How to deal with a PLATEAU in your acro practice!

I think most of you can relate to hitting a plateau in your practice!

Times in which you feel stuck, experience little progress and feel like you’re not really growing anymore.

If you’ve been reading our emails for a while you know that we’ve experienced a phase like this when we were still in Bali.

Since our Europe trip things have shifted which brought more perspective and the ability to see what helped to move forward, which I now feel inspired to write about and share with you.

Our most profound realisation is the influence or impact of our environment to our growth and motivation.

With every acro event we’ve done our motivation grows, we feel increasingly inspired, we unlock new skill after new skill and we really feel like we’re levelling up our own practice.

Which made us question and brainstorm together and with other acro friends about what ignited this spark and what is feeding this desire now?

And our conclusion is that being surrounded by acro friends that are more skilled than us, who we really enjoy training together and who we can team up with for spotting is a game changer for our own acro practice.

We feel so grateful for these opportunities and have already shared such great times working together with different acro friends which have been absolute highlights!

From spotting each other in more focused training in which our goals are to refine, improve or unlock, to making crazy ideas come true because with good spotting so much is possible!

And we realise that this flavour of acro and what that brings for us we relatively have very little of in Bali at times in the past years.

Understanding this helps us see that this is also part of the solution for us to prevent these long periods of plateaus and low motivation.

We see that our personal environment in Bali and how the acro scene is there for a big part of the year, for us is not helping us maintain our acro joy, passion and growth.

We don’t know exactly how this will look like for us, but we can take ownership and initiative to create more opportunities that do ignite us!

For example longer Europe trips, arranging for acro friends to come over to Bali and train together, take trainings ourselves and maybe visit more acro events in that period of the year.

And maybe this is also helpful for you to reflect on: how does your acro environment currently look like? In which acro environment do you thrive the most?

Of course not everything is always possible and I know a lot of people feel/are limited by several factors like no acro community near their house, no access to classes or workshops, no consistent training partner etc.

And while those factors are certainly impactful, seeing what you can do to put yourself more often in your optimal environment is definitely helpful.

The next realisation is that plateaus are plateaus and not drops, they are a slowing of the progression and growth of learning but not actually a declining of your skills.

Our most recent example of that was with whips.

We haven’t been able to train whips the past months because of a hip injury I had.

This is getting better I’m beyond excited to be able to train whips again and am determined to get big breakthroughs in our whips and whippops.

In retrospect I maybe had a slight subconscious fear that my whip skill would have gotten worse over the time not training them…

But this was not the case! We got right back into it and it felt like we just picked it up where we left off.

Which is also a nice reality check: chill your beans! It’s all relative and things will happen in their own time.

Plus we always say to each other that we’re not in a rush to get to the next thing, because we’re so focused on really understanding and mastering skills.

When we were in the middle of those months of not practicing whips I at times left annoyed and disappointed that we could not practice those and I really missed it.

But now looking back that perspective changed and I can see that in the bigger picture it doesn’t matter!

And lastly, regarding our motivation, understanding the influence of our environment makes us a little less hard on ourselves.

Back in Bali we would sometimes beat ourselves up ‘Why can’t I just be motivated?!’.

I think that the role of and importance motivation holds for you is an interesting topic full stop, maybe for a different time.

Maintaining an acro practice maybe does not only require motivation, but also commitment and dedication to show up in times that you don’t feel so much like it. 

Plus there are things we can do to control our motivation, and change our environment to put us in the best position for success.

For us the topic of plateaus feels lighter now that we have more perspective and understanding about the things that impact it.

Especially Caspian went from a state of:

‘I’ve lost all motivation and passion, let's not pursue new skills but just maintain our practice and I don’t know if I want to keep training as much.’

to:

‘let’s make a list of new skills we want to train, I'm feeling motivated and in training mode and super enjoying feeling high on acro!’.

Obviously not everything is perfect yet, we sometimes have moments that don’t feel so good and this new state still needs to be solidified and continued over a longer period of time to fully trust this process and progress. 

But it’s a great start!

Oh boy it feels so good moving forward!

Very grateful for our partnership, all the festival organisers giving us the opportunity to share at events and be in such a rich acro environment and all the acro friends! Thank you!

On to the next event! Hopefully see you along the way.

Hug!

Laura