← Build with Leila Hormozi
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Why is it that it is so easy to consistently overeat, doom scroll, binge tv, but it is so hard to consistently work out, build a business, build a relationship. After losing 100 pounds and making $100 million by the time I was 28, I realized something, which is that being consistent comes down to five key habits. So if you are ambitious but inconsistent, listen closely if you want to achieve your goals. Number one is make the behavior survive bad days. The first thing that you need is essentially what I call a bad day plan. Most people quit their goals after like two weeks because they don't know this. The problem is that most people design their habits for their best days. When they're feeling rested, they feel like very emotionally regulated, they feel motivated, they have energy, all those things. But if you want to be consistent with things, then you actually have to be built on bad days. So if your standard only works when things are easy, it's going to fail the moment that the pressure shows up. And that's not a motivation problem, that's just poor design. So for example, for myself, when I was trying to lose 100 pounds, one of the main things that I focused on was what's the minimum viable amount of exercise I can do in a day, no matter how bad I feel, no matter how busy I am, no matter what I have going on. And so for me, at that point in time, when I was trying to lose weight, I was like, I can always go on a walk. Like it doesn't matter. I can wake up early and do it, I can do it after dinner, I can seek it in at lunch, I can walk on a treadmill, I can always go on a walk. And so for me, it was being able to say that even if I can't get to the gym and do my perfect workout, I can at least go on a walk. And so then when there was those days where maybe I was supposed to go hit a leg day, or I was supposed to do an upper body workout, but I couldn't really do that because maybe my schedule didn't allow. I was flying somewhere and filming and doing this, that, or speaking at an event, it was like, okay, at least I can get my walk in. And so if you think about it, right, you want to have your baseline plan, which is essentially your bad day version if things don't go as planned, which life doesn't go as planned many of the times, right? Think about all the days in the last, like 14 days. Like, which one went as planned? Like, there's so many days that do not go how we want them to go. At least I will speak for myself here. And then we need our good day version, which is I'll call stretch plan, which is like, what are we going to do on the good days when we have extra energy, we have extra X, right? So a good example is, if you want to start making content online, your baseline version might be, I'm just going to write a tweet today. Like, that's it. I'm gonna write a tweet or write something on threads, right? That's a base version. That doesn't take a lot of effort. What you would like to accomplish on a mediocre day, or a good, you know, normal day, as you might define it, might be, hey, I'm gonna post a short on Instagram. And then on your stretch day, maybe you wake up with a ton of energy, you've got a clear plate, and nothing is getting in your way. Hey, I'm gonna write a YouTube video. I'm gonna shoot it. I'm gonna make captions, I'm gonna decide the thumbnail and the title. So even if you just get a tweet out, you're not losing. It's your baseline. And the thing is, like, the baseline in that instance takes, like, you know, maybe 10 minutes to think of. You don't need lighting, you don't need a camera. You don't need anything. There's really no excuses not to get it. Versus, on the good days, it's like, okay, I'm gonna set up the camera, I'm gonna get the lighting, I'm gonna do my hair and makeup, do all these things, which, that's fine. Either way, whichever version you're going with that day, you're going to stay consistent because you've added in flexibility. And the most flexible system wins. Not the most rigid, not the most perfect. Took me a long time to understand. So before getting angry because you didn't get stuff done, ask yourself, is my goal designed for real life or for days when I feel really good? You know, a lot of people come to me and they're like, layla, I just can't get started on this thing because XYZ is going on my marriage, XYZ is going off my kids. XYZ is going on in my business. Great. Life isn't perfect if you only can perform under perfect conditions, it will break the moment. It's imperfect. The best time to start something is under imperfect conditions, because then you train yourself to see that you can do things when there are not ideal conditions. And then you build more self confidence than you would if things were perfect. I gain a lot more confidence in myself when I can perform under imperfect conditions. That's why you want to do this. The second principle is reinforce or replace. This is what most people miss. Even when they show up consistently, they accidentally make it harder on themselves. Every time you try to quit a bad habit, you're actually making the problem worse. And this is why and what you should do instead. You've probably lived through a very similar scenario to this. Okay? You are skipping workouts and scrolling in bed for 30 minutes in the morning. So you're like, you know what? I'm sick of my bull. I'm gonna set an alarm, I'm gonna put my phone across the room and it works for you for like four days. And then the next morning you're exhausted, you find yourself scrolling on your laptop instead. Now why is that? You didn't want the phone. Why is it that even when you put the phone away, now you've grabbed the laptop? It's not about the phone. You wanted to transition from sleeping into real life and so you're looking for something to do. There's some kind of fix you're getting from the phone and now you've transferred it to the laptop. That was doing that job. They're both doing the same job for you. They just look different. This is just how humans work, right? If I took the piece of cake from you, you'd grab the cupcake. People repeat what feels good and and they avoid what feels bad. Tldr on life. And this applies to good habits too. So if doing the right thing feels rushed, it feels thankless. It feels like it's not going anywhere. Your brain doesn't wanna keep doing it. Not to say if you remove a bad habit without replacing what it gave you, something else will fill the gap. And usually not something that moves you towards your goals. Usually something that moves you away from your goals. So the secret to stopping a bad behavior is not just remove the bad thing, but break it down into a two part process. First, reinforce the behavior, immediately check it off and say done. Create some kind of moment of completion, a moment of satisfaction. So here's an example for you. If you're trying to lose weight and every time that you throw away something that you were gonna eat that was bad for you, maybe it was a candy bar or a piece of cake or whatever, you get to put a dollar into a jar. And what happens over time is every time you do that, you put the dollar into A jar. You. You start building up this little piggy bank, essentially, and then eventually you can use that to buy whatever you want for yourself. So now what you've done is you have positively rewarded yourself for not eating. The thing that's the first thing we want to do is we want to essentially link giving up a behavior with some kind of reward. Something that's great is I tell people all the time, like, use your spouse. You know, something that me and Alex will do for each other is like, I'll tell him the things I'm trying not to do, and he'll, like, congratulate me and reward me for not doing them. And so, for example, if I were trying to lose weight, I'd be like, hey, every time I don't eat dessert, I don't go for the candy. Can you give me a hug and tell me you love me? He absolutely has done that for me before, and it works amazingly. And actually, I think it works better with somebody else than it does just with yourself. So if you have somebody that you're with, you have partner or friend, and they can cheer you on is a fantastic use of the relationship. Now, once we've rewarded the thing that we have stopped, now what do we do? We actually want to replace the function of the bad habit. Ask this. What did the habit give you? Was it relief, Escape? Reward? You're not going to know what it gave you until you stop doing it. When I first stopped drinking and doing drugs, I'll never forget this. I was in my apartment, sitting there when everybody else was drinking and doing drugs. And it was, like, the first time I'd been, like, really sober for, like, more than a few days. I remember sitting there and being like, I feel very stressed. And then I was like, why do I feel so stressed? And I was like, I feel very stressed because I have so many things. I have so many responsibilities right now. And I think I'm very anxious being in this new social situation. I'm living in this apartment with all these people. I don't know how to socialize unless I'm drinking or doing drugs. Like, I remember all these thoughts started flooding to me, and then I had the urge to drink. And that was the moment that I realized why I drank. I was like, oh, I drink to feel more comfortable because I'm stressed. It gets rid of it. So then I said to myself, what can I replace it with? And that's why I lost £100. I replaced drinking with working out. So. So you know what I did? I would go to the gym when everyone was pregaming, I was like, fuck it, I don't care. Like, better than drinking and doing drugs. I would go there and it would be the college campus gym, and there was like, nobody there. Cause it's like 9:00 o' clock at night. And I was like, fuck it, I'm gonna go do cardio. Because I knew that if I replaced it, I would be able to essentially, like, keep warding off the bad habit. So this applies to anything that you're thinking about. It's like, first we get rid of it, then once we've gotten rid of it, there's this void and we feel uncomfortable. So, for example, if you always get up and the first thing you do is scroll social media, it makes you feel like shit, which of course it does. I cannot look at social media when I wake up in the morning. So if you do this, I can guarantee it makes you feel like more than if you didn't do it. What can you do instead? Can you meditate for 10 minutes when you wake up? Can you make a nice cup of coffee when you wake up? Can you listen to some classical music when you wake up? Those are all things that I have done, and I like them much more than scrolling in bed. And the thing is, now you're giving your brain not just something it's looking for, but something better. So the question that you want to ask yourself to figure out what this is, what habit did I remove without replacing what it actually was doing for me? Because for those of you who are trying to be consistent, you. You probably removed something, but you didn't know what it was doing for you. And so you end up either going back to it or going to something that's equally as bad. It's like, okay, well, if you just gave yourself enough space to find out what it's actually doing for you and not be so scared of, like, being alone with yourself on your thoughts, which I understand is a scary place, then you will probably be able to be consistent more than others. Now here's the thing. Even once you replace those habits, that effort doesn't really go anywhere if you don't do this piece. Okay, number three is close feedback loops fast. Most people have no idea that not focusing on this or implementing it is what will destroy your consistency, even if you can nail number one or number two. Here's the thing, Consistency doesn't work when people don't know what to fix next. So when everything feels wrong, people either overhaul the entire plan or they quit entirely. But if you get fast feedback and you close the loops quickly. It will keep your effort focused. Say you're trying to lose weight. At the end of each day, ask yourself, what worked? What broke? What's the smallest adjustment I can make tomorrow? How can I track what I'm doing? How can I create feedback loops? If you are implementing a new behavior, for example, let's say that you're trying to delegate more in your business and you're trying to make sure that you're doing a good job of delegating at the end of each day, how can you prompt yourself, ask yourself questions to decide what you need to do the next day to be as consistent and even better. So, for example, if I have a leader and I'm trying to get them to delegate, which actually I'm literally doing this right now with somebody, I have a self self prompt that this person asks themselves every day, which at the end of the day she fills out this thing and what it says is, is there anything today that I did that I should delegate to somebody else? And then she just writes down what it is. And so what is that? Is? It does two things. One, having a prompt that she's put in to prompt herself keeps it top of mind, which makes it more likely to be consistent. And it makes her feel like she's winning because she fills something out and completes it every day and then gets to apply it to the next day. And every day there's something that she finds and she's like, okay, I'll delegate this, I'll delegate that, I'll delegate this, I'll delegate that. Because a lot of people, what they want to do is they just want to go into execution mode. But you have to continue to prompt yourself with questions so that you know if you, are you getting better? Are you getting worse? Do you need to change something slightly? Now, as you're going along and you're closing those feedback loops and you're asking yourself these questions, one thing you will notice is that you are going to want to change your mind about things and you are probably going to want to change the plan. Which brings me to number four, which is decide once and remove options. If you are deciding every day whether you're going to do something, then you are relying on willpower. You're not relying on a system. And if you have systems, you can be consistent very easily. And I don't know about you, but I'm not motivated every day and I don't have a full tank of willpower every day. In fact, sometimes I have like, this much willpower. And I don't want to do anything that's on my schedule. If you want to be consistent, it's going to require defaults, not making a daily decision. And the people who look super disciplined, they are not fighting themselves, having all these thoughts inside their heads. They've actually made the decision and they're just sticking with it. And so what I mean by this is a few things. One for myself, for example, once it's past Monday, my calendar set your rule for with yourself is that you already decided on Monday, and that was the last day that you've given yourself to cancel or move anything. And so you're sticking with your plan. Is that because I'm not honoring how I'm feeling, etc. No, it's because I made a decision when I was in the great state of mind, and I said, this is what I'm going to do, and I'm not going to rehash it every day, something I've become very good at. And my husband will say, it's probably a little rigid, but, like, I make a decision, I'm like, I'm sticking with it. Your mood. Follow the plan, as I like to say, because I know that my mood's going to change every day. I might want to eat something different. I might want to work a different way. I might not want to do this, might want to do that. Well, that's just me being a little princess. I need to stick with the plan if I want to achieve my goals. If you want to be consistent, you have to ask yourself, what is something that I say I want to be consistent at, but I'm still redeciding about it every day. What is that thing? Is it what you eat? Is it how you exercise? How you show up in your business? Is it the risks you're taking for your business, the investment you're making in your business? What is it? There's a lot of things that people promise themselves, then they break those promises. Once the day comes and they don't feel as good, they're a little tired. And that's because they've essentially made an impermanent decision for anything that's important to you. Decide one time. Do not decide every day. So let's say you want to be more consistent with outreach in your business. You're like, if I reached out to 10 of my ideal client a day, my business would blow up. Okay, well, let's decide once. Which is like, if that's the truth, why aren't you doing it? Let's decide now. Okay. You're going to reach out to 10 clients a day. When are you going to do it? Every day at 9am before you open an email. Where? At your desk. In what? HubSpot. What does done mean? It means that you sent 10 messages. That's it. You write that down and it's like, great, I'm gonna do that until my business hits $50 million. And you don't stop. The only reason that people stop is because they are not following these, I would say, like, rules, right? Maybe they're like, oh, My God, at 9:00am Every day, though, at 9:15, I have a huddle, but I still have to do it at nine every day. And maybe, okay, well, then, great. Like, that's why we have to apply the bad day one, which is like, hey, if it's an inflexible day, if you're traveling, et cetera, then maybe that's not the rule for you. Maybe you need to do it at 6am or at 6pm or. There's lots of things that we can factor in here. The point is, is that you're not renegotiating the decision. You are flexible in your approach. You're not flexible in the decision that you make to get there. The fifth piece is to track behaviors, not outcomes. This is probably what kills consistency for a lot of people, and it's really just about people that track outcomes instead of leading indicators or behaviors. So say you're trying to make more money in your business, and you're like, I am so excited about this, I'm going to kill it. And you're like, I commit to every single day. I'm going to work from 6am until 2pm and it's like, week one, you're like, cool. I reach out to some clients. I'm running a webinar, and maybe you make, I don't know, like, $3,000. Then the next week, you look at your bank account, you're like, oh, my God, I have $500 in here. And you're basically ready to quit because you're like, nothing works, Layla. Nothing works to get my customers. I'm not getting enough money. Nothing that I'm trying worked. You were doing the work, but you only gave it a week. The fact that you think a week is enough time for something to happen in your business is insane. And that is why you cannot look at the outcomes. You need to track your behaviors. People do not quit because the results are slow. They quit because progress feels invisible. And slow outcomes, like making $10,000, $15,000, $50,000, $100,000. Take time, but if you measure your progress based on immediate feedback of your behaviors and what you do and you track those and you don't track the results yet, then you will actually be able to hit your goals. What happens too many times is that because you're tracking outcomes and not behaviors, you then start to change what you're doing. And you change it so many times. It's like the girl who's like, I don't understand. I tried the banana diet. I tried low carb. I tried keto, I tried this. I tried 16 diets last year. I'm like, well, no, they all didn't work. You didn't give anything enough time to work. What are we talking about? You're not consistent because you keep changing the plan because you're measuring results and you're not patient enough. If you're not tracking what you can control and you're just judging yourself based on not getting results yet. In fact, the results of the body you have today, of the business you have today, of the relationship you have today, they are not a byproduct of what you even did this last week. They're probably a byproduct of the habits that you've accumulated over the last two years. So if you want to change those things, think about how long it's going to take to change all those habits, to have a new body, a new business, a new relationship. It does not happen overnight. So instead what we want to do is we want to track one or two behaviors that you can tie to success. Successful actions lead to success. So let's track successful actions. And then you can ask yourself one question per day. Did I do this thing? If it's for your business, if it's for your body, did I eat this much protein for your relationship? Did I spend this much time with that person today? Did I have a meaningful conversation? And then at the end of the week, you can ask yourself an audit and say like, did I do these things this week? Did I hit my daily minimum? And if that's a yes, even if there's no results, that's a win. And you give yourself a pat on the back, you put a little dollar in the jar, you take yourself out to dinner, whatever it might be, you congratulate yourself on the win. We tend to minimize the side quests that we take in our inconsistency, but they add up. One bite here or there from your kids food, spending a little bit of money here and there. In your business, all these things add up. Here's the thing. Consistent people are not better than inconsistent ones. They have just designed better systems to operate under real life conditions, under imperfect conditions. And they do not rely on willpower. They don't wait for some kind of like feeling or motivation. And they also do not moralize inconsistency. They treat it as data and they say, great, I'm going to fix the system that I have in place. Because consistency is not a personality trait. It is an engineered outcome. If you can consistently eat like lose money and have that relationship, then you can be consistent in the opposite direction. And the thing is is once you start to learn that and learn how to design it to work for you, not against you, it stops feeling hard and starts to feel like something you don't even need to try to do. If you are ready to be dangerously consistent, then go ahead and check out my other video on how to be dangerously confident in this next one. Also, if you want help on some behind the scenes intel of how I help my teams maintain consistency, I just launched what I call Layla's letters. I know it's a tongue twister, but it's essentially the weekly memo that I send to my team is unedited. It is raw. There's no GPT or copywriters in it, but you can check it out if you want help with staying accountable each week. There's a link in the description below.