For the first time in three years

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #24

Three years. Every week, without fail.

Tuesday evening, my phone buzzed with the same reminder it gives me every week. Newsletter. I glanced at it, told myself I’d get to it after the next thing... and then the next thing... until I found myself exhausted and stumbling my way to bed. I was enjoying my cappuccino Wednesday morning when it hit me, the same way it hit Catherine O’Hara on that plane in Home Alone, the second she realized she’d left Kevin behind. The letter never went out.

Since I started publishing this weekly newsletter three years ago, the style and content have changed, but its purpose has always been the same:

To help you build your consulting business.

And I’ve never failed to put it in your inbox every Tuesday evening, like clockwork. Through holidays. Through travel. Through weeks when I had no time to write it. I found the time anyway. It became the one thing I never let slip.

Until last week.

Life keeps life-ing, as they say, and for the first time, I missed an issue.

I’m very sorry about that.

I missed it because we’ve been bringing on new people. Hiring, training, building a team so this business can better serve you and not rely solely on me. And I’m still wearing a lot of hats while I do it. We’re making great progress…but last week the urgent swallowed the important whole.

Maybe you have one of these too.

The thing you do without fail, right up until the week the client work piles up and the people need you and the calendar gets full... and then it slips.

For you it might be the outreach. The follow-up. Your own marketing, the work that builds next quarter’s pipeline while this quarter’s clients are screaming for attention. The discipline that slides first is almost always the one that was building your future.

And underneath the single slip is a fear that, if I dropped it once, maybe I’ve lost it for good. Maybe the streak was the only thing holding it together, and now that it’s cracked, the whole thing is gone.

I want to help you stare that fear down, because the research says it’s just “stinking thinking,” as the late Zig Ziglar used to say.

A researcher named Phillippa Lally at University College London followed people building new habits, ninety-six of them, for months. Average time for a habit to lock in: sixty-six days. But here is the part that matters to you and me. Missing one day did not break the habit.

Not statistically. Not meaningfully. The people who slipped once and got right back climbed the same curve as the people who never slipped at all.

Because the first miss was never the thing that got anybody.

It’s the second.

James Clear put it cleaner than I can. “Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.” The first slip is human. The second slip is a choice. And the road between them gets paved by a small voice that psychologists have actually studied.

They call it the what-the-hell effect. It started in diet research. A person eats one cookie they swore off, and instead of stopping there, they figure the day is blown anyway, so they finish the bag. One slip becomes a binge. Not because of the cookie. Because of the story they told themselves after it. “It’s already broken, so why bother.”

That voice doesn’t only wear out refrigerator hinges and grow waistlines. It grinds away at your business, too. You skip the outreach one week and the voice says the rhythm is gone, so why force it today. You miss one workout, one sales call, one issue of your own newsletter, and the voice hands you a tidy excuse to miss the next one too. That is the voice that turns a slip into a season, and a season into who you are.

So the rule I’m holding onto is not “never miss.” I’m a sixty-something man running a growing company. I’m going to miss. The rule is simpler and harder…

Never miss twice.

And when you do miss, how you come back matters more than you would guess. Most of us reach for the whip. We figure a good round of beating ourselves up will scare us straight. The research says the opposite.

Kristin Neff has spent her career on this, and her finding is, well, kinda blunt. Self-criticism runs on fear and stress, and it stalls you. The people who tear themselves down make less progress and put things off more, not less. Grace gets you moving again faster than guilt ever will.

The performance coaches arrive at the same place through a different door. The best ones don’t chase perfect days. They decide ahead of time what showing up looks like on their worst day, and they protect that floor. An unmotivated workout still counts. A less-than-perfect call still counts. A short, honest issue still counts. A hundred ordinary efforts will beat one heroic burst every time.

Which is the whole reason this letter is in your hands right now. It is a week late. It is a confession instead of a polished framework. But it is here. Showing up beats showing off.

P.S. I missed last week because I was hiring people, training them, building something bigger than myself, and living a fairly full life while I did it. I’m not going to apologize for that part. The building and the living are the whole point. This letter just protects the relationship with you while I do it. Missing once was the cost of a full week. Missing twice would be the start of letting you go... and I’m not doing that.

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #23
👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #22

You might also find these interesting:

🔎 How The 1% Habit Can Make You Rich
🔎 How to Segment Your List and Reduce Friction in Your Buyer's Journey

P.S.: When you're ready, here are more ways I can help you...