistic concern, a fear of mistakes, a worry about falling short, a preoccupation with getting it wrong is strongly associated with more procrastination. And that makes intuitive sense. If the standard for beginning is certainty, we are less likely to begin. If the standard for participating is excellence,
We don't actually embrace practice. And if the standard for continuing is a perfect record, one bad day gives us permission to quit. Here's the thing, my friend: perfectionism says, do it right. Growth says, do it, learn from it, do it again, perhaps a little bit better, each and every time. Those are very different operating systems.
And nowhere do I see the consequences of those two operating systems more clearly than in leadership development, especially in healthcare leadership. We have a high propensity to overvalue credentials and undervalue practice. Another degree, another certification, another conference, another book, another workshop. And listen, I love learning.
And my livelihood is largely built around leadership development. I believe deeply in the value of good education, but knowledge acquisition and leadership development are not the same thing. You can know a lot about leadership without becoming a particularly effective leader, because leadership is practiced in relationship with other people. It's practiced when you give feedback, both well and poorly. When you receive feedback, both well
Or not so well, when you have a difficult conversation that you've been avoiding, when you communicate a decision that not everyone will like, when you ask a better question, when you admit that you were wrong, when you acknowledge someone else's contribution, when you stay curious five seconds or five minutes longer instead of rushing to a judgment, when you walk into tomorrow's meeting and intentionally try something differently than you did yesterday. Researchers
Researcher Anders Ericsson spent decades studying expertise and deliberate practice. And one of the important ideas from his work is that expertise isn't simply the product of experience. Practice has to involve attention, feedback, evaluation, repeated opportunities to perform and refine. In other words, engage, observe, reflect, learn, iterate.
And then engage again and again and again. That is how we become. Practice precedes mastery. And if that's how individuals develop, it raises an important question about how we develop the people around us. Because organizations are just as susceptible to the allure of intensity. An organization will spend enormous amounts of money bringing leaders together for an annual offsite. They'll hire a speaker, conduct a workshop.
Develop a beautiful strategic plan. Everybody leaves energized. And then Monday rolls around. And the weekly meeting looks exactly like it did before the retreat. That's intensity without consistency. So what if we thought differently about development? What if the annual retreat was reinforced by 10 minutes of learning in every weekly team meeting? What if leaders regularly shared something that they're reading, listening to, testing, or learning?
What if every team huddle included one coaching moment? What if teams routinely paused after an important project and asked, what worked? What didn't? What did we learn? What will we do differently next time? Imagine the difference between an hour of intentional reflection once a year and eight to ten minutes every week. Your annual workshop may inspire you, but the weekly practice is what actually changes you.
And of course, we don't need to wait for our organizations to create that kind of rhythm for us. We can build it into our own lives. We tell ourselves we'd like to read more, learn more, reflect more, become more self-aware. And then we imagine we need an hour every morning to journal, or a three-day conference, or a stack of 12 books. Maybe not. Maybe it's five minutes of reflection twice a week that turns into a daily practice.
What am I grateful for today? Maybe it's one book a quarter that you actually read, think about, and then apply. Maybe it's two podcasts that you listen to consistently instead of 20 that pile up in your queue. Small doesn't mean insignificant. Small and repeated can become enormous. That's compounding. And maybe that's why this conversation ultimately feels like it's about something bigger than habits or discipline or productivity.
It's about who we're becoming through all of those small repetitions. I've been thinking a lot lately about becoming, because I think sometimes we imagine growth as though there is a future version of ourselves waiting somewhere out there. The confident leader, the wise executive, the disciplined person, the great communicator, the healthy human. And we believe that once we've learned enough, prepared enough, achieved enough.
Or somehow gotten ourselves ready enough, we'll step into that identity. But that's not how becoming works. You don't prepare perfectly and then become. You become by practicing. You have the conversation before you feel completely ready. You speak before you've perfected your voice. You lead while you're still learning to lead. You make the investment, you take the walk, you read the 10 pages, you ask.
The curious questions. You try, and then you pay attention, you reflect, you adjust, and tomorrow you try again. Becoming isn't something that happens after the practice, my friend. Becoming is the result of the practice. So if becoming happens through practice, the question isn't whether you can manufacture some extraordinary burst of effort. It's what you're willing to practice often enough that it begins to shape you.
So here's my challenge for you this week. Consider an area of your life where you want a different result: your health, your finances, your leadership, your learning, your relationships, your team culture. And instead of asking yourself what you need to do more intensely, ask a different question. What could I do more consistently? Imperfectly?
But consistently. What's the action small enough that you could repeat it even on an ordinary Tuesday? Maybe especially on an ordinary Tuesday. And then begin. Don't wait for optimal conditions. Don't wait until you're perfectly prepared. Don't mistake one difficult day for evidence that the practice isn't working. Start early, stay engaged, pay attention.
Learn from the good reps and the bad ones. Refine your approach and keep going. Because intensity can create a moment, but consistency creates momentum. Consistency builds trust.
Consistency builds trust. Consistency builds capability. Consistency builds culture. And consistency compounds. So over enough ordinary days, consistency doesn't just change what you accomplish. It changes who you become. My friend, this is something I will continue to work on, I'm confident, until the last day of my career and probably the last day of my life.
So know that I'm there with you, walking alongside you, becoming two. And as always, I'm rooting for you.
