It’s always exciting when you’re starting or learning something new, isn’t it? It’s also motivating as you move along in the first days because you can easily see your progress. This in turn increases your motivation because you want to see more progress.
But once you reach a certain level of skill or success, you plateau. Your growth appears to slow down and you feel like you’re stagnating. It’s at this point when you feel like giving up.
This is the final article in a series of 5 articles on How to Develop a Success Mindset. Here are the articles in the Series:
- How to Embrace Change and Make it Work Towards Your Success
- Why Charting Your Progress is Key as You Develop a Growth Mindset
- 6 Tips to Help You Overcome the Fear of Making Mistakes
- How to Identify and Break Limiting Beliefs That Hold You Back
- 5 Ways to Keep Going When You Feel Like Giving Up
The articles in this series are not meant to replace the help of a professional mental health expert. Please seek help from a licensed counselor or therapist if you’re feeling overwhelmed or depressed, experiencing burnout, or feeling unable to cope with regular day-to-day activities.
5 Ways to Keep Going When You Feel Like Giving Up
Imagine you’re learning a new language. When you start out, you learn something new every day. You’re excited to practice your new language skills and possibly drive everyone around you nuts as you practice and try to rope them in.
Unless you’re highly motivated, your interest will wane after a few months. This happens at the point where you’re not sure how to make progress in leaps and bounds anymore. It feels like you’re not improving.
You can plateau in anything – your diet, your business, learning a musical instrument, job, business, hobby, etc. How then do you overcome this frustrating situation and soldier on instead of giving up?
Here are 5 strategies you can use to re-energize yourself and keep going instead of giving up.
1. Change your strategy
When you hit a plateau, it’s a clear sign that it’s time for a change of strategy. What has worked until now isn’t working anymore. For some people, this is because you’ve become too good at what you’re doing. It’s almost automatic.
Growth, on the other hand, requires that you meet and overcome appropriate challenges. When you feel like giving up, chances are high that the challenges aren’t challenging enough. You need to do something new or up your game
For example, say you have a business and things aren’t working well with your sales:
- Could this be the time to launch products in a new category?
- Maybe you’ve done all you can with your current audience and it’s time to branch out.
- Or maybe you can look into some new marketing channels or add a new strategy to your mix.
Evaluate where you are before giving up. Decide what to do next to reclaim your motivation. Create a new plan or recalibrate the plan you have. Then take action on your plan.
2. Identify what has changed
Hitting a plateau doesn’t always mean that you need to change your strategy. Sometimes, this happens because there has been some change that has occurred without you realizing it.
In the business example where your sales aren’t going as well as expected:
- Look at demographics, sales, or traffic over the last year.
- See if something has happened that has caused you or your business to stagnate.
- Also, check out your industry and global levels. Maybe something has changed in the market or world that’s slowing down or stopping your growth.
- Brainstorm with yourself or with your team and come up with ideas on what you could do to overcome this.
You can do this in any area of your life. Before you give up, evaluate to find out what could have changed. Then ask yourself what change you make in order to adapt to what’s going on.
3. Track your progress
It’s easy to see how well you’re doing when you start out or when it’s a new goal. But this gets harder as you get better at it or after you’ve been working on your goal for some time.
Growth takes time and the truth is that you may be growing but just not seeing it. Go back and look at the milestones you’ve achieved. Write these down somewhere and track your progress so you can remind yourself how far you’ve come.
4. Ditch the ego boosters
Hitting a plateau can also be a matter of perception. Is it possible that you’re surrounded by people who pat you on the back and encourage you? While we do need recognition and acknowledgment, having more of such people in your circle means that you’re surrounded by ego boosters.
However, growth happens best when you also have people who provide stern criticism and constructive feedback. Identify people who are at the next level where you want to be and spend some time around them.
Also create a success team that includes coaches, mentors, and accountability partners who hold you accountable as you grow.
5. Adopt the growth mindset
You can prevent and deal with plateauing best if you adopt the growth mindset. This mindset is a set of beliefs that sees humans as dynamic beings that evolve and develop over time, not as something static or fixed. It’s a powerful mindset that helps you to overcome the limiting beliefs that are holding you back.
Over to you…
Sometimes we give up just when we’re about to hit the milestone we were working on. Use one or more of the strategies outlined above to rekindle your motivation instead of giving up.
This blog post concludes a 5-article series on developing a growth mindset. This process takes time because you have to unlearn your way of doing things and learn a new way of thinking and living.
Do you want to learn more about harnessing the power of the growth mindset?
Check out my program Break Free, Live Your Life, which teaches you the A to Z of adopting this success-minded way of thing and helps you achieve your personal, career, or business goals. This is a personal growth program for high-achieving women who are finding it hard to go for their BIG goals in the way they used to.
Click here to find out more about this program so that you break free of the thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours that keep you playing small.
(Photo by Andrei Shiptenko on Unsplash)
