Difference Between Persistent and Consistent
Persistent and consistent are enviable qualities and help a great deal in achieving goals that a person sets for himself. These qualities are also wanted in leaders and managers so that they can lead from the front. Many people are perplexed and assume persistent and consistent to be synonyms which is incorrect. There are many differences in being persistent and being consistent and these will be highlighted in this article.
Let us look at these two qualities from the outlook of a leader. Managing men is not as difficult as it seems. Most managers fail because they do not use the right approach. Leaders must set lowest standards of performance that are satisfactory to them and must not allow any team member to fall below these standards consistently. Secondly, leaders need to set individual targets for the members based upon their actual competence. Now a rookie cannot be expected to perform at the same level as an experienced worker but every worker can raise his level a wee bit all the time to catch up with the rest. For this strategy to succeed, managers need to be both persistent and consistent. If leaders are persistent, team knows it has to perform to a minimum level. Leader must be consistent and have same benchmark for all so that a top performer is not treated unfairly. This gives a message to all that they need to perform consistently all the time. Performance management is all about the stance of a leader and unless he is both consistent and persistent, he will always get mixed performances from his team members.
Let us turn our thought to our lives. All of us have dreams in our eyes and set goals for ourselves but a lot many do not know how to get to these goals. It is only by being both persistent and consistent that we can get to our goals. It takes only small changes in the way we make efforts to accomplish our goals to conquer great heights in our lives. Experts agree that it is a blend of persistence and consistency and how we employ them in our lives that decides how far we will go in our endeavors. Goal setting and working to attain it has to be a way of life and one cannot stop and take rest thinking he has had sufficient. Yes, one needs to take a break to get recharge but it is single minded persistence only that takes us near to our goals.
Occasionally, people give up when they face and barrier that they think is surmountable but the fact is that their goal is just behind this apparently overwhelming wall. The key to accomplishment is being persistent and consistent. The asset of consistency shows up when one behaves in the identical approach during difficulty as he would when the times are good.