When You Hit the Plateau
I think we have all been there. When we are so excited about starting something new, something different, something exciting. Maybe it’s a new job, a new hobby, a new personal challenge. The first period of time you feel motivated, inspired, and excited to push through any hardships that come along the way. But at some point along the line, you hit a plateau. The new job loses its sparkle, or the new hobby is way harder than you thought. Maybe you’ve been making progress at the gym, but now you don’t see any improvement. The feeling of a plateau can be frustrating because you expect your progress or experience to be growing exponentially with time. I’ve been feeling this way with my own running, yoga, lab work, and pretty much anything else new that I started this year.
But, as with life, progress does not simply happen just because a certain amount of time has passed by. To think that we are always improving on a set schedule can be more harmful than motivating. I think that, in many ways, a plateau is good. Of course it can suck to not hit more PRs at the gym or keep making the same mistakes at work. But despite this, it is still progress. Because we have already chosen to take on the new challenge, there is no other path than moving forward, even if it seems we are not moving at all. It doesn’t help that we are accustomed to always seeing our shortcomings rather than how far we have come, but we must take on a plateau by accepting that it happens sometimes no matter how hard we try.
Of course, this is easy to say when your job may be demanding perfection in the here and now, and you are just not quite there yet. Or maybe you have a big competition coming up, and you are still not as prepared as you should be. We all have external sources of pressure, whether immediate or abstract, that make us feel like our progress does not happen fast enough. And when plateaus do happen, they are painful and annoying. But the plateau is where we learn the most about ourselves. How do I react when I’m not making a PR at the gym? Do I immediately start criticizing myself? Do I use this as an excuse not to keep going? How do I react when I make a mistake at work? Do I channel anger instead of taking the time to figure out how I can do better?
I’ll be honest. Even with this blog I can feel like I am hitting a plateau. Some weeks I feel like the words I write are great, that I’m finally reaching my full potential with my voice. Other weeks I feel like what I write is not going to resonate with anyone, that I shouldn’t even bother writing this week. And let me tell you, when I hit these plateaus, there is one thing that I do that absolutely helps - just let it be. The weeks where I feel like I have nothing to say, nothing to share, I don’t write that week. Instead, I write down all the ideas that I maybe thought would’ve been something fruitful or jot down reasons why I am feeling this way. Most of the time it’s a culmination of being burnt out from other priorities or that I’m just in a funk. And that is OK. I still “made progress” that week by attempting to do what I could, which was write down a couple new ideas, and reflect. By the next week, typically, I am ready to write again, using the new ideas I made the week prior. Progress is understanding that plateaus are there for a reason. If we constantly progressed every single day, there would be no feeling of satisfaction when we reach the highest level (arbitrary term, but you know what I mean). Plateaus make us see clearly what may be going wrong because we, as humans, typically never do something new right on the first try.
And when those external forces of pressure make you feel as though you are not progressing fast enough or like you are always behind, just know that you WILL get better if you have set that intention. There is no doubt about that. We can be so greedy to want things perfect when we tell them to be, and therefore rarely forgive ourselves when we don’t meet this mark. But most of us know that maybe a year from now, we won’t be having these same frustrations because we will have progressed so much in the next year. Next year, most likely, you will have set new goals, new challenges that you might also hit a plateau in. Plateaus are progress. You just have to keep going.
