By David Cox, CEO and Founder, Fluency Space
I have been teaching advanced Business English to business leaders and executives for over 14 years — from entrepreneurs to CFOs and banking professionals. My students are entirely self-directed — they pay for lessons themselves, organise their own time, and answer to no one but themselves when it comes to showing up. English is often far down their priority list — just as with fitness, reading, and meditation.
So how do high achievers sustain habits that intend to keep up, but rarely treat as urgent? It is a question I have spent fourteen years exploring at Fluency Space — and the answers are rarely what people expect.
Goals will get you started. But hold them lightly
Most people begin a new habit with a goal. Reach B2 level English. Run a 5k. Goals lure you into the habit and provide early motivation, but they need to be held with a particular awareness.
Goals are temporary. When you reach one — when you pass the exam, hit the target weight, finish the course — the chase is over. The motivation disappears with it. Enthusiasm dips not because you have failed, but because you have succeeded.
Nobody warns you about this. The English level you worked a year to build, the fitness you developed over six months — none of it stays without effort. Everything is rented. You lease your capabilities, and the rent is paid through consistent practice.
So set goals — but with this knowledge built in. The goal is not the finish line. What happens after you reach it is the more important question — and one we will come back to.
Why success can work against you
The traits that make people successful — ambition, intensity, a tendency to obsess over new challenges — are exactly what can derail a long-term habit. The problem is most acute when the habit is forming, when everything feels possible and early results justify maximum effort.
This is where high achievers bite off more than they can chew. Commitment feels easy when enthusiasm is high, so the ambitious person commits to three sessions a week instead of one — full intensity from day one.
The same dynamic drives over-tracking. AI-powered apps track vocabulary retention by the hour. Gym performance is logged set by set. This feels sensible, but over-tracking is corrosive for self-driven habits. Progress in habits is non-linear, invisible for periods, and affected by stress and the demands of the week. Bad days register as failures. A flat week feels like evidence the habit is not working. You lose confidence precisely when you should be staying the course.
Finance professionals are particularly susceptible — trained to trust numbers and data above almost everything else — but self-driven habits require a fundamentally different mindset. Commit only to what you can sustain on a difficult week. Trust the direction rather than the data.
Senior executives often misunderstand productivity because they measure only visible output. But many of the behaviours that drive long-term performance — learning, strategic thinking, relationship-building, recovery, reflection — produce delayed returns. Good decision-making is often the result of habits that appear unproductive in the short term but compound quietly over years.
This dynamic appears inside organisations as well. Teams routinely overcommit during periods of enthusiasm — new strategies, transformation initiatives, leadership programmes — only to abandon them once the initial momentum fades. Sustainable performance in organisations, like personal habits, depends less on intensity and more on systems that can survive pressure, fatigue, and competing priorities.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Mount Stupid and the Dip
Inevitably, at some point a dip will arrive. Enthusiasm fades, overcommitment becomes a burden, and the schedule manageable in month one is unsustainable in month four.
This mirrors a phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect — In any endeavour, beginners overestimate their competence because they don’t yet know enough to understand what they don’t know. Progress feels rapid at first, enthusiasm is high. A language learner feels their confidence climbing week by week. A new gym-goer sees clear gains in the first month. Feedback is immediate and enthusiasm builds to the point where you reach a peak. Dunning-Kruger describes this peak as Mount Stupid — where perceived enthusiasm and competence significantly outpaces actual competence.
Then reality intervenes. The novelty wears off. The full complexity of what you are building comes into focus. This is the dip — where most people quit, often just as the habit is taking root.
Strict goals, obsessive tracking, and overcommitment carry you to Mount Stupid, but they become liabilities in the dip. For that you need something else entirely.
Getting through the dip
As Mount Stupid gives way to the dip, the habit becomes vulnerable. A big project, a holiday, progress that feels imperceptible — any of these can convince you the habit is failing. It usually isn’t.
This matters particularly at senior levels of leadership, where performance is less dependent on bursts of motivation and more dependent on consistency under pressure. Executives are rarely judged on their best week. They are judged on whether they can continue making sound decisions, communicating clearly, and operating effectively during demanding quarters, difficult negotiations, and periods of uncertainty.
The behaviours established early carry you through. Not overcommitting means the habit stays sustainable when motivation dips. Not obsessively tracking means a bad week doesn’t register as a crisis. Booking sessions with trainers removes the daily decision of whether to show up. A trainer or coach makes it their job to keep you engaged when you can’t keep yourself there.
By this point you need to embody the habit. It stops being something you do and becomes something you are. You no longer go to the gym or take the English lesson to attain something. You go because you go. Motivation becomes irrelevant and discipline unnecessary. Autopilot takes over — and it is the only place from which a habit can truly last.
Make it something you enjoy
Enjoyment matters less at the beginning, when novelty carries the habit. It becomes essential for surviving the dip.
Small wins provide the reward system — a phrase that landed well in a meeting, a negotiation that felt more natural, a kilometre added to a run. They are a reliable metric for telling you the habit is working.
Can you make the habit more interesting? This is the thinking behind Fluency Space, the best Business English platform built specifically for senior leaders and executives. Rather than textbook dialogues, lessons are structured around best-selling business writers and thinkers, so every session develops business and finance knowledge along with English.
For senior leaders, this matters because the quality of your habits eventually becomes the quality of your judgement. The professionals who sustain learning, reflection, and disciplined routines over decades are rarely the most intense at the beginning — but they are often the ones still improving long after others plateau.
