Coaching practices for Is This on the Curve

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Is This on the Curve, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I’ve been showing up faithfully for weeks and the needle just won’t move
• I’m good at my actual job, but lately I keep wading confidently into the next thing over
• On any given day my read on how my life is going swings wildly with my mood, and I can’t tell whether things are actually getting better or worse over time or I’m just reacting to today
• I wave through arguments on my side that I’d tear apart in a heartbeat if the other side made them
• I keep telling myself I should push harder, but I genuinely can’t tell anymore what’s a healthy stretch versus what would tip me over

Practices that may help

1. Push through the plateau
   Keep going through the flat stretch where effort seems to produce nothing.
   The Compound Effect, Made Practical
2. The Forgetting Curve: How Memory Decays and How to Fight It
   Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885) documented that memory decays rapidly after learning — roughly half of newly learned material is forgotten within hours and most within days — but that spaced review dramatically flattens the curve. The core implication: the timing of review matters as much as the quality of initial learning, and retrieval practice at the right interval is far more effective than rereading.
3. Know and mark the edges of your circle
   Label the boundary clearly: 'inside my circle’ vs 'outside my circle’ vs 'I am not sure.'
   Circle of Competence
4. Track your wheel scores over time to see trajectory, not just snapshots
   A single wheel is a photograph; repeated wheels are a film — trajectory matters more than today’s score.
   The Wheel of Life, Made Practical
5. Ride the Wave (Urge Management), Made Practical
   "Riding the wave" is a mindfulness-based urge management technique: rather than acting on an urge or fighting it, you observe it as a rising and falling wave of physical sensation, without doing anything. Urges are time-limited; if not acted upon or fought, they peak and subside. The technique has observational support specifically in addiction contexts (urge surfing), and the underlying mechanism — that urges are temporary physiological events — is consistent with mindfulness and DBT research.
6. Apply the double-standard check: would I accept this reasoning if it pointed the other way?
   Test whether you are holding your team’s arguments to a lower bar than the other side’s.
   The Scout Mindset
7. The Life Line Exercise
   The life line exercise is a narrative reflection tool that asks you to map your life visually — high points, low points, and turning points — on a timeline. It surfaces the implicit story you have been telling yourself about your life, makes that story revisable, and identifies the experiences that most shaped your current values and patterns. Evidence is primarily clinical and observational; it is an established coaching and therapy tool with a solid mechanistic rationale.
8. Map your personal zone boundaries
   Name what is currently easy, what is doable-but-challenging, and what would shut you down.
   The Comfort Zone Model: How to Grow Without Burning Out
9. Understand the anatomy of an urge
   Learn that urges have a beginning, a peak, and an end — and that acting on or fighting them changes the arc.
   Ride the Wave (Urge Management), Made Practical
10. For each small choice, ask: "Is this on the upward or downward curve?"
    The slight edge turns small choices into a binary classification: slightly better or slightly worse trajectory.
    The Slight Edge: Jeff Olson’s Philosophy of Consistent Small Actions

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