You're Checking Progress too Often... (and it's making you suffer)
Why do New Years Resolutions fail?
People start going to the gym on January 1st and the gyms are back to normal capacity by February 1st.
You start that diet and are cheating in 4 weeks.
Why do your players try to develop a skill for a week and then you never see them work on it again?
Our expectations are backward and we “check in” way too much.
We look in the mirror after 4 weeks and go, "well there's no progress to see so what's the point?”
We still can't consistently kick passes in our skates up to our stick successfully enough to our ego's liking so we stop working on that because it's uncomfortable and we can't do it.
Getting better at anything is messy and we need to teach people about the "Plateau of Latent Potential" and also how to re-frame development.
James Clear showed us this graph in his book, Atomic Habits.
We think success in everything is linear.
We know but may have forgotten that it is not.
When is the last time you learned something brand new? Unless you seek this experience out intentionally, it will start happening less and less with each passing year. We forget what it's like to struggle. When we lose connection to that experience, our perception changes.
Write with your opposite hand, learn to juggle, learn a new language.
It's messy.
But if you stay in the discomfort long enough, and get through the flat start where nothing happens, eventually you reach the breakthrough point.
Checking for progress constantly will frustrate you to the point of stopping.
And stopping is the only thing that will ensure you never get to where you want to go.
Losing the weight is going to take more than 4 weeks, so let’s stop checking and start doing the work.
The undisciplined person will check out and quit when the progress isn't where they think it should be.
The disciplined person has the self-awareness to know this improvement won't happen on their personal timeline but has the self-discipline to stay in the fight and practice with intent. Their confidence comes from knowing they are doing the preparation required to eventually get there.
Have you stopped too early on something you wanted to learn?
Attack it again with this framework in mind.