Reading Time: 8 Minutes

What to Expect:

• The causes of slumps

• What you can do to break out of it

• The most common slump trap to avoid

Chris Davis, a major league slugger who won the home run title in both 2013 and 2015, was a feared hitter. His performance during the first part of the 2010s earned him a whopping $161m dollar contract, and he was highly regarded as one of the best hitters in baseball. He even earned the nickname “Crush Davis,” as a testament to his formidable performance in the batter’s box. With a solid identity as a feared hitter, Davis was poised to lead the league in some of the major hitting categories. Known for sending balls out of the park, his approach to at-bats consistently led to dominating the opposing pitcher.

On September 14, Chris began one of the most impressive streaks in MLB history. This streak lasted for 210 days because of a break in the season, and he would go on to set a record that had been incredibly difficult to break.

After 62 appearances at the plate, one of the most feared hitters in baseball finally did it: he managed to hit a 2-run single. Before this hit, he went 0-54. This streak from Davis that began on September 14 marked the start of the longest hitless run in the history of Major League Baseball. Despite his history as a renowned slugger, he set the record for at-bats without a hit. He had ended one season in a deep rut, and even the break couldn’t get him out of it.

He had a 9-year-old fan write a letter encouraging him not to give up. When he finally broke the streak, fans for the opposing team - the notorious crowd of the Boston Red Sox - actually cheered for him. A bar in Baltimore even gave away free drinks to mark the occasion.

There’s a lot to learn from Chris’s approach to breaking a record nobody wants to have. Despite his struggles, he remained relentless in his adherence to the basics. He showed up, took batting practice, and ignored the pull to make major changes to his approach. His teammates said he showed up with a positive attitude each day. He refused to grow fearful of the plate.

What Chris also did, perhaps unknowingly, is follow what the science suggests is the best way to bust out of a slump.

Defining Slump

First, let’s tease apart a slump from a choke and a plateau. A slump is a consistent level of underperformance. Players who are slumping don’t have just a one-off bad day (we all have those), but don’t manage to get the job done. Slumps are some of the most challenging states to work out of, because the often become a source of additional stress and pressure that further pushes performance down.

Choking is simply making a mistake under pressure. While everyone has a bad day once in a while, choking has to do with the context in which that bad day takes place. And, it’s also possible to choke at a specific, high-pressure moment of a game, even if the rest of the game has gone smoothly.

The final point of differentiation is a plateau. In sport, we often view a plateau as negative, but the reality is that performance plateaus are fairly common. In Robert Greene’s famous book Mastery, he describes how progress can look and feel like a plateau, with no visible meaningful improvement, before a rapid increase in performance. But, for a world that’s popularized the (false) notion that “you’re either getting better or worse,” we’ve got to recognize that staying the same is also an option, and isn’t the same as getting worse.

What Causes a Slump? 

While there’s rarely a singular cause for a slump, here are some possibilities about what could lead to consistent underperformance.

Physical Factors

It’s not uncommon for an illness or injury to lead to the beginning of a slump. Unfortunately, these two physical issues can often lead to psychological struggles, making continued slumping likely.

Performers may also have a physical skill deficit that leads to underperformance. If we've reached the peak of where we can perform, it's not uncommon to struggle with a transition to the next level. Over time and with enough persistence, this deficit can be reduced and ultimately eliminated, which often ends the slump.

This period of transition is important to manage, though. At the highest levels of sport, like the NBA, it's not uncommon for a top-5 draft pick to struggle on the floor. They are used to being the best player on their team, and now they might not even be a top 5 player in the gym. This skill deficit can lead to a lack of confidence, withdrawal, and a sense of helplessness or hopelessness if the player has unrealistic expectations of themselves or how long it will take them to transition.

Psychological Factors

Even if our physical skills are up to par, our minds can get in the way. What's happening for us internally when we perform has a big impact on what manifests on the field.

The typical psychological culprits for performance slumps are confidence, concentration, and expectancies.

When we're not as confident as we could be, we tend to play smaller. We execute with less vigor, question our decisions, and generally reduce the risk we take on during the course of a game. We play not to lose. Over time, this can manifest in a run of suboptimal performances.

When our focus is elsewhere, whether that be home, family, or just the next thing we need to accomplish, our performance in the moment suffers. If we let our concentration linger outside the present moment for too long, we slump.

If our performance suffers for long enough, or we have a history of underperformance against a specific team or during a specific stretch of the season, we come to expect that this is the best we can do. These lower expectations give us a target to hit that's less than ideal. As a result, we underperform.

Relatedly, it turns out that performers who have what's called a "pessimistic explanatory style" - that is, they tend to explain their failures by ascribing them to internal, stable traits like not being good enough or lacking talent - are more likely to end up in a slump. This pessimistic explanatory style results in feeling crappy, reduced motivation, and lower confidence which ends up damaging performance even more. It's a downward spiral.

Behavioral Factors

Sometimes our skills and psychology are totally fine - but what's lacking is what we might call "professional habits." In the case of the person slumping, the habits that might be misaligned include performance routines and self-handicapping.

Routines are critical for maintaining a sense of predictability. The mind is a prediction machine, and the more predictable we make our world, the better we are able to perform. Routines allow us to anticipate a sequence of actions time and again, create a sense of control, reduce ambiguity, and increase confidence. So, when we're underperforming, the routines that lead to poor execution are a good place to look for a potential suspect (and subsequent fix).

Self-handicapping, or setting ourselves up to fail on purpose, is the second behavioral issue that can lead to slumping. Sometimes, when we're not performing our best, we either set ourselves up to take on easy, meaningless tasks, or tasks that are too hard. As a result, if we fail, we can simply explain it away. Or, we can do things that undermine our performance, like reduce our sleep, train poorly, or not study enough (to name a few examples), so that if we do underperform, we've got a ready-made reason.

How Chris Got Out

At first, Chris was frustrated just like the rest of us are when we underperform. But, at a certain point, he took the first step toward getting out of the slump: he started to "embrace it."

Now, that doesn't mean that you like the slump - it just means that you move away from the natural inclination to try harder, do more, or "press", and instead allow the game to come to you. When high performers press, it often makes things worse. We all feel the urge to double down when we're failing, to try harder, and to push ourselves more - and sometimes, that can work. But, more often than not, that only leads to digging a deeper hole, because it pushes us away from what we know can allow us to be successful - consistency, good preparation, and practice.

Rather than urging himself to do more or stray from his preparation, he chose to stick with his game plan, "kept his chin up," and kept practicing. He made it a point to show up and keep a positive attitude, to be a good teammate, and to not wallow in his failures. At one point, right before the slump ended, he said "I tried not to let the slump dominate my thoughts." Even though the pressure persisted, he continued to work hard, go through practice, and stick to what he knows can work for him.

The strategies Chris used are a solid foundation for anyone looking to get out of a slump: talk to yourself effectively, accept where you are while working toward what you want, and be consistent in your practice and preparation.

Here are the other strategies science suggests can help us get out.

Find a Super Strength

When we want to break out of a slump, we tend to lose sight of what helped us reach the prior level of performance. Finding our super strength is all about returning to what we know makes us unique and gifted, and reliably using that strength during practice and performance. For example, if your super strength is creativity, you might find ways to approach your work with an extra emphasis on creative execution. Using what we know we're good at is one way to re-establish confidence and tilt our performance back in our favor.

Train Attributions

One thing Chris did well was not ascribing his slump to himself or his own qualities. Instead, he focused on the bad luck of the situation.

We can talk to ourselves in a way that emphasizes unstable, external factors - things that are outside of our control and temporary - as the causes behind our poor performance.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't honestly assess our own performance or recognize what we can do better. It just means that, when explaining failure, we also recognize the contextual factors that might be contributing, and make sure that we talk to ourselves about those just as much as we talk to ourselves (or more) about what we can improve.

Make Specific Plans

When you're in a slump, it can be tempting to try and find a win anywhere. But that's often a recipe for spreading ourselves thin and trying to do too much.

Instead, focus on 2-3 things that you can do well. Clarify your role, your expectations, and how you'll know if you're succeeding. For example, if you're in a bit of a selling slump, you might focus solely on uncovering your next prospects' pain points and nothing else. Or, if you're having a rough few days on the pitch, you might focus on just executing passes with great touch.

The narrowing of focus down to 1-3 simple tactics helps us to reclaim a sense of control and gives us something we can make real, meaningful progress on. Often that's enough to get us pointed back in the right direction, and for the rest of our performance to improve.

Imagery

There are two ways you can use imagery to break out of a slump.

The first is to think back to a time when you performed particularly well - a past excellent performance.

Make note of what you did. What strengths did you use? How did you prepare? How did you feel?

Recalling this past success helps your mind return to a state where you've been successful and start to identify changes you could make to bring that state about again.

The second way to use imagery is to imagine yourself coping effectively with the challenge. In the case of Chris Davis, that might mean imagining yourself responding adaptively to the pressure around each at-bat, or imagining yourself walking back to the dugout with your chin up after another difficult strikeout.

Seeing yourself cope with challenges increases your sense of self-efficacy around doing difficult things, and can help you respond more adaptively to future failure. It's kind of like doing a mental rep. The more you practice this imagery and see yourself working through difficulty, the more you will believe you can do it, because you've "experienced" it in your mind.

Routines, Habits, and Goals

The last set of mechanisms that can help you break out of a slump are the performance basics: routines, habits, and goals.

Goals, in this case, refer to process goals. In the case of Chris Davis, this meant approaching each at-bat like it was any other at-bat and staying focused on one pitch at a time. For the everyday high performer, this means establishing action steps that are well within your control, that you can do consistently, and that, if executed well, increase the likelihood of the outcome you want. Process goals are the steps we take on the path to the outcome we desire.

Focusing on process goals helps us stay within the confines of what we can control and not press, which can undermine getting out of a slump. Since perceiving performance as outside of our control is one of the factors that often precedes and predicts a slump, this can help us mitigate that risk and enhance performance.

Chris also did a great job of sticking to his routines and habits. He took batting practice regularly, did not change his swing, stance, or pre-performance/pre-practice preparation, and did not introduce anything novel that would've disrupted him. Since he had a history of performing well, it didn't make sense to undo what works. Instead, by sticking to what's served him, he helped himself work his way back out of a lull and into high performance.

Routines and habits are important because they give us a sense of predictability and control. I recommend establishing routines as regularly as possible because it helps reduce the cognitive load associated with executing specific behaviors, and because, over time, it can help us land in the optimal psychological state for performance (if we're deliberate with it). Habits and routines put us in a position to do the basics well and to give us small wins, even if the larger thing we're trying to accomplish is proving more challenging than we anticipated.

Avoid the Slump Trap

Getting out of a slump can be a bit of a challenge, but the main thing to avoid is the default strategy: increasing effort. Now, to be clear, that doesn't mean not trying hard. Rather, it means not increasing the pressure and intensity on yourself, and just doubling down on "doing more." That strategy, though often the first thing people do, can lead to giving up if there's not an immediate improvement.

I recommend staying focused on what you can control and the fundamentals of your performance. The goal when getting out of a slump isn't to go from consistent underperformance to immediate peak performance - the goal is to first return to baseline, and then begin to climb.

Though slumping can happen to all of us, it does define a career and is not final or fatal. Stay grounded in yourself, leverage your strengths, and be consistent - the rest will take care of itself.