In NLP one of the topics my class covered was called the Bandura curve. Albert Bandura was a physc who, like most physcs do, studied human behavior. Particularly he looked at how people’s performance compared to their expectations. What he found was that the two didn’t always sync up.
It goes along like this: You start doing something new and your performance sucks. No big deal you expected that so performance and expectation are in sync. You practice and you start doing better than expected. Say you win a game you expected to lose. Your performance exceeded your expectations. Naturally, you raise your expectations. You go out for another game expecting to win but you lose. You are out of sync. Worse because you’ve not actually improved, you expectations are what have been changing your, performance will stay roughly the same or even deteriorate.
The next part to the curve is a plateau. Eventually your performance will max out. You will simply not be able to do it any better no matter how hard you try. This is actually really dangerous because if you are maxed out there is only one obvious direction to go in – decreased performance. How do you avoid this? Change. You cannot reach the next ‘level’ of performance doing this the same way you were doing them before.
In one of the exercises we did we stood in a circle. The coach threw a ball to one person, that person threw it to another and so on until the ball had been touched by each person in the group and thrown back to the coach. Once we had that down we timed how long it took to throw the ball to 18 people in the group. It took us 21 seconds. Could we do it any faster? Yes, we tried again and did it in 19. We couldn’t get the ball around any faster than that. However, based on the rules we were given we rearranged ourselves so we were in order and we were able to pass the ball around in 7 seconds. Could we do it faster? Yes, we tightened up the circle and had one person hold the ball and rub the ball across the top of our hands. It took less than a second. I’m sure you’ll agree there is no way we could have thrown the ball around the circle to 18 people in less than a second. This is a prime example of the idea contained in the Bandura curve. Once your performance has maxed out you have to change the way you do things in order to achieve higher performance.
In many ways I’m on a plateau now. I’m about maxed out in terms of what I can do as a software developer. Or at least a software developer running Visual Studio on his workstation. In order to get more performance from myself I have to change the way I do things. I have to make decisions about how I want to deliver value to my customers. I can only deliver so many lines of code per day and the value of those lines is fairly fixed. If I want more I have to change what is being delivered.
And by the way – being on a plateau is not the most comfortable place to be. Whether you’re talking about professional development or personal things (like weight loss or exercise) plateauing is a fact of life. The trick is to not quit and find a way around it. Try different things, get help, but most of all – don’t quit.