The Power of Building Consistency | An Interview with Jeffery and Jami Downs
Leading Saints Podcast
Leading Saints
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2024
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jeff and Jami Downs are the authors of Streaking: The Simple Practice of Conscious, Consistent Actions That Create Life-Changing Results. Both have served in numerous leadership callings, Jami as a Primary president, Young Women president, and currently as a Relief Society president. Jeff has served as a Seminary teacher, in every role in the bishopric, and on the stake high council.
Jeff and Jami speak regularly to youth groups, young single adults, single adults, married couples, and many more on the power of consistency in increasing your faith, strengthening your relationships, and excelling in your profession. Jeff and Jami have seven children, and you can see what they do in their life every day, week, and month, by downloading and following them on the Streaking app. If you want to join them in streaking the scriptures, click here to download the Streaking app and start your own scripture reading streak.

Links
Streaking: The Simple Practice of Conscious, Consistent Actions That Create Life-Changing Results
The Streaking App
The Streaking Podcast
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Scriptures referenced in this podcast: Alma 37
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Highlights
1:50 Introduction to Jeff and Jami and the story behind their book Streaking. Setting different streaks.
8:40 There are a lot of books on habits but Jeff couldn’t find that the suggestions were helping him. He explains the difference between an intentional decision and a habit.
12:00 Why does streaking work? The ways it activates the brain
12:45 The 3 laws that helped Jeff and Jami as they were streaking
- Make it laughably simple
- Keep a record of it
- Create a community
17:00 Jami set a ministering streak. Some streaks are more private and some more public. She tried to do something with ministering everyday and she did it even without an assignment.
19:50 “Ministering isn’t this grand thing that I do all the time. It’s a journey and it’s a journey of how I treat other people and how I’m changing inside.”
21:45 We have to be careful that shame and guilt isn’t the driving reason for trying to change our behavior. Jami talks about ways that she addresses the guilt and shame and has worked to change it.
24:00 Jami had been very unsuccessful at journaling. She tried year after year and couldn’t make it stick. She found that committing to a single sentence everyday and making it laughably simple helped she stay consistent.
26:40 Overcoming the natural man by yielding to the prompting of the Holy Ghost. The promptings are small and subtle things normally. Creating streaks helps us overcome the natural man by helping us feel like we are winning and succeeding instead of losing.
30:15 We can apply the idea of streaking for the individual that is in the bishop’s office trying to repent. Stop focusing on the sin. For example, don’t look at pornography. It actually makes us think about it more and feel guilty when we mess up.
31:40 Sometimes we just need something to get us started and then we end up keeping going. We don’t want to get started because the mountain seems too big to climb.
32:45 The brain science behind streaking and creating habits
33:40 What do you do when you miss a day after doing it over a thousand days? How do you overcome shame and guilt?
40:10 Setting a ministering streak. Small ways you can focus on ministering every single day.
40:45 Creating a streak with family history. Just opening the app and understanding how it works can be your daily activity. Jeff talks about how the streak drastically changed his contributions even though he only did something very small everyday.
42:15 Jami talks about creating a streak for family history and how it helped her reconnect with her biological grandfather.
45:40 The scriptural basis of streaking is in Alma 37.
47:30 Does the gospel cause you intense overwhelm? It shouldn’t. We need to step back and reset.
50:30 There are 3 types of streaks
- Lifetime streaks
- This time of life streaks
- Challenge streaks
53:20 Streaks don’t cause shame, Satan causes shame. Remember that ‘don’t’ streaks don’t work. For example, don’t eat sugar. Don’t watch pornography. Overcome sin with ‘do’ behaviors. Do good one drop at a time.
57:15 It’s not a very good idea to put time limits on things. We think that if we do something long enough then it will just be a habit but really we still have to be intentional about things our whole life. Some things are just not automatic.
1:00:10 Jeff and Jami’s book isn’t about creating habits or doing something for a long time but it’s about becoming something. It’s also not about what we should be doing. Who do we want to be?
1:05:30 Using the principle of streaking as a leader with an organization. We shouldn’t try to set streaks for other people but we can do it for ourselves with things that relate to our callings. We can also help people that are struggling by helping them make things laughably simple.
1:12:30 Time streaks put your focus in the wrong place. Doing something for 30 minutes or 5 minutes. Don’t ever focus on the time.
1:13:00 Resources. Get the Streaking book and Streaking app. They also have a Streaking podcast.
1:14:00 In the end, streaking is your determination of what behaviors you want to do and how you do that to become like Christ. That is the end all be all of all of it.
1:17:15 Jeff and Jami’s final thoughts on leadership and their final testimonies
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Have you ever heard of scrupleocity? |
| 0:04.0 | This is a mental health concern that is impacting more Latter-day Saints than you think. |
| 0:09.0 | Scruplocity is religious, obsessive, compulsive disorder disorder where individuals are |
| 0:13.7 | hyper obsessed about their worthiness and repentance. |
| 0:16.8 | Sam Baxter, a former Bishop, sat down with me to talk about his lifelong |
| 0:20.8 | struggle with scruplocity and how he got treatment. |
| 0:24.4 | You can watch this interview for free in the Mentally Healthy Saints Library by going to |
| 0:29.0 | Leading Saints.org. |
| 0:31.0 | This gets you 14 days, free access to Sandbaxter's interview about Scruppolosity and 25 plus other interviews about ministering to those who struggle with mental health. |
| 0:42.0 | The content is priceless for leaders, so visit |
| 0:44.4 | leading Saints.org for free access. |
| 0:48.0 | Hey, welcome to the Leading Saints Podcast. |
| 0:54.4 | Now, for many of you that are brand new to Leading Saints, |
| 0:57.6 | it's important to do know that Leading Saints |
| 0:59.4 | is a nonprofit organization, 501c3, dedicated to helping Latter-day Saints be better prepared to lead. |
| 1:06.7 | And we do that through content creation. |
| 1:09.6 | We get so much positive feedback on the podcast, our virtual virtual conferences the articles on our website |
| 1:14.9 | you definitely got to check it out at leading Saints.org and on their home page at leading |
| 1:19.5 | Saints that are you can actually find the top six most downloaded episodes to the podcast. |
| 1:24.1 | So if you're new, like the content, want to jump in to some of the most popular episodes, |
| 1:28.7 | head there after you listen to this episode. All right, I finally did it. I actually went through my email before this episode to see when was the first time somebody recommended I reach out to this couple and it was 2020 and I mean that's now we're 2024, that's four years ago. |
| 1:53.0 | The 2020 doesn't feel four years ago, what's happening? |
... |
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