If you ask an amateur how progress works, they will draw you a straight line pointing up and to the right. They believe that if you put in 10% more effort today, you should see 10% better results tomorrow.
So when they put in the reps and nothing changes, they panic. They assume the strategy is flawed, the coaching is wrong, or they lack natural talent.
They don’t understand the mechanics of the step-function.
I was chatting with my son’s cricket coach recently, and he was telling me about a specific technical tweak they’d been working on - adjusting the alignment of his front foot on the drive. They’d talked about it repeatedly. They ran the drills. They did the mental rehearsals.
For weeks, it wasn’t happening. The old habit kept winning.
And then, suddenly, during a match... it just clicked.
The front foot planted cleanly, the weight transferred perfectly, and the coach said it was the absolute best cricket he’d ever seen him play.
The physics of latent progress
When you are trying to change a bad habit - whether it’s a cricket stroke, a coding architecture, a management style, or your posture - your brain is attempting to overwrite an established neural highway.
During the ‘plateau,’ you aren’t failing. You are building latent capacity.
The intellectual phase: Your brain understands what to do. (You can explain the theory).
The mechanical phase: Your body struggles against old muscle memory. (It feels clunky and artificial).
The integration phase: The neural pathway finally standardizes. The friction vanishes. It clicks.
The period between Phase 1 and Phase 3 is where 90% of people abandon the protocol. They confuse the delay of results with the absence of results.
The sovereign coach protocol
The cricket coach understood something critical that every leader, parent, and operator needs to internalise: You cannot force the click, but you can guarantee it through persistence.
If the coach had panicked on week two and changed the entire technique, he would have reset my son’s neural clock back to zero. Instead, he maintained the standard, kept delivering the same clear feedback, and waited for the system to catch up.
Persistence isn’t just mindless grinding; it is trusting the mechanics during the silent phase.
How to hold the pocket
When you are stuck in a plateau where the feedback loop feels broken:
Protect the standard: Don’t change a proven drill just because it hasn’t clicked yet. Repetition is the tax you pay for automation.
Lower the ego: Accept that clunky, uncomfortable phase. High-level re-calibration always feels like a step backward before it becomes a leap forward.
Stay in the game: The breakthrough usually happens when you stop overthinking the instruction and let your sub-conscious execute what you’ve been practicing.
Love yourself. Keep jabbering.
