A famous quote by Bruce Lee says:
If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

It is all true but it hurts a lot when I reached a plateau and didn’t know exactly how to make the step to the next plateau which frustrated me again.

I do have some tips that have helped me to reach the current plateau I am on. I only have to figure out how to grow again.
1. Set BIG goals in the future for both your business (BHAG:Big Hairy Audacious Goal from the famous book Good to Great by Jim Collins) and personal life (Big 5 for Life by John Strelecky). When things got tough I reflected if I was doing stuff that at least contributed to reaching these goals. It helped to have these compasses.

2. Personal development. The biggest plateau I reached was the plateau where I found out that I was the biggest problem in developing myself and my company. Finding coaching and reflecting with peers helped me a lot.

3. Develop our people.
This picture says it all. Internal and external coaching of me and my colleagues, but also talking in a different way to my girlfriend has helped me to reach next plateaus.

4. Hire the right people. We always aim to hire A-players. But A-players are simply not so easy to get. The more and more I think about it we should focus on hiring good people and hope a few of them develop into A-players and avoid the mistakes. Basically hiring is the same as investing: An investor needs to do very few things right as long as he or she avoids big mistakes (quote by Warren Buffet). Therefor we see that when we hire slow and fire fast we avoid the damages mistakes can do and good people we can help to develop.

5. Listen more, ask more questions is something I am trying to learn. I am still very good in sending information and convincing people which ‘sucks big time’ as one coach learned me. But I will also conquer that plateau in the future. Hopefully that future is near.

Although there is much more to learn for me I do know this already: On every plateau I reached there is always a way to get to the next. The only one to blame when I get stuck is always me. It is never the economy, the competition, the product, the system, the price etc etc.

I control my own future…