The Bamboo Effect: Why Progress Often Feels Invisible

One of the most common forms of interference for performers is misinterpreting progress. In this episode, we discuss the bamboo tree and how it symbolizes why growth is often delayed, invisible, uneven, and misunderstood. You’ll learn a helpful perspective shift to stay patient and persistent when results lag behind effort.

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Transcript

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When was the last time you got discouraged because it felt like nothing you were doing was working? Like you were doing everything right, you were putting in the effort like you're supposed to be and trying to stay consistent, and yet the results just weren't there. No matter what you did, you couldn't create or reach a breakthrough. If you've been there or if you're even there right now, today's message is for you. Because today on the podcast, we're gonna discuss an ancient story that reminds all of us of something that we often forget. That there is often progress happening even when we can't see it. And in those moments, your ability to reach your goals and create a breakthrough won't come down to your talent always. It's often gonna come down to your ability to stay patient and to persist and keep going. Hey coaches and leaders, I got a quick question for you. You spend a lot of time building game plans for those you lead, but when was the last time you built one for yourself? If you're looking to sharpen your leadership skills, strengthen your team culture, or find better ways to support and challenge your athletes in the mental game, I'd love to help. I'm offering a free coaching call where we can talk through your current challenges and create a simple game plan for what might move the needle most for you, your players, and your program. Most coaches I know obsess over developing their team, but they neglect the person in the mirror. This call is a chance to invest in you because a better you is going to produce a better them. And if that sounds helpful, you can grab a time at Callendly.com slash Zach Brandon. That's Callinly.com slash Zach Brandon, or just check the link in the show notes. I'd love to connect and explore how I can best support you. So today's message on the podcast is one of my all-time favorites. It's one that's been passed around for years. Many of you have probably heard it before. Uh, and maybe this is going to be your first time hearing it, but I'd be willing to bet that there's probably someone in your life right now who could benefit from you sharing this message with them. So I feel feel called to share it today. It's the story of the bamboo tree. If you plant a bamboo seed and you give it the right soil, you get it sunlight, water, and so forth, and you do that consistently for a year, at the end of a year, nothing's gonna happen. There won't be any visible sign of growth. Then you do the same thing in year two. You get it the right soil, the right sunlight, the right water, and all that, and you do so with discipline again for an entire year, and at the end of year two, there's still gonna be nothing. At the end of year three, still nothing. And at the end of year four, still nothing. So despite your consistency and your discipline, there is still no visible growth above the surface. But then in year five, everything changes. Within just six weeks, it can grow up to ninety feet tall. Now, from the outside, that might look like explosive growth, but in reality, it's simply delayed result or progress that is finally being made visible. And so this is where I want you to think about your own journey. As I've shared before, at the heart of my work is often helping people not drift away from their goals, their dreams, that aspirational person that they want to become. Now, in pursuit of these things or this person that you aspire to be, you're gonna inevitably veer off course. Typically, it's gonna be in very subtle and small ways. And this drifting is often a result of what I see as interference. All of us encounter interference in different forms. Some of that interference is external and beyond our control, while there's many instances where we interfere internally with ourselves and we get in our own way. So, one example or pattern that I've observed where interference begins to sabotage performers is through the manner in which they interpret their own progress. We have a human tendency to overvalue what we can see, and we often undervalue what's happening beneath the surface. It's like that classic image of the iceberg. There's that small portion of it that's visible, but underneath is the accumulation of a lot of things that matter too. In the context of being a performer, the work beneath the surface is all the progress that you're making that just might not be showing up in the stat sheet or in the exact results that you want. These other forms of progress sometimes are in the cultivation of new habits, habits that are going to actually help you sustain impact in the long term. Maybe it's the development of new skills, skills that you didn't once possess, and that you're still trying to produce the results that you want with, but that at the very least, you've at least now developed those tools so you have them. Maybe it's building confidence or your ability to handle pressure. Things that maybe once kind of rattle you, maybe are no longer rattling you. That is all forms of progress. The problem though is that they don't always immediately equate to visible results that we want in terms of outcomes. Um and when your only reference point is visible results, you're gonna start to question a lot of things. And most importantly, um, or maybe detrimentally, you begin to question yourself and your own abilities. You start to wonder if you're on the right track, you start to lose belief and faith, and then you begin to steadily drift. Your process in this in this pursuit isn't what's actually flawed, it just hasn't revealed itself yet with results. And just because you don't see progress doesn't mean that there isn't any. If I told you that you were five performances, or maybe even think of it like five failures away from a breakthrough, you'd probably keep going. And the reality is you never know when that moment is coming. It might be now, it might be later on, but the one thing that you can do and the one thing that you can control is how you choose to remain patient and persistent despite the circumstances. This is where um one of my favorite components of this is often talking about like recommitment. And this first kind of stood out back during COVID. We had this player who I shared this story with, and he loved it so much. It's still one of my all-time favorite stories. He actually went and bought uh a bamboo seed. And so over the years, every time we've run into one another um and stayed connected, uh, I always like to ask him, I was like, hey, how's that bamboo seed treating? Yeah. And I don't know where he's at right now or if that bamboo tree is is now um shot through his roof or what. But one of the things that we always would talk about is recommitment. It's easy to talk about commitment from the standpoint of, okay, here's our goals, here's what we need to stay committed to, but forgetting that every single day, it requires a recommitment in your investment, a recommitment in your effort, especially when, again, those results maybe aren't showing up and there's no external reward. And so for me, I think that's actually one of the key components with this message of the bamboo seat. Every day you have to recommit to watering the bamboo. So if you're listening to this and you're trying to figure out, okay, what can I do with this or what can I use this for with somebody that I care about, the first is you need to shift how you measure progress. Now, I've previously talked about these two scoreboards that we all play in life. I think we have society scoreboard, values things like achievement, wins, accolades, recognition, promotions, and so forth. And then you have your personal one, which is comprised of your values, the things that you care most about. But one of the things that I also like to add to this that I do with my coaching clients is I help them craft their own scorecard. A scorecard, like in golf, is something that you, in essence, can carry with you to track your daily actions, your daily efforts and your behaviors, the things that actually align with your values and give you opportunities to live in alignment with them each and every day in each and every moment. Things like did you prepare the right way? Did you execute your process? Did you show up to this meeting or to this session with intention and purpose? Did you ask for help? Did you ask for feedback? Did you spend 20 minutes developing yourself today by learning something new? Like these are certainly not an exhaustive list, but these are all little daily actions, little daily audits that you can do to ensure that you're moving in alignment to not only to win on your personal scoreboard, but also society scoreboard, but it's a way for you to keep track of it day to day in these small little ways. Um, because I think if you want to win on your scoreboard, you have to start to stack wins on your scorecard first. And then the second thing to keep in mind is sometimes we need to zoom out. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is judging a long-term process on a short-term horizon. You start evaluating what in essence is a five-year journey on a small sample size of results. And when you do that, it's often gonna feel like nothing you're doing is working. But real growth, whether it's skill development, confidence, culture, or anything else, will rarely show up in a linear, predictable way. It's often gonna be uneven, many times it'll be delayed, and a lot of it's gonna happen again below the surface before it ever becomes visible for you. So if you're in that phase right now where it feels like nothing is happening, this is your reminder. Just because you can't see it yet doesn't mean you're not growing. The breakthrough doesn't start when you see it, it starts long before that. Now your job is to simply stay long enough in it to see it and keep recommitting to it every day to keep watering the bamboo.