The Superpower That Will Help You Reach Your Goals | Ep 168
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What's up, guys? Welcome back to the podcast, Build. In today's episode, what I want to talk to you guys about is a superpower that will move you 100% towards your goals. That is consistency. And I want to help you get what you want in your business, in your life, in your relationships. And I know this episode will do that for you. So I hope you enjoy and share this episode with a friend if it doesn't fucking suck.

If you are not able to reach your goals and you are not able to stick with the habits that propel you towards the future that you want, I promise you that by the end of this video, you're going to know the five tactical steps that you can take to make consistency your superpower. If you don't know who I am, my name is Laila Hormozy. I'm the CEO and founder of Acquisition.com. I've built, scaled, and sold three businesses by the age of 28, leading to $100 million net worth. And now I run Acquisition.com, which is a portfolio of businesses valued over

$500 million. And the one thing that has allowed me to do all of that is consistency. Consistency is making a commitment and seeing it through. It's pairing your words with actions over a long time horizon. It is not a complicated concept, but it

It is a challenging one. And so I want to break consistency down into five practical steps that I use to be consistent in my workouts, in my diet, in my marriage, in my business, and in my relationships. Because if there's one thing that I do believe I have done well over the last 15 years, it's consistency.

The first step for being consistent is setting your goals. Half the time, people don't even have a goal. They don't even know what the goal is. What's the vision for your business? What's the vision for your body? What's the vision for your marriage? It's very hard to be consistent if you don't know what you're working towards because you could be consistent in the wrong direction. So from a qualitative perspective,

measure. Who do you want to be and what does that look like? I'll tell you a secret of the vision that I have for myself that I don't tell anybody. I don't even think I've told my husband. I have a vision of myself sitting in a chair on one of the world's most well-known talk shows talking about how I am one of the top five women on the Forbes list. This is me 15 years from now. I know what I look like. I know

I know how I sound. I know what kind of confidence I exude. And I know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how I built a company through praise and not punishment and how I've helped change the workplace and the workforce through my content and through the example I've set by building that company. When I show up, I look good. I'm slim. I'm in shape. I have good hair, good makeup, good skin. And I'm happy. I'm confident. And there's this snapshot that I hold onto on the days when I'm like, I don't know if I want to do this.

But I anchor myself to that snapshot. And so the question is, once you know, what's your snapshot of your future? Where do you want to end up? How do you want to feel? How do you want to show up? What do you want to look like? And the next question from that is, how do we reverse engineer that into qualitative and quantitative goals that can put us in the right direction so that we know when we are being consistent, we know what it's building towards?

A vision without a plan is just a dream, right? And if we want to make our dreams a reality, then we turn them into plans. And so what I do is I break my plans down into yearly, monthly, weekly, daily. When I was trying to lose 100 pounds, it felt like, oh my gosh, this is a lot of weight to lose and it's going to take me probably two years. And so I didn't just create a vision board. I created two boards. I had a vision board and then I created a goals board.

What's my goal for the year? What's my goal for each month? What's my goal for the week? And what's my goal every day? It broke it down so simply that I knew every day I had to drink this much water. I need to work out, exercise, strength train this many times. And over a monthly, it looked like being able to increase my weights in the gym, being able to wear certain clothes.

made it that much more easy to believe that I could accomplish that vision that I had for myself because I broke it down into daily steps. And the thing is, is that oftentimes what people do is they have this amazing dream and vision. You haven't done the work of taking that vision and that dream and breaking it down into actionable steps. And

And if you're watching this video, I want you to take that dream. I want you to take that future self that you see. I want you to pull it with all your might into the present. The second practice is that once you have goals, you need to choose supporting behaviors.

Okay, most of us are consistent with behaviors that work against our goals. I have been in that place. I was consistent. I was consistently drinking. I was consistently doing drugs. I was consistently fucking off watching Netflix, right? So I was consistent in the wrong direction from my goals. You might be watching this thinking, oh, I'm consistent, consistently addict to my team, consistently not showing up on time, consistently getting distracted. So it's not that you're not consistent. You're consistent on the wrong things.

What I have found to be the simplest thing to do for myself is when I'm trying to change behavior, I ask myself, what do I need to start to propel me towards my goals?

What do I need to stop doing that's deterring me from my goals or interfering with my goals? And what do I continue doing that is absolutely helping me achieve my goals? Right now, I'm at a place in my career where I need to level up. I'm recognizing that as a CEO, I know that I can be the bottleneck for the entire company. And we're in a place where we're growing really fast. And so I recognize that I need to change the way that I do things in the company, which also means changing personal habits and things that I've done for a long time.

And so what I did is I talked to friends of mine who have companies that I aspire to have of that size or that kind of impact. And they have built amazing companies with amazing teams. And I said, can I see your calendar? Because when I break down, what are the habits that I need to have as a CEO? I think about my calendar. I think about where my time goes, right? Because where time goes, attention goes. And where your attention goes in the company is what's going to grow and where money is going to come from. I asked to see their calendars. And what did I see? One,

If I look at my calendar, I look at one of their calendars, I had hour-long meetings. They had 15-minute meetings. That was the biggest difference that I saw.

And so it's not like they took more hours of meetings a day. It's not that. It's that they were getting more from the hours they had. And so I said to myself, that's a lot of things we have to change. I'm going to have to learn how to have 15 minute meetings rather than hour meetings. And so what I decided to do was one, no hour long meetings. Those are removed from my calendar. Two, any meeting that gets requested is a 10 to 15 minute by default. No more, no less. And then three, one thing I'm going to continue doing

is I'm going to continue having 30 minute one-on-ones because I recognize something, which is what has been working for me and continues to work despite all the ebbs and flows in the business for

For me, that's investing in my people. When I grow my people, the business grows. And so it's important to me to spend time with the people who report to me and even don't report to me and to put more time to them than any little task that comes up. And so the question for you is right now you've anchored with that vision of yourself. Say you've even started thinking of here are the goals I have. What do you need to stop doing that's fucking up you from hitting your goals?

What do you need to start doing that's going to propel you in that direction? And what can you continue doing that's not deterring you? Maybe it's not propelling you, but it's neutral. The third practice that I have in being consistent is you have to make it easy. You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your environment and what you have engineered your environment to be.

How can you create an environment that makes it easy to start the behaviors that propel you to your goals and makes it easy to stop the behaviors that interfere from you hitting your goals?

I remember the first time that I ever did this when I started gym launch and it was 2017, which is the second year technically in business. I tend to be very expressive. Like I have emotions written on my face and something that I've had to work on is in the moment when I'm on meetings, when I'm talking to people, people will say things that piss me off, that I feel stressed about. Maybe I'm super excited about, but what I've realized is that that split second reaction dictates a lot about what that person's going to tell me next time. And

And so something I recognized in myself was that something that was interfering with me being a leader that people could tell anything to was reacting quickly to what people said with my face, right? Because I might not say it, but my face would show it. And so I put the sticky note on my computer and the sticky note just said, be neutral. It sounds crazy, but that sticky note changed how I showed up for my entire team for the next six years because all I thought about was

When I'm receiving news, whether it's bad, frustrating, stressful, et cetera, be neutral because the likelihood that this is going to end the business and create this giant whirlwind of effect and then ruin my life is so low. It's probably just inconvenient and frustrating. And if I show that when somebody delivers me the news, it interferes with my goals of being someone they could come to because it punishes them in a way because they feel like they've upset me with the news.

But in reality, for me to be the right CEO for this business, I need to know everything. I need to have more context than anybody to make the right decisions. I recognized that that was a key for my growth. And all I had to do was put a sticky note on my computer. The research shows that it takes about 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic, meaning you don't have to think about it. So, for example, if you've been reaching for the ice cream every night for a year, it might take 66 days for you to not reach for the ice cream.

And that is why we fall to the level of our environment. Because if we don't set ourselves up for success by having engineered our environments to remind us of these things before it's automatic, it's going to be tough. The fourth practice I have in being consistent is rewarding yourself for consistent progress. What I have seen is that when you want a behavior to happen more consistently,

more frequently and more consistently is you want to reinforce it positively, whether that be you or somebody else. And I will say this, is if you can recruit somebody else to reinforce your consistent behavior, you will be far more likely to succeed, which is why if you look at the most effective

effective exercise, nutrition, behavior change programs. There's a third party. It could be a friend. It could be a family member. It could be a therapist. It could be a coach. That person is constantly there to reinforce the new behaviors so that you're constantly focused on the future and what you're doing well and forgetting about the fact that you've dumped all these behaviors over here that aren't helping. An example of this would be when Alex wrote his book, $100 Million Leads. It took him a long time of writing every day for six to eight hours. He got no reinforcement from that writing.

In the beginning, to get started, what I knew is it's hard to be consistent when you get zero feedback. And so what I did instead is I constantly positively reinforced him for the work he was putting in on the book.

Because I knew how punishing it might feel and how it's much harder to be consistent when you don't get that kind of reinforcement from somebody. Say you don't have somebody else to reinforce you or reward you. Something I do is I set up my schedule in a way that I reward myself if I am consistent with the things that are the highest priority. If me getting certain things with work done

was my number one priority, then I would say that if I get my to-do list for the day done, that is when I get to work out for the day. And so what it means is that the workout actually becomes a reward that I put in place for myself. If I don't get those things done, the reward is not there. And so there's also ways that you can reinforce and reward yourself for things. And the fifth practice of being consistent is that when in doubt, stick with the fucking plan.

The plan is working. It's often that either one, you're being impatient with the plan and you just don't recognize how long it actually takes to lie to yourself about if you're really sticking with the plan. I can't tell you the amount of times that people have come to me and they've said, Layla, I'm trying to lose weight. I'm eating 1100 calories a day, but I just can't seem to lose weight. And I was like, okay, well, are you tracking it? Can I see? And they're like, well, no.

And I was like, so I'll tell you, I thought recently even because I was like, oh, I want to lose six pounds. I thought that I was eating like 1400 calories a day. So I said, you know what? Okay, I'm not going to change what I'm eating, but I'm gonna start measuring it. Oh my God, I was eating 2300 calories a day. You don't even realize how things add up when you don't track them.

And the thing is, is about a plan and about being consistent is if you don't track and you don't measure, you don't manage it. So a lot of the times, the first thing I realized is that people aren't sticking to the plan of being consistent because they're actually just not confronting the fact that they're not doing it to the best of their ability. Like I knew that I should have been tracking. And guess what? I'm tracking now. My weight's going down. If it's business, it's like people are like, oh, I'm trying to make more money. Are you measuring how much money you're making? Are you doing your financials? Did you get a bookkeeper?

It's not that the plan doesn't work. It's that oftentimes we lie to ourselves about the fact that we're actually not doing it that well. Most people are just really impatient. There's so much immediate gratification nowadays that when we see that we have not lost 20 pounds in a week, our business hasn't blown up overnight, all these things, we think, oh, it must not be working. We just want to look for progress. That's it.

look at progress on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly scale. That's something that I've learned to do in my business with myself. A lot of the times when you decide to be consistent with something, to change your behavior and to be consistent in a direction that's going to propel you towards your goals, the results you're getting today and even a week in and even maybe sometimes two weeks in are the results from work you did three, six, 12 months ago. And so if you're wondering why

Why is it not happening yet? Momentum takes time to change and to turn into the opposite direction. So you might still be incurring the costs and receiving the result from the habits and the things that you were doing for the last three, six, 12 months.

And it might even be that you have started these new habits and these things are happening when you've already cemented these new habits into your routine. I'll give you an example of this. We had a portfolio company and they realized that they did not have great leadership on the team. And so they said, we really need to turn it around. And we said, cool, you know, the best way to do that is let's hire these two people. And then we're going to do consistent leadership trainings. We're going to put this quarterly performance review in place and we're going to have consistent one-on-ones with our teams.

They started doing that and they're about a month in, two people quit. Why did they quit? Lack of leadership. Why is that? Because those two people, that one month wasn't enough for them yet. They were thinking about the 12 months prior where there was all this terrible leadership, there was chaos and there was no organization. And so then they said to me, like, what do we need to do? We need to do this. No, no, no, you don't need to do jack shit. You need to stick with the plan. The results you're getting right now are from things you did three, six, 12 months ago. And

And so ask yourself, if you're watching this video and you're like, I've been consistent. I'm not seeing the fruits of my labor. Have you really waited long enough?

Or are you just paying the price for bad habits and bad decisions that you made three, six, 12 months ago? Studies show that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become a master. So when somebody tells me, I'm not that great at business yet, I'm not a great leader yet, I'm not good at making content yet, have you put in 10,000 hours? I think about that for myself, that I'm pretty good at business.

I've put in 10,000 hours there. Have I put in 10,000 hours to content? I don't think so. So it would make sense that I'm better at business than I am at making content. But it's catching up. And so eventually I will see the fruits of my labor. You can't believe everything you think. You've got to stick with the plan. Here's the thing. If the plan has worked for more people than it hasn't,

It's probably you, not the plan. Most people are one year of consistency away from a completely different version of themselves, but they can't get past the fact that the first three months are the slowest. When your mind is telling you, don't stick with the plan, change the plan, we need a new plan. Remember this, a lot of people think that our minds have immense influence over our behaviors.

But in fact, the opposite is true, which is our behaviors have immense influence over our minds and feelings.

If you're struggling to be consistent and you're struggling to stick with the plan, get out of your head and let your body do the talking. Let your body guide you into new beliefs. I don't believe it's going to work. Do it anyways and see what happens. Consider it an experiment. You know, people come to me and they say, Layla, I want to be a great leader, but I don't know where to start. I feel like I don't, I don't give a shit about my team. I don't care. I don't. Here's what I want you to do. Smile at your team. Ask them how they're doing. Tell me how you feel in two weeks.

The more times you do it, the faster you'll start feeling that way. A lot of people think, hey, look, I don't believe in myself. I don't think that I'm going to be capable of doing it, whether it's losing weight, starting a business, being a great leader, you know, whatever it is that you have that's that goal for yourself. And the thing is, is that I have rarely ever believed or had my mind work for me or my feelings work for me to get me to achieve some massive goal and take those steps every single day.

In fact, what I've realized is that I don't need to believe anything. I just need to take the actions. But I promise you that you can create thoughts and feelings by your actions. You don't have to believe.

that you can be consistent to win. You just have to take the actions of being consistent and eventually you will. Long-term consistency will beat short-term intensity every freaking time. It's easy to muster up the energy to do something once and do it great and do it with intensity. What's hard is doing it day in and day out, especially when you're doubting if the path even works.