If there’s one lesson that has transformed the way I approach personal development, it’s realising that consistency isn’t the rigid, perfection-driven concept we often make it out to be. For years, I believed consistency meant doing something flawlessly day after day – never missing, never slipping, never letting real life get in the way – and because of that belief, I would convince myself that if I stopped for even a short period of time, I had “fallen off the wagon.” It’s a phrase we hear constantly, thrown around casually as if it’s harmless, but the truth is that it creates a mindset where any pause, interruption, or moment of being human feels like a complete collapse. It turns one missed workout or one busy week into a reason to give up entirely, and it teaches us to view progress as something fragile, easily broken, and dependent on unbroken streaks of perfection.

The more I lived with that mindset, the more I realised how much pressure it created. I would set goals or routines with the best intentions, building excitement around the idea of a new beginning, but the moment life became overwhelming or my energy dipped, I would break my own streak. Once that happened, instead of simply picking things up again, I’d sit with a sense of failure, convinced that I had ruined the progress and should wait for a new “clean start.” It wasn’t that I didn’t care – it was that the idea of “the wagon” made me feel like I was either on it or off it, succeeding or failing, disciplined or defeated. There was no middle ground, no grace, no softness, and certainly no understanding that humans are never meant to operate in perfectly straight lines.

But the truth, when it finally settled in, was so much simpler and so much kinder: there is no wagon to fall off in the first place. Life isn’t a narrow platform you balance on; it’s a series of paths, stopovers, detours, and pauses. Consistency isn’t about clinging tightly to perfection, but about returning – sometimes slowly, sometimes imperfectly, sometimes with resistance – to the things that matter to you. Once I understood that, the shame I used to feel after taking a break began to dissolve. I realised that pausing and quitting are not the same thing, and that stopping for a day, a week, or even a month never meant that the goal was gone; it simply meant that life had shifted, and I was allowed to shift with it.

When I look back at the habits I’ve built and the changes that have stuck, none of them came from rigid, punishing rules. They came from allowing myself to start small, to make tiny adjustments, to show up in a way that felt manageable rather than extreme. I didn’t build consistency through dramatic, all-or-nothing declarations – I built it through five-minute efforts, through gentle restarts, through forgiving myself when momentum faltered, and through recognising that progress isn’t erased just because it isn’t constant. The steps I took were often quiet and subtle, sometimes barely noticeable, but each one contributed to a foundation that couldn’t be undone by a temporary pause.

Something shifted when I stopped thinking of consistency as a test of willpower and started seeing it as an act of self-respect. Showing up for myself – even in small ways – reminded me that I mattered, that my goals mattered, and that the process mattered far more than the timeline. I realised that motivation wasn’t the spark that created action; it was the result of action. Every time I took even the smallest step forward, I felt a sense of pride that encouraged the next step, creating a rhythm that felt natural instead of forced. And when I did pause, instead of spiralling into self-criticism, I treated the pause as exactly what it was: a pause, nothing more.

The idea of “falling off the wagon” keeps people trapped in cycles of all-or-nothing thinking, but the reality is that the most meaningful growth happens in the grey areas – the places where we come back to ourselves after drifting, where we choose again after forgetting, where we start over without drama or guilt. There is nothing weak about returning; it is one of the strongest things we can do, because it means we are choosing to keep going even when things haven’t gone perfectly.

If you’re reading this and thinking about a habit you stopped or a routine you let slip, I want you to know that nothing is lost. You haven’t failed. You haven’t undone your progress. You haven’t fallen off anything. You simply paused, and you are allowed to begin again without needing to make it a story about failure. Consistency is not built from perfection but from persistence – the gentle kind, the patient kind, the human kind.

So let go of the wagon. Let go of the idea that you must start again from zero whenever life gets messy. Choose the smallest step you can take today, even if it feels almost insignificant. That’s where real consistency lives – not in grand gestures or flawless streaks, but in the quiet willingness to return to what matters, over and over, in the most human way possible.