Want a habit to stick? Break up with consistency. Here's how to look at it instead...

SALT LAKE CITY — Ever have a great routine going and then life happens? Most of us have started a habit with the best of intentions only to watch it fade a few weeks later.

Monica Packer is the author of the new book "Sticky Habits." She said if you want a habit to stick, you have to break up with the myth of consistency.

"Habits do live and die by consistency," she said. "But a lot of us, when we think of the word consistency, we think perfection."

Packer emphasized that an all or nothing paradigm sets you up to fail.

"I think the way to word that for people is to think how often has your insistence on perfection cost you your consistency?" she said.

A lot of habit-building tools reward perfection. Closing rings, maintaining streaks and checking boxes can feel motivating, but Packer said those systems also create unrealistic expectations.

"You could maybe do it for 30 days, but can you do it for the next 30?" she asked.

Sustainable habits need to have flexibility. When one missed workout, one skipped journal entry or one imperfect day feels like failure, people often abandon the habit entirely. That cycle is discouraging. Instead of measuring your success by perfection, Packer said to redefine it.

Consistency is doing your best, most of the time, over time.

Consistency = Doing Your Best

"Your best is also not perfect," Packer said. "It's genuinely what you can give."

Some days your best might look like a full workout. Other days, it might be something smaller.

"My workout a typical day is 60 minutes, but there are gonna be days where my best is 15 to 20 minutes," she explained. "And that counts."

Most of the Time = More Times Than Not

"20 out of 30 days is you being consistent," Packer said.

Consistency doesn't mean never missing. Real life doesn't work that way.

"A lot of us think that means I need to hit 30 out of 30 days," she noted. "There's a little bit more of a gentleness there ... A practicality that allows you to actually be consistent."

Instead of trying to hit a perfect streak, Packer said to focus on just showing up regularly.

Over Time = You're Playing the Long Game

"A goal doesn't end with the week," Packer said. "A goal is who we wanna become."

A lot of habit systems focus on short-term challenges. Twenty-one days. Thirty days. A month-long streak. Packer said those timelines can be helpful, but they shouldn't be the finish line.

"You're playing the longer game," she explained.

A longer perspective gives you room for setbacks, interruptions and times when life happens without forcing you to start over every time something goes wrong.

"A lot of us think we're failures or that we're lazy or that we're non-starters or non-finishers," Packer said. "We've just been playing this game with two hands tied behind our backs."

When you adopt a more flexible system, you stop seeing yourself as the problem. You start to see that the system you were using wasn't built for real life.

"Not only does she feel more supported," Packer said, "but the biggest thing I've heard is it helps her see herself differently."

Find more advice from Monica Packer on Instagram, @aboutprogress.