🌿 The plateau that might scare you

Hello Reader!

By early October, the momentum you felt in September may have started to flatten. Your reminder is still there and the skill you chose still matters to you, and yet the sense of progress that carried you through those first weeks may have quieted into something that feels, some days, like standing still.

If that sounds familiar, you are in good company, because most learning curves are not smooth upward lines! They rise, flatten, sometimes dip, and rise again, and the flat stretch in the middle is the part almost nobody warns you about. It’s a rollercoaster!

Researcher Robert Bjork coined the term “desirable difficulties” to describe something counterintuitive: the conditions that feel hardest and slowest while you are in them are often the exact conditions that produce the most durable learning… Wow, this feels a lot like teaching! Practice that feels smooth and easy tends to fade quickly, while practice that feels effortful, uneven, and occasionally frustrating tends to stick.

Your plateau is not a sign that your work has stopped working, but a sign that your brain is doing the harder, deeper consolidation that makes a skill permanent rather than temporary.

From here, the move this week is not to add a new strategy to escape the flat feeling. Stay with the one you chose, trusting that the plateau is part of the shape of real learning rather than evidence against it.

A few questions to sit with:
Where do you notice a plateau in your own practice right now, and what is your instinct when you hit it?
What would it look like to stay the course this week instead of reaching for something new?

We can do this! The dip you may be feeling right now is not the end of the story, but far more often - the middle of it.

We would love to hear about a plateau you pushed through once, and what got you to the other side.

Warmly,

Tammy

P.S. Don't miss out on tomorrow's email... another awesome episode of the podcast is out! Conversation with returning guests - and co-authors, Lindsay Prendergast, Piper Lee, and Amanda Brueggeman.

​​​​​

You might be seeing an ad here. If so, it's because it's a sponsored ad. All you have to do is click the link and we will get a small kick back for your click. You don't even have to sign up! We appreciate the clicks!