Shoots.

When you're a ball player, no matter what kind of ball, from bowling to ping-pong to golf to basketball to baseball to badminton whatever, there are two ways to deal with a slump.

The same holds true no matter what you do for life, no matter what temporal adversity you face.

There are two ways to deal with it.

First is what new-age people might call centering.

First, acknowledge and respect and even welcome the slump. Slumps happen to everyone. They happen whenever they want to happen. You can't obviate or avoid them anymore than you can skirt a politician's lies or lie with a politician's skirt.

Slumps are just a fact of life. In fact, without slumps, without the inevitable lows, you wouldn't, really, take in the equally inevitable highs. You've never ridden on a roller-coaster that doesn't have peaks as well as troughs. Roller-coasters, like most of everything, are metaphors. You might think about how they're built, why they're built and why so many millions of people flock to them.

One thing you might want to do, right now for instance, is head over to ebay or amazon and buy some version of the centuries-old board game "Snakes and Ladders," or as we called it when I was knee-high to a dust-bunny, "Chutes and Ladders."

Speaking of metaphors, Chutes and Ladders is a good one. If you're in an agency, either as an interchangeable part or a "leader," your job, in a sense, with your bosses, colleagues and clients is to--however possible--maximize ladders and minimize the effects of chutes.

As you might expect, Johnnie Mercer and Harold Arlen said it best, "You've got to accentuate the positive/Eliminate the negative/Don't mess with Mr. In-between."

So, back to my two ways to deal with a slump.

One: You can panic. You can second-guess. You can over-react. You can punish yourself. You can change everything you've always done.

Two: You can think about who you are. The quality and quantity you've always delivered. Your reliability and stalwartosity® and you can confidently get through the slump. With time.

Of course, look at the video tape. See if you dropped your elbow a tad. Examine the circuitry of what you do and see if you got into a bad habit. We all do.

But don't linger on your demise. Or the evaporation of all that brought you to where you are in the first place. If your career and life has been punctuated by ladders, the ladders will once again, and probably before long--probably sooner rather than ladder--present themselves once again.

This is the best I can do on a rainy Sunday morning before six AM.

See you ladder.