It happens to everyone at some point, they hit a plateau in their progress. If you haven’t, then either you’re not pushing yourself enough or you just haven’t realized that you’re in the middle of one. Once you’re in one, how do you get out of it? And perhaps more importantly, how do you feel about being in one?
Are you progressing things in your life? Your work, your relationships, your dancing, your fitness? Whatever things you might have in your life…
Recognizing the plateau
Most people actually know already when they’re in a plateau. You must listen to yourself and your feelings. Most people do feel when they get in a plateau about life, but they don’t realize that is what they are feeling. They get angry, frustrated, difficult, bored, disconnected, melancholy, unresponsive, depressed.
Sometimes people ignore these obvious signs of the plateau. It could be because they are distracted by things in their life. More often though people actually use the things in their life as a distraction to avoid the fact that they’re sitting in a plateau.
Sometimes the distraction is external – ever have the dance teacher that told you that you are just in a plateau and your just need to work hard and you will get past it? What if that never happens? I’ve seen plenty of people stick with teachers for ages in a stuck state, just spinning their wheels, working super hard and not progressing.
Getting out of the plateau
As one writer put it, “Ten years of the same one year of experience does not make for ten years of experience.” So it’s important to move out of the plateau and continue to progress.
The primary reason people plateau is simple. It’s lack of knowledge. It’s not knowing how to progress.
The trap of the pretty good
In dance, and in fitness (even business and relationships) there is a lot of misinformation. A lot of mixed benefit things – things that partially work or work pretty good. Plenty of things, techniques that work pretty well or good enough – good enough for people to use them and get results for a few months, but then those methods stop being effective. Even after the methods have stopped working to get progress people continue to use them – boom – plateau reached.
Keep learning
It’s pretty simple really, to get out of the plateau you must learn new things, new methods, new practices, new exercises. You must try new things. Even if they fail (usually a quick tell) it will only have taken a short time instead of the vast time people usually keep trying to do the same thing again and again.
It’s best really to get information from things that are different from what you do but similar. Want to progress your dancing? study yoga, weight lifting, other types of dance, music, gymnastics, martial arts, theater, etc.
Read, take coaching (a good coach shows you the things you are missing more so that just teaches you), watch videos, go to theater, or just simply experiment.
