Are You Stuck on a Plateau?


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“When life looks like easy street there is danger at your door.”
The Grateful Dead

The journey to success is analogous to mountain climbing. While the goal is to ascend continually to reach the peak, sooner or later you will arrive at a plateau, a place where your routine becomes monotonous and your performance might even begin to slowly decline. This can apply to not only your business but to your workouts, even your relationships. I distinguish a plateau from a slump in the following way: When you’ve reached a plateau, you’re taking actions that yield slightly diminishing returns – you hardly notice a slight dip in results. And while you might feel a vague uneasiness along with reduced enthusiasm for the task at hand, you tend to hit the snooze button, perhaps repeatedly, and keep doing what you’ve been doing.

In a slump, nothing’s working and you’re feeling totally deflated. While not fatal to your career, spending extensive time on a plateau will degenerate into a slump.

In their book, The Plateau Effect, Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson explore this topic and share tips on how to break free. If you’re continually doing things that used to work in the past but are now yielding spotty results at best, the authors suggest you are unaware of the “just-noticeable difference.” This explains “why we continue forging ahead when we’re in the throes of a plateau – we just don’t realize how much less we’re getting for our efforts.”

Rest assured – everyone experiences this leveling-off state, with the associated challenge of breaking through. “No one sits down beneath a tree and enjoys easy-street inspiration from the muses. It is always a struggle.” Rather than give up, a plateau is, “designed to derail you. Expecting the fight is half the battle.” Unlike average performers, high achievers are willing to confront a stalled situation head on. I don’t know if you love or hate the New York Yankees, but even a perceived superstar like Derek Jeter is not immune. The authors share the story of Jeter’s declining defensive statistics at shortstop. In 2008 Jeter hired a new personal trainer, who put him through a rigorous training drill to correct his first step to the left to cut off ground balls up the middle. The result? Jeter won a Gold Glove in 2009. (Oh, yeah – and the Yankees happened to win the World Series that year.)