What Happens When Travel Hits Your Consistency Directly?
A vacation in Europe answered that question for me before I meant to ask it. I was seven hours ahead of Kansas City the entire trip. Going over is the easy part. Your body barely fights you on the way out. Coming back is where it gets real, and I know that because I track my Whoop data every morning. Recovery score after recovery score came back red or yellow on the way home. My mind still thought it was seven hours ahead. I was waking up at three thirty, four in the morning, and not by choice.
Right as my recovery scores started climbing back toward green, I flew to New York. An hour ahead. On paper that’s nothing. My body was still mid-repair from the first disruption, and now I was setting it back again before it finished healing.
I want you to sit with that for a second, because this is what a real week looks like for a lot of us leading teams. It’s rarely one clean hit with recovery time built in after. It’s a second hit landing before the first one heals.
Here’s what got squeezed in the middle of all of it. My running took a hit. My strength training took a hit. Both things I know matter to me, both things I could watch getting compressed in the data in front of me. So I had to ask myself the question this whole episode is built around. When everything in your system is compromised, sleep, energy, recovery, what’s the one thing you still keep.
For me it was the running. Coming back from Europe, I ran three miles, then four, building it back instead of expecting my normal pace to just be there. In New York I found Central Park. From there I got to New Jersey, and that’s where I built all the way back, seven and a quarter miles, easy, back to normal.
Running is the thing I always keep. Running defines me. Running resets me, and that pull is strong enough to get me out the door even on the mornings when jet lag makes everything else feel impossible.
That’s what this episode is about.
What Is Consistency, and Why Is It a Leadership Skill?
Consistency is a muscle, and it’s one of the most underrated tools we have as leaders. It’s underrated for the same reason eating well and sleeping on time are underrated. Neither one announces itself. Nobody claps for a decision you didn’t have to make because you’d already turned it into a habit.
Here’s the thesis for this episode. Consistency is the muscle that connects four different parts of your life, physical, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual. Train that muscle in one domain, and it doesn’t stay contained there. It shows up in the other three whether you’re paying attention to it or not.
What Are the Two Mechanisms Behind Consistency?
Running survived that trip while other things didn’t, and the reason is that two completely different mechanisms hide under the single word consistency. Most people only ever build one of them.
The first is elimination. This means removing a decision before it has the chance to drain you. I’ve worn a black button-down shirt to work for years. I own seven of them. Every morning I don’t have to stand in front of my closet negotiating with myself about what to wear. I lay my clothes out the night before for the same reason. It protects the small amount of mental bandwidth I have before the sun comes up, because I already know what the rest of the day is going to ask of me.
Think about how many decisions you’re making as a leader in a single day. Dozens of small ones. One or two heavy ones. Meetings pile on top of emails, emails pile on top of messages, and by the afternoon there’s nothing left in the tank. My kids were younger, and my wife used to joke that she was out of popsicles, meaning she’d made every decision she had available for the day and there weren’t any more to give. I think about that line constantly now, and I think about it specifically as a leader, because if a parent can run out of the capacity to decide what snack to hand a five year old, a leader can run out of the capacity to make a good call at four in the afternoon after a full day of meetings.
The black shirt is one small piece of armor against that. It’s elimination. It’s subtraction.
The second mechanism is construction. This is the opposite move. Instead of removing friction, you build it in on purpose. The run before the sun comes up, the one you don’t want to do, that’s construction. You’re spending bandwidth on purpose there, because the friction itself is what builds the capacity.
One day, years into wearing the same black shirt, I wore pink instead, and it threw people off. People noticed. People asked. People reacted to a shirt color like something was wrong. That told me consistency isn’t only a tool for managing your own bandwidth. It’s a signal to the people around you. Show up the same way every day and you’re communicating something to your team without saying a word, that today is a normal day, that nothing has shifted, that they can read you accurately because you’re predictable. Break the pattern, even in something as small as a shirt, and people notice the gap before they notice the reason behind it.
How Does a Hard Habit Become an Easy One?
A hard habit becomes an easy one through repetition, until the decision disappears entirely. Think about brushing your teeth. When you were a kid, someone had to remind you, maybe even stand over you while you did it. It took effort and negotiation. Now you don’t think about it at all. It happens. That’s the entire idea behind books like Atomic Habits and Tiny Habits, that a behavior repeated enough times stops costing you willpower and becomes automatic.
Apply that to running. The sunrise run that started as construction, the one that required talking myself into it every single morning, doesn’t require that negotiation anymore. The miles still feel exactly as hard as they always did. What changed is the decision. The decision to do it stopped requiring a fight at all.
That’s the real promise of consistency. It’s a conversion process. Do the hard thing enough times, and it stops requiring the fight it used to require, which frees up bandwidth for the next hard thing you need to build.
What Does Neuroscience Have to Say about Consistency?
I keep coming back to Dr. Andrew Huberman’s podcast on this show because his work turns neuroscience into something usable, and usable neuroscience is exactly what leadership needs more of. If you’ve listened to more than a handful of these episodes, you’ve noticed the pattern. I do that on purpose. Every time I bring him into an episode, it’s because the science explains something I’d otherwise just be asserting on faith. There’s a reason I keep going back to him across more than seventy episodes now. It makes perfect sense to me, and I think it will make sense to you too once you hear the mechanism.
Huberman has an episode people call the Dopamine Masterclass. In it he makes a case that most of us get backwards. We assume the reward comes at the end, the finish line, the goal, the moment you’re done. Huberman argues you can train your brain to release dopamine from the friction and the challenge itself, during the effort, not only once you’ve crossed the finish line. That’s a learnable skill, not a fixed trait.
Then there’s the episode Huberman did with David Goggins, where he gets specific about the mechanism. He names the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, a part of the brain that releases dopamine in response to friction and pain, and he’s clear that this response is learned. People who repeatedly choose hard things over easy ones train that structure to respond more strongly over time. That’s not a personality trait some people are born with and others aren’t. It’s a muscle, in the most literal sense the brain allows for.
So when I call consistency a muscle, I’m not reaching for a nice sounding phrase. There’s a structure in your brain that gets stronger every time you choose the hard thing on purpose.
What Holds When the Disruption Hits the Anchor Itself?
I’ve talked before on this show about what I call your private anchor, the one thing that holds when everything else in your system bends under pressure. That episode was about the fact that systems break, the journaling slips, the meditation slips, the food tracking slips, and there’s usually one thing underneath all of it that stays.
This episode asks the harder version of that same question. What happens when the disruption doesn’t just bend the structure around your anchor. What happens when it goes straight at the anchor itself. Jet lag doesn’t touch a journaling practice the way it touches your ability to physically get out the door and run. That trip was a direct hit on the one thing I’d built my strongest consistency around. What held was a smaller version, three miles instead of seven, and that smaller version still counted as keeping it.
What Are the Four Domains Where Consistency Shows Up?
Consistency shows up in four domains, physical, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual. Physical carried the weight of this episode, and the other three deserve real attention too.
Physical means running, strength training, and sleep, and the protocol here is simple. Lay out tomorrow’s clothes and workout gear tonight. Remove the decision before your bandwidth runs out.
Spiritual might mean religion for you, or it might mean meditation the way it does for me. The protocol is picking one fixed time, the same time daily, with no negotiation about when.
Emotional means breath work and gratitude journaling, regulating how you’re feeling instead of pushing through the day numb to it. Attach one gratitude line or three minutes of breath work to a trigger you already have, right after you close your laptop for the day.
Intellectual means reading. Twenty pages a day, before you check your phone in the morning, not after. Over a year that’s a stack of books most people say they never have time for.
Four domains, one muscle. Train it anywhere and it strengthens everywhere.
How Do You Know What You Really Keep?
You know what you really keep by checking data, not memory. Pull up your calendar or your notes from the last time real life hit you, a bad travel week, a sick kid, a stretch where everything felt like it was against you. Check what you did that week, day by day, against what you’d planned. That’s data sitting in your own calendar, the kind you can’t talk yourself out of. Whatever you find still standing in the middle of that wreckage, that’s your real anchor, not the one you’d guess sitting here comfortable right now.
What’s the One Thing You Keep?
Sit with this question longer than feels comfortable. What’s the one thing you keep. I want the real answer, not the polished version that sounds good on a leadership podcast. I mean the thing that survives when your sleep is wrecked, your schedule is wrecked, and every excuse in the world is sitting right there for you to use. That answer tells you something about who you are underneath the roles you play. It tells you what you held onto when you had every reason to set it down.
Why Does This Question Belong in a Book About Eulogies?
This question belongs in a book about eulogies because nobody stands up at a funeral and reads your job title or your org chart. What gets said is what got kept. That’s the same question sitting underneath the book I’m writing, The Eulogy You Haven’t Written Yet. I think about the three miles in Central Park and the trail in New Jersey when I write that book, because those aren’t side stories. That’s the material the book is built from.
Key Takeaways
Physical: Lay out tomorrow’s clothes and workout gear tonight. Remove the decision before your bandwidth is gone.
Spiritual: Pick one fixed time for prayer or meditation, same time daily, no negotiation about when.
Emotional: Attach one gratitude line or three minutes of breath work to a trigger you already have, right after closing your laptop for the day.
Intellectual: Twenty pages before checking your phone in the morning, not after.
When disruption hits, aim for reduced but present, not full output. Three miles still counts.
