Valley of Abandonment

Don Kelley and Daryl Conner published the Emotional Cycle of Change in the 1979 Annual Handbook for Group Facilitators, based on organizational-change consulting from the mid-1970s. Five stages: uninformed optimism, informed pessimism, hopeful realism, informed optimism, completion. The trough between the second and third stage is where the model earns its popular nickname, the valley of despair, a phrase that does not actually appear in the original text but describes the low point precisely enough that it took over.

Business and self-improvement creators, Alex Hormozi among the most visible, have repackaged the same five-stage shape for entrepreneurship and skill acquisition. The underlying curve is 45 years old and was built from consulting observation, not a controlled experiment, so treat it as a durable practitioner heuristic rather than a measured causal model. What makes it worth citing correctly is the message it was already carrying in 1979: the low point is not a signal that you chose wrong. It is a predictable, well-documented stage that most attempts pass through and most quitting happens inside.

See learned industriousness for the actual mechanism that determines whether a given attempt crosses the trough or stops in it.