Growth charts look like a stock ticker, not a staircase. Zoom out before you panic.

Real improvement moves in jagged lines, with dips and flat stretches that look like failure when you are standing inside one. The panic almost always comes from judging a long process by a very short window of it. A bad week is data, not a verdict. Progress is only visible at the scale it actually happens on.

When the next slump lands, compare where you are now with where you were six months ago instead of with yesterday. Keep a rough record, even a few lines a month, so you have something to zoom out to. Let the dip be a dip.