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Plateaus and Four Ways to Get Past Them

Everyone hits plateaus on the way to impossible goals, but there are things you can do to get past them more quickly: staying with the plan, changing the plan, easing up and staying one step ahead.

Why Am I Stuck On This #@?!ing Plateau?

I’ve hit a plateau. Actually I’ve hit hundreds.

We all reach a point where progress toward a impossible goal stalls or even feels like we’re moving backward. It plateaus.

If you don’t reach one, it’s a sign that you’re worthy of a bigger goal.

Plateaus can feel awful, but they can also be a beautiful waypoint. And they are an inevitable part of reaching for something extraordinary. By learning to move past them quicker, we reduce the pain and get to the finish line faster.

Four Plateau-Busting Strategies Plus 1 Essential Component

Below are four ideas for moving past a plateau. The common element to all of them is having people around you for support. Whether that’s a coach like me, a colleague, a spouse or a friend, information from external sources helps you to design your next steps and experience plateaus with less discomfort.

1. Stay With The Plan

It’s possible that you underestimated what it takes to reach your goal.

Sometimes our idea of how fast things should happen is simply wrong. Especially for those of us who have had an easy time learning new skills, we might believe the next skill should come quickly. Wrong. That’s called a fixed mindset, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

That new skill we wanted to learn in 10 repetitions might take us 100 repetitions to master. Or 1000. With a fixed mindset, those last 990 repetitions (if we do them) feel like a death march of failure.

Contrast that to the growth mindset. The growth mindset is neutral and observant. After 10 reps, the growth mindset experiences something like “Wow, we’re not making the progress we hoped for. Okay, let’s evaluate. What’s working? What’s not? Is this still the optimal plan? Cool. Let’s keep going and see how things progress.” The growth mindset is aware, it’s hopeful but not attached to a result. And it’s scientifically proven to lead to better outcomes.

Six years ago I started a quest to become one of the top players in a second sport. I had already won 14 world championships in freestyle flying disc, and I would win 2 more while taking on this new adventure. While I knew what it took to become a top player in freestyle, I didn’t have all the information on this new sport (called DDC). Fortunately, I had a great mentor who sped my progress.

And I still hit plateaus.

What I didn’t realize was that truly mastering the essential skills for DDC was going to take a lot more work than I thought. Once I came to terms with that, I not only stayed with the plan but doubled down on it. I knew my throws were not at a high enough level for the DDC I wanted to play, so I started noticing more opportunities for throwing practice. These sessions were exciting and injected new energy into my experience of DDC.

Thousands of practice throws later, I was more consistent and effective. My stress level in games went down because I could count on the muscle memory of my practices when executing plays.

2. Revise The Plan

Most of the time, our first instinct is to work harder or give up. That temptation to give up is real. It’s a heavy feeling to wonder whether we can actually get there and if it’s all worth it. When we get to this point – and we all do – it’s a symptom that we’re focusing too much on the end point and not enough on the experience of getting there.

Staying connected to a winning mindset is essential. Any victory is going to be fleeting. If the purpose is to finish a marathon or get a promotion or win a world championship, what happens once you’ve done it? There is a literal graveyard of people whose lives felt completely empty after achieving an impossible goal.

What if you could arrive at that finish line and be more of yourself, full of pride in the effort invested in the chance at victory? If we can do that, we emerge stronger with more long-term resilience.

So, the plateau. What you’ve been trying feels like it’s not working. Your performance isn’t improving. Your progress seems stalled.

For my DDC project, I had timelines for my progress and ideas of where I should finish at my next tournaments. It all seemed very obvious. And I was wrong most of the time.

I was catching up to the level of more experienced players and thought I knew what it took to get there. With every breakthrough, a new blindspot opened up between me and my goal. After feeling frustrated by underperforming over and over, I took a fresh look at the plan.

As I mentioned, I started practicing more often on my own. I also started noticing what else might work. Playing with the local club was a great learning lab, and it didn’t put me in enough top level games, so I played as many pick-up games after competitions as I could. Teaming up with elite players helped me learn to adapt and deal with more sophisticated game situations than what I was familiar with. And it started to build my reputation.

I noticed that the additional throwing practice was helping with basic technique but that the top players had resilient technique that performed in a variety of wind conditions, so I practiced in “bad” wind too and threw hundreds of incompetent shots in order to raise my level of competence.

By revising my plan often, I believe I shortened my plateaus and accelerated my progress.

3. Ease Up

This is the fun one, and it has its risks. Sometimes the best way to get past a plateau is taking a break. Most often, by taking a break, we are allowing our brain to go to work in the background integrating all our learning so it’s more ready to be used next time. During intense periods of learning and training, we sometimes don’t give our brain enough time to do its thing.

Over the past few years I’ve been learning new languages using an app called Duolingo. I’m probably one of their power users. I have a streak of more than 650 consecutive days of doing lessons. When learning new languages, I have the visceral experience of how we reprogram our brain when we master new skills. There are very few things as basic as the words we use to communicate. Changing that code sometimes feels like I’m twisting my mind. I go through cycles of immersing myself in Duolingo’s lessons and easing up to a minimum level. What I’ve noticed is that my brain starts to pick up new patterns after easing up. I give my brain time to catch up and lock the learning in, and I get more out of the next lessons.

For my DDC project, I’ve found the best results easing up after a competition. During the competition, I’m learning but my brain needs needs more time to let it all soak in. Giving myself some time after a competition opens the door for improvements. Something that was a struggle before is more natural. Or, strategic opportunities become more obvious. It changes every time.

Here is the risk: there is a fine line across easing up, being lazy and giving up.

When you decide easing up is your strategy, monitor whether it’s actually a strategy or whether you are avoiding doing the work. Monitor your gut. Is easing up just a sneaky way of quitting? Keep connected to the motivations for your goal and keep designing the experience you want to create for your life as you pursue it.

4. Stay One Step Ahead

Most of the time, we realize we’ve plateau’d while we’re already struggling. What if we could be one step ahead, predicting the plateau and solving it before it sets in?

Going back to my quest to learn DDC, what if I had been in deeper communication with my mentor about what it takes to get to the top? I had such absolute trust that my approach was much closer to “he’ll reveal what’s next when the time is right,” but what if I had been in conversation about what to expect, what to be doing differently.

It’s possible that I could have skipped or shortened a plateau or two. It’s also possible that I wasn’t ready to hear the complete plan. You know how when rereading a book, we see things we never noticed during the first read? If I read a book six years ago about becoming a better DDC player, I might have seen some lessons but not really noticed them, not known how they were actionable. On rereading, previously invisible lessons would jump out as A HA! moments.

To stay ahead of plateaus, we need to gather information and feedback and hope we notice the important lessons in time to speed us past a plateau and toward the finish line.

Ready To Jump To Your Next Plateau?

Which strategy do you need now? It may take some exploration.

Let’s be clear. Whichever strategy you choose, it leads to another plateau.

Sound depressing? It doesn’t have to be. As we navigate these plateaus, leaping from one to the next, what keeps it beautiful is being in the moment. By staying connected to why we are taking on the impossible, we can shape our experience as we stay in the process. We can see plateaus as inspirational evidence that things are working. And as an opportunity to optimize our plan.

As for me, as I write this I have made three finals at major tournaments this year, including a runner-up finish at the world championships in England. I’m ready to jump to what’s next.

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Trust Is Your Job

Trust

I’ve been thinking about trust recently after hearing two heartbreaking leadership stories:

If I Trust You, You’ll Cheat Me

In the first, the head of an organization’s branch sent out a message through his managers: no remote work during the holidays, even though the facility itself was essentially closed. As this message was shared, you could feel the deflation in morale across the entire branch.

Staff correctly interpreted this rule as a vote of no confidence. You’re all cheaters and I don’t trust you to get anything done. You’re just going to take vacation days and not document them. I don’t trust you unless I can see you are working. Making the situation worse, the message was phrased in a way that implied it was a worldwide rule. When word got out that other facilities were shutting down for the holidays or giving days off, it destroyed staff morale and exposed this manager’s lack of trust.

If I Trust You, I’ll Fail

In the second, a leader under pressure from her bosses turned her frustration on her team. The team had delivered a successful program a month before, except in the leader’s mind the success was due to her taking over the program halfway through planning. In her narrative, the team had let her down, and she had saved the day. She hadn’t trusted her team to deliver, so she did “all” the work herself.

She shared her perspective in surprise conversations with each team member. One described it as an ambush. Another reminded the boss that she had never even celebrated the completion of the program by thanking the team for its hard work. The boss’ response: there was nothing to thank the team for.

By getting stuck thinking of herself as the savior, she shrunk as a leader. She lost sight of the needs of her team, their talents, and their substantial work that she had simply repackaged into the final program. In situations like this, a cratering of morale isn’t the only result. They can be triggers for the disintegration of the team itself.

When trust disappears, it can cost organizations their very lives.

Being A Leader When Trust Falters

There are schools of thought that it is the employee’s job to earn trust from the manager. It’s just the opposite. It’s the manager’s job to cultivate trust.

Noticing you’re not trusting your team? As a leader, it’s your job to fix it.

Leadership means taking responsibility for the situation. And here’s a key point many leaders forget: responsibility doesn’t mean doing everyone’s work for them. If you’re doing that, you’ve surrendered responsibility. By doing it all, you’ve relieved your team of expectations and weighed yourself down with work that isn’t yours.

The boss in our second story shared that she felt like if she didn’t do all the work, she could never ensure that there would be a positive result. I empathize with the pressure she felt, and I thirst for her to see the greater possibilities of letting go of control: the wonders of using the full talents of the team, and the incredible upside of chaotically unexpected insights.

Your work is building teams and team behavior that create results. And trust.

This is the point where some team leaders are thinking “I can’t imagine ever trusting my team.” What if you did anyway? What if there is no way to actually be a compelling leader than to trust your team when you’re not sure you can?

Like our leader above. What if she set aside her perspective of “I can’t trust” and trusted her team to kick ass on the next project? What if she practiced expert management to maximize their talents? It might feel terrifying at first. There aren’t even any guarantees that the project would work out. What I know is that the team would be stronger at the end and more ready with each succeeding challenge.

Trust is always there to give, even if you don’t feel it.

That sounds hard. Yup. Sounds that way, and with practice it can feel easier. Amateur leadership is easy and ineffective. World class leadership cares enough that stepping up to “impossible” challenges is the only option.

So how do we fix things when we’ve lost trust?

Fixing Distrust

The solution comes down to courage and communication. It’s courageous leadership to hold back and not blame your team members for the situation. It’s courageous leadership to look deeply at the situation, be honest about your role and imagine what positive contribution you can make. And it’s courageous leadership to make that contribution.

More often than not, it’s going to be about communication designed to elevate the skills and leadership capacity of each member of the team. Diplomatic communication. Nonviolent communication. Some of your team members may not yet have the communication skills needed to thrive with you, and your challenge is to communicate anyway and support their growth. Becoming a better leader means summoning more courage and expanding your own willingness to communicate effectively, in service of trust.

And yes, sometimes it’s not going to work out. Sometimes people are not ready to contribute at the level needed by the team. Sometimes people are not ready to be trustworthy. And your team needs you to replace them, but only after you have shown tremendous leadership in owning the situation.

Trust Is Everyone’s Job

Trust

One more thing. This is for all of us on teams who are relieved by this article, that it’s the boss’ responsibility to fix things. Let’s go back to this statement from earlier: there are schools of thought that it is the employee’s job to earn trust from the manager. It’s just the opposite. It’s the manager’s job to cultivate trust.

I take that back. Leadership is the responsibility of every team member. So if you’re noticing something is off, look courageously at the issue and communicate to create the working experience you envision for the team.

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The Failure of Failing Forward

Mooki FAIL

(This article is based on a talk I gave at Nonprofit Boot Camp in San Francisco.)

Haunted By Failure

A few years ago I led a program at Craigslist Foundation called LikeMinded. It was part of a high profile suite of projects funded by a major foundation. Like 9 out of 10 web initiatives, it didn’t catch on.

It’s almost three years later, and this is the first time I’ve written about it publicly. There’s a taboo around talking about failure, and I’m ready to defy that taboo.

LikeMinded failed for all sorts of reasons, including the most important one: the world decided it wasn’t essential.

What I’ve been learning recently is that what is essential is a real relationship with failure.

We all fail, and failure hurts. I invested years of my life leading this initiative for Craigslist Foundation and traveled more than 100,000 miles learning from community members and partners. When it didn’t take hold, it was disappointing. And when Craigslist Foundation didn’t last long enough for us to learn from round one and try again, it was doubly frustrating.

We don’t have to share our failures publicly, but sharing them has an important role. It helps us move forward. It helps us get the disappointment out in the open so we can process the emotions and grow from the experience.

I grew from my LikeMinded experience. Leading the initiative expanded my skills, and I discovered that they were exactly the type of skills that help me in my current role as a peak performance expert and leadership coach.

The Real Stakes of Failure

failure is cool

This summer I went to a talk about failure. For our name tags, everyone was asked to answer the question: “How do you handle a moment of failure?”

Almost every answer was a variation on: “move on,” “fail more,” or “fail bigger.”

These answers come from a concept called Failing Forward. Originally, this was a great concept. It connected people to the idea that we don’t need to be stopped by failure, and in fact failure might be the pathway to bigger victories.

But somewhere along the line, Failing Forward got corrupted to the point where failure became the badge of honor instead of moving forward. Rather than being a tool, failure has almost become the end. That’s not cool.

This new interpretation of Failing Forward needs to go away.

The point isn’t to fail. The point is to succeed, and failing is more complex than FAIL AGAIN!

At this meetup, Esther Pearl talked about how girls feel no freedom to fail. They feel so hemmed in by expectations that they’d rather not even try. If you’re a girl and you’ve been socialized to believe that you have to be twice as compelling as your male peers, try taking risks, try being resilient, try dispassionately failing forward. Pretty sure I couldn’t.

It’s a good thing we have people like Esther around to work with girls to disassemble this socialization.

It reminds me of how folks feel within nonprofits. They work so hard to get funding that delivering on promises can feel suffocating. While most initiatives in business are not successful, nonprofit leaders feel like every program has to catch on and shine.

Under these conditions, this new cavalier version of failing forward doesn’t help.

Day 222 (Or is this Day 1 now?) - Oops!

Reimagining Failing Forward

We need something different.

Don’t get me wrong. We need to take risks to succeed. And there is virtue simply in taking the risk. Success comes from persistence in spite of failure. All that is still true.

But we need to get back to some fundamentals underneath failure: Learning, Vulnerability and Honesty.

Learning

As Failing Forward focused more and more on the failing, we forgot about a critical ingredient: learning. Unless we’re taking in the lessons of a failure, failing becomes flailing. We’re seeing some people lose discernment between experimenting and f-ing up.

Let’s double down on learning. On actual, honest learning.

Vulnerability

We’ve stripped the emotion from failing in our attempts to get people to not be afraid of it.

When nonprofit programs fail, it’s not the same as the failure of an app. When social sector programs fail, people are injured, they die, species go extinct, climate change accelerates. The stakes are unimaginably higher.

So when we fail, it hurts, and it’s time to allow ourselves the vulnerability to share both the existence of the failure and its effect on us. Being real about our emotions lets us pass through the failure in a stronger and more creative way.

By the way, the same is true for success. While this article is about being real about failure, being real about our successes is just as important. Too often, we gloss over our successes, feeling only relief or minimizing our accomplishments. It’s time to celebrate our victories, reward ourselves for jobs well done and learn from our successes just as we learn from our failures.

Honesty

Our culture can make us dishonest about our emotions. Being vulnerable can be perceived as weakness, so we’re dishonest about how failure impacts us. The reality is that vulnerability is a leadership strength. Being honest about a situation allows frank exploration, more collaboration and greater creativity in charting out the next chapter.

And here’s one more thing to be honest about: our experiment itself. If you’re really not bothered by failure, if you’re a “fail more” type who feels nothing from failure, it probably means you didn’t care. It probably means the stakes weren’t high enough to begin with. It probably means what failed was trivial or random or sloppy but certainly not strategic or inspired. Pretty easy to be unbothered by failure when the attempt didn’t matter.

There’s a balance here. Vulnerability can lead us to wilder emotional swings. Radical honesty can be messy. A focus on learning can bog us down in analysis. Finding an equilibrium that serves both the project and the team is key.

310. Embrace

Embracing Failure

Back to that failure meetup. They released a video of the talk, I was really excited to see the name tags they showed as part of the intro.

How do you handle a failure? Quietly
How do you handle a failure? Mourn then learn
How do you handle a failure? Draw and dance

(Full disclosure: one of those was mine.)

These choices are rich and vulnerable and honest. And they are a great sign that maybe we’re ready to move past the obsession with failure.

Let’s abandon the this twisted, emotionless version of failing forward. Let’s be more real. Let’s embrace failure. Embrace it for everything it brings: its pain, its disappointment, its growth, its insights, and the incredible potential for impact that comes from being real.

Let’s fail. And let’s be human about it. And let’s surround ourselves with people who provide the space to be vulnerable and honest and learn.

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I Deserve to be Big

Wishing Well: Little Blog That Deserves to be Big Award

Apparently I deserve a bigger audience, and I say yes please bring it on! Jessica Sweet at Wishing Well has included me in her list of little blogs that deserve to be big. What a nice honor and a fun surprise. This badge is extra incentive to keep sharing my thoughts about peak performance, creativity, pursuing ambitious goals and defying expectations.

Check out the full list over at Wishing Well. Thanks Jessica!

What award are you ready to win? Make one up. Is it 8 Parents Whose Patience Has Yet To Be Acknowledged? Or maybe it’s Entrepreneurs Whose Ideas Funders Should Follow? Or how about 14 People Who Smile Adorably While Jogging? Or is it Courageous Leaders Who Should Be President?

What do you want to be recognized for?