SUMMARY 

• We all know that goals are important, but to achieve mastery, we must learn to love the plateaus. The plateaus are those times, when you feel like you’re making no progress at all, when you feel like giving up and when you feel like you shouldn’t have even maybe started working toward the goal, those are the times that we need to learn to embrace.
• Look to treat them as the signals that they are. That if you keep your head down and if you just keep hammering away, keep plowing away at whatever it is, that your next spur of achievement is just around the corner.
• Success is not linear. It’s more like a stair step, having success for some time and then no success and then some more success.
• The path to mastery involves showing up day after day, diligent, persistent, patient practice, day after day.

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, everybody. We all know that goals are important, but to achieve mastery, we must learn to love the plateaus. The plateaus are those times, when you feel like you’re making no progress at all, when you feel like giving up and when you feel like you shouldn’t have even maybe started working toward the goal, those are the times that we need to learn to embrace. Hey, everybody, Eric Partaker here, author and Peak Performance expert, and today I’m talking about one surprising truth to achieving our full potential, one surprising truth to achieving mastery and how it’s not about the goals, but it’s actually about learning to embrace and love the plateaus.

And today’s message is inspired from a book called Mastery by George Leonard. And in that book, George talks about how we go through these, and we’ve all experienced this. I’ve experienced this. I’m sure you’ve experienced this. When you’re on that journey, when you’re trying to achieve a certain goal and you get to that point where nothing seems to be working anymore. You start beating your head against the wall. You’re not achieving the results that you had hoped. You’re not progressing as quickly as you would like and you start to lose your motivation. You start to think, what have I got myself into?

Why did I even bother doing this? I’ll never be good enough. Oh, here I go again. And it’s in that precise moment where those who achieve mastery do something different from everyone else. It’s in that precise moment when you’re on that plateau, when you’re not making any more progress, when you feel like giving up, that those who achieve mastery learn to embrace those plateaus and carry on, whereas others fall away, stop doing, they give up too early. They don’t realize that their greatness or their next spurt of achievement lies just on the other side of that plateau, which of course would then be followed by another plateau and then another spurt of achievement and another plateau.

I recognized this when I was trying to learn another language years ago. So my wife is Brazilian and I was trying to learn Brazilian Portuguese and I started at the age of 35 and I was definitely not in my prime language learning years. And it would just seem like I’d make some good progress for a couple of weeks or a month and I’d get all excited, and then suddenly somebody would have one of those conversations in Portuguese near me or to me and I’d just sit there dumbfounded, not able to understand what they were saying or I would be searching for the words and they just weren’t coming out. And I was hitting plateaus during those times. But what I noticed, and I had read this book, Mastery by George Leonard, around the same time. And what I noticed is that when I stick through those plateaus, that my progress wasn’t linear. What I didn’t realize is that there were still new neural connections being made, even while I was on those plateaus, even while I was not making any progress.

My brain was still at work and new connections, new pathways, new learning was being embedded. And so when you are on your path to whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve, and it suddenly feels like you’re making no progress at all, start to take these as signals. Take these as, I must be just on the other side of another spurt of progress and look to embrace them. Look to treat them as the signals that they are. That if you keep your head down and if you just keep hammering away, keep plowing away at whatever it is, that your next spur of achievement is just around the corner.

Learn to embrace the plateaus and your goals will become more achievable. Success is not linear. It’s more like this stair step, having success for some time and then no success and then some success and that’s the reality of life. So learn to embrace those plateaus and you’ll feel a lot more successful in all that you do. The path to mastery involves showing up day after day, diligent, persistent, patient practice, day after day. So I hope you’ve enjoyed that and if you head over to my website at ericpartaker.com, you can also subscribe to my weekly Peak Performance Insights newsletter.