Don't Quit In The Rut: The Dip & The Lull - “This Isn’t Working Anymore” I PART 2

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Foreign. Welcome to the Uphill Community Podcast. Your source of inspiration to gain clarity, elevate your standards and embrace.

Together we can choose the uphill climb, pursuing the hard best over the easy good in discovering the extraordinary life that's waiting to be lived in community. So hello and welcome to the show. I'm so glad that you are joining me today. We're going to be following up on Don't Quit in the Rut.

This is, this is part two of four parts just dealing with ruts, dips and lulls. I think we've all experienced that in our life a time or two and so we're going to talk about that. I'm so glad that you're with me today.

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It's theuphill community. That's T H E U P H h I l l.community all right, so without any further delay, I'm going to jump right into today's topic. I'm pretty pumped.

I'm excited about this.

This is something that, this is a topic that, I mean, I just know so many people that I see in these challenges and they're like, what do I do when I'm in these situations?

So when I'm coaching, it could be a person who's taken on a new role, could be a person who launched a new business, could be a person that everything was going so, so well, and then it all of a sud, like, they're in this rut. And if you listen to last week, you don't just end up in a rut. You don't just like, boom, you're in a rut.

You know, you've been going in a rut for a while, but then there's these dips and these lulls that we'll talk about. So last week I gave you the five most common ruts that people fall into. And this week we're going to go deeper into more ruts. But.

But what it feels like when you're in. When you're in one, right, and you're wondering, hey, if you can keep going, can I do this? Can I continue doing this? And so I have some keynotes.

I'm gonna make sure that I do not miss these keynotes because there's so much that I wanna say about this I have a lot of talks I've developed around this to just really help leaders and teams and companies just really go to the next level. So I have talks around this. But just let me start here.

Have you ever found yourself thinking, right here's where you are just thinking, this just isn't working anymore. This isn't working. What I'm doing is not working. So you've probably met the dip, and maybe you've hung out in the lull as well.

So you've met the dip and you've hung out in the lull, and I'm going to talk to you about both briefly. But I'm going to use a great, you know, someone who's great at this and who's done a great job defining it.

But Seth Godin, great author, best selling authority, um, and marketing thought leader, he's known for challenging the status quo all the time. Great book, Purple Cow. But anyways, you can find all of his books. But in his book the Dip, he explores a powerful idea.

And that idea that I want to put out there is that that winners quit the wrong. Sorry, they quit the wrong stuff at the right time and stick with the right things long enough to succeed. That's what winners do.

So he defines the dip as ready. I'm going to give you some definitions of how Seth defines the dip. It's the long stretch between starting something and finally seeing the results.

In the beginning, everything feels fresh and full of promise. You're motivated, you see momentum. But eventually, right, eventually the early spark wears off and now you're just grinding, man.

You're just in that grind and you're giving your best effort. But, you know, guess what? It doesn't seem to be moving anything. There's no progress, nothing's moving forward.

So the results aren't matching the energy that you're putting in. Right. That's defining that dip. So, hey, welcome to the dip. If you're in that spot, welcome.

All right, so this is where most people, they tend to walk away in the dip. I see it relationally. I see. I see it in work. I see it in ideas. I see it. I mean, so many ways.

I see it in sports and training, as a wrestler, as a football player, growing up. I mean, there are times that you hit a dip, and sometimes, you know, you get in your own head and you.

You just shut down and it causes you to move from peak performance to just barely performing. Like this happens to everyone. People go through it. So the dip is the tough stretch between starting something exciting and reaching Excellence.

That's a good way to put it, right? So most people quit here, though. But for those who push through the dip, they become their best, the very best in the field.

They are the ones, the ones that push through. Look at Seth Curry. If he goes through a dip of not hitting his threes, he keeps working, keeps working, and he pushes through all the greats.

You see like that when you see J.K. rowling as an author. She was rejected 12 times. She was in a dip, right? But she kept going. These people become the best.

They keep writing, they keep going. Songwriters. I mean, I've seen this time and time again in any industry, in anything in life. I have seen enough people do this.

So what's the key message? I'll tell you. It's don't quit when it's hard. Now, you know, on this podcast, I talk a lot about doing the hard best and not the easy good.

So don't quit just when it gets hard. You quit when it's a dead end. That's the only time you don't quit when it's hard. You quit when it's a dead end.

But if it's a dip, you've got to push through. That's where your greatness lives. And if you really want greatness, and I do, I want greatness. What I mean is be world class.

You want to be significant in what you're doing. You want to make a difference. You want to make more than a dent in something. You want to really show up. You want to feel valuable.

Not talking about, have your name in lights. I'm not interested in all that.

What I'm interested in is having that true depth and fulfillment of knowing that man, I have brought the best me out and forward. I can compete, I can contend, I can. I can do whatever it is that I'm trying to do at a high level.

But what if this place, this hard, quiet, messy middle, is actually where your breakthrough is being built, Right? Think about that. Could it be that in your dip, in this middle, this messy middle, which so much happens in the middle.

From what I understand about a runner, people that do long distance runner, they actually train for the middle. I mean, it's kind of strange, you know, and you think about great athletes and fighters, things like that.

If you look at that, they train for the middle, right? Because those middle rounds are the rounds where they got to be scoring because you may not be fortunate to score a knockout at the very end.

And so it's so important that we learn how to get into the Middle, the messy middle. And this is the hard, quiet middle. This is where I believe that the very best in the breakthrough is being built. Right?

So the dip isn't the only trap. Okay? So you have this dip thing that you can feel, and it's like, man, it's. It's quiet, it's messy, it's hard, it's the middle.

But then you have the lull. Ugh. What is that lull? Well, it's the emotional flatline. Here's what the lull is. It's. It's when you're not burned out, but you're not fired up either.

You know, like, you're just not fired up. You got motivation. You're not burned out. You're not fired up. You're doing all the things, but none of it feels alive.

The things just don't feel like they're alive. And the silence. Are you ready? The silence is louder than the results. Think about that. Silence can be deafening.

But it really sucks when the silence is louder than the results that I'm hoping to get. And the silence will become discouraging. So what we tend to do, though, when it comes to the lull is we confuse the lull with failure.

But the lull is often ready. It's just a pause in our momentum. That's it. A lull is a simple pause before momentum returns. You're still moving. You didn't stop. Here's the thing.

Momentum is not going to return when you stop, but momentum comes back when you're in this area. It's just that little pause. It's just, oh, when you get going. And it's right there over the top. Just keep that in mind.

So I'm going to tell you a little story, and this is really neat. It's about a guy named Ru Darby. And it comes from a book that I read several years ago. But just. This is a true story.

All right, so this guy, Ru Derby or Darby, R U Darby. That's his name. R U Darby. He was caught in. He was caught. Like he caught the gold rush fever.

And he went out west, and then he staked his claim like so many others did, you know, and after weeks of digging, he struck a vein of gold ore. I mean, he hit it. It was rich enough. It was rich enough, right, to make him and his family wealthy for life. Excited. What.

What Darby did was he covered up the mind. He rushed home, he raised money to buy the right equipment. He came back ready to cash in. I mean, he knew this is it.

But after a short Stretch of digging, the gold disappeared. Like, poof. It's just gone. He drilled and he dug, and he tried again. Nothing. He drilled, he dug, tried again. Nothing. So frustrated. Guess what?

He did what most people would do. He quit. I mean, he just quit. I mean, he said, I'm done. I quit. He sold the mining equipment to a local junkman for a few hundred dollars.

But, but, but here's. Here's where it gets interesting. The junk man hired a mining expert who came and studied the land. And then it turns out. You ready, Darby? R U.

Darby, I get it. Hey, Ru. Darby, R U. Darby stopped digging just three feet from one of the richest gold veins in the region. 3ft.

The junk man dug a little further and he struck gold. Basically, that is it. I mean, look how close that is. That's close. All the work wasted by a few feet of. You ready? Discouragement.

Like, literally a few feet of discouragement, and he stops digging. But here's the best part. Darby didn't let that be the end of his story, right?

He took the lesson that he learned from that and he went into life insurance sales and he became wildly successful. Why? Because Darby said this. He said, I learned never to stop because I was tired. I stopped once and I was only three feet away from gold.

So Darby was in the dip, friends. That's where he was. And he did the work. He showed up. But when the resistance hit, he quit. And he missed it. That's what happened.

Resistance quit, miss. Resistance quit, miss. It'll happen every time. Resistance quit, miss. If you let the resistance cause you to quit, you're going to miss.

So let me ask you, where are you digging right now? Where in your life are you digging? And could it be, think about this.

That you're only a few feet away from the very thing you've been praying for, pushing for pushing toward, dreaming, of studying, for, concentrating. I mean, literally changing your life for. I mean, could it literally just be a few feet away?

So we often feel the strongest urge to quit right before things ultimately are going to shift. Think about that. We often feel that urge that, hey, I'm gonna quit. It's this urge. I don't know what it is. It just bubbles up.

And it's right before things start to shift. It's when, like when I said, the runner trains for the middle. And again, I'm not a long distance runner. I have really bad knees now.

I have to do a lot of rehab on the regular. Just basically. Well, not rehab.

You just have to do the therapy and just do the regular stuff to keep my knees, they're very arthritic, they were damaged in sports and thank God I haven't had to repl placements yet. But I mean, I can function, I can do all that stuff, but I can't run.

But I can understand the idea of the middle because when I did run and did stuff, especially for wrestling and long distance stuff, right in the middle is when you want to quit. When I was wrestling, you get in the middle of a match, it gets tough. You can feel it.

You can feel like, man, you're only two minutes into this thing. You're only three minutes into a six minute match and you're going, man, this feels like forever. It can happen.

And even if you're passionate, everybody hits a dip in a lull. This is where you have to negotiate with yourself. You have to go a little deeper.

You have to make sure that you're not going to put yourself, you're not going to just take advice from the urge to quit. Because things can start to ship. The dip doesn't mean it's over. And the lull doesn't mean you ready? That it's broken.

It might just mean that you're a lot closer than you think. So there's something I think that's pretty important. It's discernment, right?

You need to have discernment to know, is this a dip or is this a dead end? Because I don't want to tell someone that everything you're doing is just a dip. Some things need necessary endings and you walk away, right?

That has to happen. But let's just do the real talk around this. Not every dip means you need to push through. So some things aren't gold, they're just distractions.

So how do you tell, how do you know if it's just a distraction? I'm just going to give you a couple of things to think about. So the first thing to think about is did I enter this with a clear sense of purpose?

Right? Am I in this thing with purpose? Is it clear? Second thing that I would ask is, is my frustration from fatigue or am I misaligned? Right?

What's going on here? Is this fatigue or is it misalignment? And then the third one, this is a pretty big one. Would I regret? Regret?

Would I regret quitting or would I feel released if I walked away? So those are the three things. Did I enter this with a clear sense of purpose? Question one, question two.

Is my frustration from fatigue or misalignment or would I regret quitting? Or would I feel released if I walked away? So discernment matters because some dips are worth it and some doors are better closed.

But never quit just because it's hard. And you hear me talk about doing the hard best and not just doing the easy good. So is this season a season for you to push through?

Or is it one for you to pivot and pivot out? So I'm going to give you something. Some closing reflection questions. And there's four of them.

First one is, where in your life do you feel like you're in the dip or the lull? The second question that I want to give to you is, what is one area you've just been tempted to walk away and tempted to walk away from recently?

What is one area you've just been tempted just walk away recently? The third is, is there an area where you may have quit too soon in the past? Is there an area, just think, sit down, think about it.

That I quit too soon in the past. And then what if your next step is only three feet away? I mean, three feet away from the result that you have been hoping for and waiting for.

So revisit something that you've been considering quitting, maybe. Or you considered quitting. Revisit it. Ask yourself, honestly, am I just in a dip or did I misread the lull?

And then write down one step, one step that you're willing to take this week instead of just walking away. Then you can do this. Are you in a dip? Are you in a lull? Should you walk away? Figure it out. Listen to this episode again.

If you're not sure, just listen to it again. It's simple, practical stuff. So next week we'll talk about fighting through the rut, how to dig deeper, not just harder.

And how to reconnect with your original walk by when you feel like giving up. You don't want to miss this. So until next time, we'll talk soon.