Why Getting Better Often Feels Worse First

When people work at getting better at a task, their performance often drops before it rises, and their confidence usually drops along with it. Part of the reason is that learning lets a person see mistakes they could not see before. The other part is that the kinds of practice that build lasting ability feel harder and slower than the kinds that do not. A person who expects the dip has a reason to keep going through it, while a person who takes the dip as proof of failure will often go back to the old way of doing things.

Tiger Woods Got Worse on Purpose

In April 1997, at 21 years old, Tiger Woods won the Masters by 12 strokes. He was not satisfied with the swing that won it, and he later said of it, "I didn't see one flaw. I saw about 10." His swing depended on timing, and he believed that under the hardest conditions in a major championship, the timing would fail him, so he went to work with his coach, Butch Harmon, on rebuilding it.

Woods won once on the PGA Tour in 1998. For a player who had won a major by a dozen shots the spring before, that was a thin year, and the changes to his swing were the reason for it. The payoff began with his win at the 1999 PGA Championship, and in 2000 he won the U.S. Open by 15 shots, on the way to winning seven of eleven majors between August 1999 and June 2002. Golf Digest described the purpose of the overhaul as making his bad shots better. On the days nothing felt right, those better misses would keep him competitive.

Woods understood why his results had slipped in 1998, because he could tie the worse scores to a specific change he had chosen and he had a coach telling him the new motion would take time to trust. A person learning something new at work usually has neither of those advantages. Without them, the dip feels like evidence of failure.

Seeing Mistakes for the First Time

A well-known learning model, usually called the four stages of competence, describes how a person moves from not knowing what they do not know to performing a skill without thinking about it. The second stage, called conscious incompetence, is the uncomfortable one. A person at that stage has learned enough to recognize what they are doing wrong and has not yet learned enough to do it right.

We describe the same range in terms of strength. In our terminology, strength is a level of performance that runs from oblivious to mastery. Someone who is oblivious in an area can feel perfectly fine about their performance, because nothing tells them otherwise, and the first lesson that shows them how the task should be done is also the lesson that ends that comfort.

A new charge nurse could run shift huddles for months without a second thought. After a short course on leading them, she might start noticing each huddle that ran long and each question from the night shift that she left unanswered. Her huddles may be no worse than they were before, but now she has the knowledge to judge them. The skill to fix what she sees will take longer.

The Feeling of Learning Is a Poor Guide

Research on learning offers a second explanation for the dip. In a 2008 study, Nate Kornell and Robert Bjork had people learn to recognize the styles of twelve painters. Some paintings were shown in blocks, one artist at a time. Others were mixed in with work by other artists. On the test, 78 percent of participants did better with the mixed paintings. The same share, 78 percent, said the blocked approach had worked as well or better. The smoother method produced less learning, and the people using it could not tell.

A 2019 study at Harvard found the same pattern in introductory physics. Students taught through active problem-solving scored higher on tests than a comparison group. The comparison group heard fluent lectures from highly rated instructors, and yet it was the active learners who reported feeling that they had learned less. The researchers traced that feeling in part to the extra mental effort the active classes required, since students took their own effort as a sign that they were learning poorly.

Both studies teach the same lesson to anyone trying to improve, which is that the effort that comes with practicing a new skill is often part of how the skill gets built, and a stretch of practice that feels easy may be teaching less than it seems.

Getting Through the Dip

The old habit is still there during the dip, and it still works well enough. A manager learning to ask questions in one-on-ones, after years of handing out answers, will find that the questions take longer and sometimes lead nowhere, while giving the answer takes thirty seconds. Every conversation offers a quick way back to the familiar method, which comes with the comfort of feeling competent.

People rarely abandon a new habit in a single decision. They use the old method once on a busy day, then again the next week, and within a month or two the new approach has dropped out of their routine.

Our formula for how strength grows, Talent × (Knowledge + Skill) = Strength, explains why the dip is shorter for some people than for others. Talent multiplies whatever knowledge and skill a person adds, so someone learning a skill that draws on their natural patterns of thinking should climb out of the dip sooner than someone learning an ability that does not, though both of them still have to go through it.

Leaders can make the dip easier for the people on their teams by expecting it. A newly promoted supervisor whose first months look rough is often in conscious incompetence. A manager who tells them so gives them a reason to keep practicing. Judging someone on their first quarter with a new method measures the dip and little else.

People in the middle of the dip can keep a record of their progress that does not depend on how they feel. A manager learning to ask better questions could count how many one-on-ones ended with the employee proposing the solution, and compare that number across two or three months. The feeling of competence comes back after the skill does. Until it returns, a written record will show progress the feeling has not caught up to.

The next time a new skill seems to be making things worse, a person can check whether they are noticing mistakes they would have missed a few months earlier, because noticing them is the first sign that the learning has started.