When Consistency Becomes the Death of Your Vision

Consistency is king, right? Books like Atomic Habits and The Compound Effect have built movements around this concept. Small habits create remarkable results, and daily decisions compound into massive outcomes. These principles work and should absolutely be implemented.

But what if the very consistency that built your success is now killing your vision? What if your habits have become a cage instead of a catalyst?

I, like most of us, have been there. The question is whether you recognize it when it happens.

To be a disruptive leader, you must be willing to be disrupted. The disruption starts with you.

Dancing with God

Leadership isn't a factory assembly line. It's a dance. And we step on God's toes when we refuse to follow His lead.

Disruptive leaders don't get to choreograph the whole routine in advance. We respond. We adjust. We move with what God's doing in the moment, even when it means abandoning the steps we practiced.

On our December Disruptors Council™ strategy call, we discussed recalibration in preparation for 2026. We grounded our strategies in the definition: adjusting to or aligning with new conditions, essentially resetting to a correct or better standard for greater accuracy and effectiveness.

Translation: You can't keep doing the same thing and expect it to work when everything around you has shifted.

Ecclesiastes 10:10 says, "If the ax is dull and its edge unsharpened, more strength is needed, but skill will bring success." If you're swinging a dull blade and wondering why you're exhausted with no significant forward motion, recalibration is how you sharpen the blade.

Your routine works against you if you can't see what's happening around you.

The Propaganda We Believe

Let's talk about the warfare that happens in your head.

In natural warfare, propaganda controls the narrative to control behavior. Spiritual warfare works the same way. The enemy feeds you lies wrapped in truth until you believe the rut you’re in is a form of righteousness.

Here's the lie we tell ourselves—and yes, I said “we”:

"I'm being faithful, staying consistent, and doing what I'm supposed to do. This brings pleasure to God." “If I change now, I will have wasted all the effort and resources I’ve invested to this point. That means, I’ll be set back, and I can’t afford to fall behind God’s pace.” And because it sounds spiritual, we dismiss anyone who challenges it. We mistake routine for faithfulness and tunnel vision for focus. We stay locked into patterns that stopped working months ago, defending them with scripture and spiritual language while everything crumbles around us.

We've just weaponized our habits against our own vision.

This is spiritual bypassing, and Kingdom leaders are masters at it. "I'm praying about it." "I'm waiting to see what the Spirit is saying." "I'm doing this in service to the Lord." These statements sound holy, but they're often just covers for lazy leadership.

Let's call it what it is: avoidance. Avoiding the hard conversations. Avoiding the difficult decisions. Avoiding the reality that your current approach relies on outdated assumptions. You've dressed up your avoidance in spiritual language, but others see through it.

Really, the Spirit has already spoken—through your struggling team, through your exhausted spouse, through the opportunities you squander, through the new context that's screaming for attention. But you're not paying attention because that requires you to do something different. And “different” can feel “hard.”

Faithfulness isn't refusing to adjust. It's having the guts to adjust while wisely stewarding all that God has given you.

Choosing autopilot doesn't require you to think, to reassess, or to spend energy you don't feel like you have. So you tell yourself, "if and when the Lord shows me I need to change, I will." But the “if and when” never happens because you've tuned out every channel God is using to show you.

You can't disrupt anything when you refuse to be disrupted.

The Warning Signs You're Stuck

I'm not saying you're doing all of these. But if even one hits a nerve, pay attention:

You're missing the God-opportunities. You spent time mapping out your vision and goals, but when the right people or opportunities show up, you don't recognize them. Why? Because they don't look like what you expected, or they come at an inconvenient time. Your default response is "I don't have time for that." God's answering your prayers, but you're too distracted to notice.

Your meetings are on autopilot. Your agenda is the same…every…single…time. Nothing organic, nothing fresh. You're not factoring in changes in your team, your market, or your context. You're just checking the boxes while vision slowly morphs into routine maintenance.

Your schedule is inflexible. You follow your daily routine to the T without factoring in one critical detail - life keeps lifing. You're unwilling to adjust when something more pressing or more important shows up. The routine has become more important than the fruit. You've made your schedule a god.

Your family gets the scraps. You're giving everything during work hours—your energy, your creativity, your best thinking. At the end of the day, you're just going through the motions. You have nothing of quality left to give, so it becomes transactional. You're fulfilling duties on a checklist rather than being fully present with the people who matter most.

Your critical partnerships are suffering. You're neglecting the relationships that make the vision possible. Whether it's your team, your collaborators, or your family, the consistency you're maintaining in your work is competing with the priorities that should matter more.

The common thread? Zero situational awareness. You've lost the ability to read the room, read the moment, read the people around you.

The Cost of Refusing to Recalibrate

The losses are brutal and have the potential of wrecking you.

• You lose relevance while perfecting last year's strategy.

• You lose influence. Your team sees what you refuse to see, and they're losing respect for you by the day.

• You lose the very people you need to accomplish your vision. They’re tired of being ignored. They brought you solutions and you dismissed them. They flagged issues and you were too busy. So they stop trying.

• Your family stops trying to connect. Your marriage is dying while you're building your empire. Your kids are growing up with a parent who's physically present but emotionally checked out.

You can lose everything you're working for by refusing to adjust how you're working for it.

So how do you break free from this consistency rut without losing the power of good habits?

Stay tuned for Part 2: How to Break Free from the Consistency Trap.

Recognizing the problem is only half the battle. Knowing how to fix it is where transformation happens.