I haven’t met many people who claim to be naturally patient. Granted, in view of the whole world, I haven’t met all that many people, but at least in my experience, patience is a fruit of the Spirit that must be cultivated in order to grow properly. I wrote about my plan for repentance from impatience here, and I’d like to discuss another remedy for impatience: consistency. Impatience and procrastination demand that we get large swaths of work done in a single sitting. It’s overwhelming and often impractical, especially when jobs, family, and life are thrown into the mix. To combat this overwhelm and the anxiety that goes with it, I have recently learned to harness the incredible power of consistency. 

And the beauty of consistency is that, in our experience, it often takes less than 20 minutes a day. As a family, we are transitioning from unschooling to Charlotte Mason homeschooling, and one of many draws of Charlotte Mason as compared to traditional homeschooling is that the lessons are between 15-20 minutes for each subject, which seemed like such a small amount of time at first. In testing the theory, I have found many areas in which less than 20 minutes a day can be life changing – if done for that amount of time every day.

Reading Lessons

One of the ways that I have been practicing consistency is in teaching the children to read. We have been working our way through Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons over the course of several months. The lessons are supposed to last about 20 minutes, but Ana Lia’s were stretching longer and longer until one day I realized we had been working for 40 minutes and still weren’t finished. I tried dividing the lessons in half. That wasn’t as effective as I hoped because the words at the beginning of the lesson were in the story in the later part of the lesson, so it was helpful to do it all in a single day.

Thankfully, my mom flew to California the following week for a visit. She has decades of homeschooling experience, so she led their lessons for a few days. We were on Lesson 49, and she recommended that I go back about ten lessons to let Ana Lia review some of the sounds. The pace of introducing new sounds was too fast for her, and she was getting confused and frustrated. My immediate internal response was “I don’t want to go backwards. We have come so far!” We were getting close to reading full stories in regular type, and I was excited to show Afa all “our” progress. It took humility to admit that consistency, while important, may also mean going backwards sometimes…and that had to be okay. We simply needed to continue in our consistency. About three weeks after we did our reset, we had consistently worked our way back to Lesson 50, and she was far better prepared to tackle the new sounds than she had been before. 

Hula

Ana Lia is going to do her first official hula at her cousin’s wedding a few months from now. The beautiful bride sent me a video of the hula dance, and I felt overwhelmed watching how much there was to learn. The first eight counts looked easy, so we started there. The first day, all we did was work through the footwork for the first eight counts. The second day we went through the hand motions for the first eight counts. The third day we put them all together. It took us three days to learn eight counts, and I was afraid we would never learn the whole thing. But we practiced for about 10 minutes a day, every day. Eight counts at a time. I have an alarm that goes off every day at 8:45am. Six weeks in, and we are well on our way to learning a hula dance. 

Housekeeping

One of my biggest deficiencies as a wife and mom is my housekeeping. Thankfully, it’s one of Afa’s strengths or our house have been a disaster for a majority of our marriage. In fact, it was one of the reasons I was so nervous to buy a big house because I had no idea how we would keep it clean, and at first, we did not. I was so excited for the kids to have a room that was only for them, and we put all their clothes, toys, and art supplies in that room. I was thrilled not to have these things in the living room and kitchen anymore, but they soon exploded all over the kids room. The other rooms in the house were not faring well either.

Again, consistency came to the rescue, and again, it took less than 15 minutes a day. Having the kids complete four small chores each night before they went to bed completely changed the state of our house. I detail exactly what that looked like for us here.

Harness the Power

Any large task that seems overwhelming at first can likely be divided into smaller, manageable ones. Do you have a big goal? Maybe it is learning a language, reading through the whole Bible, exercising every day, saving rather than spending your money, spending 1,000 hours outside in a year, reading one book every month. It won’t happen all at once. You can’t learn a language in a day. You can, however, learn one noun and one verb. And tomorrow another. Then six months from now, if you have learned a noun and verb every day, you will have 180 of each…that’s a solid start to learning a language. 

Practical Tips:

• Do it at the same time every day. I set an alarm for all our important tasks – waking up, hula, park time, reading time, laundry time. Each has an alarm to keep me accountable
• Keep the 15 minute limit. This takes discipline as well, but if you are regularly going over that predetermined time and the task cuts into the rest of your day, you may be more likely to give up.
• Ask someone to keep you accountable. I keep Afa updated on our reading and hula lessons, and I have a good friend who I text each day that I run. Having a cheerleader on your team can increase your consistency.
• Record your progress. You won’t see tons of progress the first day because you only did it for 15 minutes. You may not even see much progress in the first week. Keep in mind that for hula, by the end of the first week, we mastered 16 counts of a dance that lasts several minutes. It didn’t seem like much progress at all. But have markers, maybe once a month or once a quarter to look back over your progress to see how far you have come in 20 minutes a day. 

Impatience with the bigger aspects of life can trigger despair, or it can trigger action. Get advice if you have big goals that seem impossible to reach. And in reaching those goals, one of the most manageable ways to do that is to harness the power of daily consistency in working toward those goals.