I want to tell you about a phone call I received.
A client — navigating more change in a single season than most people face in a decade. A relationship ended. Primary support relocated. A new job. And then the long-standing arrangement for their children’s music lessons, ended without warning.
They listed it all quietly. Then said: I just want consistency. I just want things to hold.
I want to look at that carefully — because the consistency they were reaching for may not be the kind within their power to provide. And the consistency that would actually serve the people they love most may be something they already have.
“Consistency is not the absence of change. It is the presence of someone who remains anchored while the change moves through.”
The definition that is making you feel like you are failing
Most people define consistency as stability of structure. The same routines, the same arrangements, the same external framework.
This definition has a fundamental problem: it locates consistency in the external world. And the external world does not reliably cooperate.
The most psychologically secure people — whether children or colleagues or partners — are not those who experienced the least change. They are those who navigated change alongside someone who did not lose themselves in it.
What people actually internalise from those they depend on
What gets internalised is not the stability of the external environment. It is the quality of presence within the instability.
The question is not whether change happened. It is whether there was someone who held space through it. Someone whose values did not shift when the structure did. Who remained — through every variation of circumstance — recognisably and reliably themselves.
“You are the consistent thing. You have been the whole time. The measure was wrong — not the providing.”
One reframe to carry forward
Stop measuring your consistency by what changed around you. Start measuring it by what held — your presence, your values, your capacity to stay connected to the people who depend on you through the movement.
What held is the consistency that matters. If you have been showing up through everything this season has brought — that is not inadequacy. That is the most important thing.
Episode D of The Kitchen Table Conference — ‘The only consistent thing is change’ — explores this reframe in full. Find it at appikshajain.com/podcast. Clarity call also available.