You pick up your child from school, ready to hear about their day, and within minutes, there are tears, meltdowns, or angry outbursts. Or maybe it looks different in your house: Your child gets silly, wild, and harder to settle. Welcome to the wonderful world of after-school restraint collapse. All day at school, kids work hard to manage themselves. They follow rules, use polite words, sit still, and keep their emotions in check. They are exercising enormous self-control, and their brains and bodies get depleted.
View Consistency as a Tool, Not a Test Simply put, consistency is one of the most reliable ways to succeed. It's a powerful tool, but it's easy to fall into self-talk that treats it as more than a tool, like "winners are consistent and losers aren't." View consistency as a tool suited to particular tasks, like using a powered nail gun for constructing a building instead of a hammer. When you view consistency as a tool rather than a judgment, you can explore when it's well-suited to the task at hand and take other judgments out of it. For example, you can remove judgments about whether you enjoy consistency or are good at it, and focus on how consistency can serve you in achieving what you want.