The point today: to show how it's worthwhile to integrate Flow into our experience.
Your quality of Life and Leadership increases when you keep upgrading Self-/Awareness, have a clear Life Vision based on your top Core Values to guide your choices, and select supporting habits that help dial in your dominant states to be closer and closer to optimal.
Your level of Well-Being impacts everything around you.
Your example influences those who turn to you for Inspiration.
Flow is a modality which amplifies the yield of our invested efforts and positive impact.
This state elevates our discernment to better navigate our information-dense age with more ease.
In hard times, our Resilience – reinforced by Flow-habits, greater Awareness, Growth Mindset and conscious choices – carries us through to resolutions.
We can manage the extremes better over time and can keep maintaining the state we best operate in for longer.
Let's look at key steps, how we can do that.
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Working with Flow
Flow is more than a performance accelerator, it is recognised as the optimal state.
Optimal state means a higher quality of experiences and a better way of accessing our (partially slumbering) potential. By learning how Body and Mind can ideally work together.
Results can be measured in how you show up and how you feel about yourself and Life.
Your positive change in attitude and state allows for more desirable outcomes, and for goal achievements to happen utilising your paired conscious-intuitive capacity to a greater degree.
Both tangible and intangible signs can serve as a litmus test in how well are you integrating Flow and where you still need to tweak environments, optimise habits and use Flow-triggers more effectively.
You are orchestrating your human experience by making conscious choices which influence also your Subconscious.
You can consciously assess and choose the habits that induce your Flow.
A key consideration shall remain:
Which habits feed your Vision, your goals leading up to it, at the same time?
Let us first look at what the qualities of Flow are, so you easily recognise them and with that clarity choose what matters to you most.
The nature of Flow
Why is Flow so instrumental for us in this endeavour to increase Quality of Life?
Because once you are in this optimal state, your thinking and the related actions come more effortlessly. There is an increased synergy of your various levels of human operation and less to no reactivity.
Among the main reasons is that the frontal lobe, which generates our sense of Self, goes mostly offline and we function at an optimum emotionally, physically, mentally, without overthinking or being overly Self-critical. (All of us probably already know how much energy it consumes when we are battling with internal doubts and striving to steady a frantic Ego.)
Flow-state has a transcendent quality, therefore it is a quintessential tool to considerably shape your Subconscious Mind, which in turn influences your behaviour. That is why it is so impactful on the long term. We learn to embody it more so and become autotelic.
Here is the list of the fundamental Flow-markers to help qualify your experiences:
the reason for exceptional focus is that energy is reallocated from the frontal lobe and the Brain processes much more sensory data (less filters active)
because the frontal lobe goes mostly offline, so does "the inner critic"
fatigue, boredom, doubts, lack of clarity and distractions get auto-excluded out of Consciousness, because you are not so occupied with obsessing over irrelevant details, being lost in a maze of limiting beliefs, disproportionately criticising yourself, being bogged down by (Self-)blame
the focus is on the task, rather than Self
the feel-good-factor is underpinned neurochemically: five of the most potent neurotransmitters are produced at the same time (Serotonin, Dopamine, Endorphins, Oxytocin, Anandamide)
the experience is intrinsically rewarding
time distorts - you are immersed in the Present Moment, not dwelling in the Past, nor being worried about the Future; you utilise the power of choice now that learns from one and shapes the other
becoming autotelic is the ultimate reward - when you learn to embody this state more so, it becomes part of the Self-concept, it's natural to tune into it; when distraction, confusion and frustration become a rarity in your experience and you can keep your dominant experience at or close to the optimum
In this altered state you gain so many advantages that it becomes self-explanatory to utilise it. As you can see there's neurological, mental-emotional rationale for it.
Just as much as our spiritual desire for a deepened inner peace is satisfied by it.
Your natural Confidence returns to its best. You navigate complexity – such as the immense amount of data we are dealing with these days – with way more ease. Your perception becomes sharp, expanded. You focus on the task – productivity being mainly a result of quality focus. You don't have to struggle against sabotaging Self-talk, because it gets excluded automatically. You won't feel the overwhelm that can occur with average approaches.
These markers will help you identify and qualify your activities and the mental-emotional states that they evoke.
Flow is not a distant magical point. You have tapped into it many times in Life without having this kind of full awareness of it. You already know how your individual Flow feels like.
The practice now is to consciously re-evaluate where you are at, become more aware of who you are (Self-concept) now and what you want (Core Values, Life Vision), so that you can tailor your choices optimally in this season of your Life.
Self-reflection points
Observe your daily activities and routines.
Which activities and environments are simply energy-draining or feel even destructive and which ones do truly contribute to what you want and how you want to feel?
When, doing which activities, in which environments do you experience any or (more likely) simultaneously multiple of the Flow-markers?
Your individual Flow
Get to know yourself, your tendencies, better and qualify your habits that match and feed your desired experiences.
You will discover when are you forcing things without sufficient progress.
You will find those elements in your day-to-day that are blocking your Flow-performance.
Becoming aware of your patterns in your behaviour means that you get to clearly see your options: what you choose to keep, what you choose to adjust, what you choose to release.
Both Flow and force can lead to results.
Forcing, as in equating overplanning, overthinking and overexerting (you get to know yourself what pushes something into the category of "over-") as a faster way to achieve, can bring certain results, but we are damaging our mental-emotional-physical vehicle in the process.
Flow in balance takes more care of our overall Well-Being, and the quality of both process and results will be incomparably higher.
Consider which approach is getting you more yield out of the same amount of invested time and energy, and what state they leave you in.
Take notice of those states when you feel naturally confident, relaxed, at ease; when your attitude feels most authentic and is harmonious towards others as well.
Self-reflection points
How would you like to feel throughout the creative work process and how would you prefer to feel after you've achieved your goals?
How do you want your surroundings to experience all of this?
What dominant thoughts and feelings, which experiences and relationships do you want to last?
Flow is your optimal state, and because it influences all areas of Life most beneficially, so we tie habit-formation to Flow.
In the previous segment you were zeroing in on which are the experiences where you recognise the qualities of Flow.
In this one, going further into details, you can identify concrete habits, environments and Flow-triggers which feed those experiences you want to be building blocks of your Life.
We talk here about dominant experiences. There may be temporary challenges as part of the human experience, but we can clarify what we want to be our most often occurring themes (like feeling healthy, joyful, good-humoured, confident, lighthearted, calm, committed, sharp-minded etc., you choose the words which best describe what you want).
You can identify your own most powerful habits by evaluating how many positive benefits they help produce.
Duhigg named the habits that have stacked benefits "keystone habits"– they generate a positive ripple effect which helps to uphold healthy routines. Although he didn't tie this in with Flow, but we do.
How you identify and tailor your Flow-habits?
Our main tools: observation, discernment, priorities, alignment.
Revelations come with observation.
“Bad” habits leads us towards unwanted goals or away from consciously selected aims. “Good” habits involve an enhanced cognitive control, they lead us into a consciously chosen direction that is also intuitively aligned, where we feel strengthened, release stress and gain balance in Well-being.
In the classical Aristotelian view, when someone acquires a (good) habit, they perform the action: (1) more easily; (2) more efficiently; and (3) with higher enjoyment.
Self-reflection points
How do your current habits serve you in the best way?
Which of your habits help induce an optimal state?
Which ones contribute to your Life quality and Well-being, cause Joy?
What's your experience with habits?
How do you keep them inspiring, consistent and enjoyable?
What's your experience with the compound effect?
When you look at your choices today, which ones belong to the incremental or "to be transformed" category?
Flow has various degrees.
Peak Flow is a high-performance high-focus experience, like public speaking, sports competition etc. where you are focusing energies in high-intensity.
Usually the following Recovery period will need to be in adequate proportion to that. When I host meetings, I feel that in the prep- and post-effect. People can boost our capacity and feeling of being inspired. Then again, we can choose to recover from social interaction in our dedicated time, away from stimuli.
It's a dance we uniquely-individually shape based on our current capacity and Awareness.
Then there is Flow as a continuous state in non-high-intensity periods. The daily rhythm.
Ordinary tasks are not to be underestimated as you are considering which habits and routines mean being in Flow for you.
With practice, you can develop a blissful, empowered state even doing something simple as... the dishes. (Your Subconscious Mind relaxes into problem solving in the background.)
You also can learn to complete those tasks that need to be done, but are not your favourites, with much less reactivity, if any at all. If you can delegate them, it may be beneficial to do so.
For some of us it's Meditation – better sleep, more focusing power, inner balance, a healthier Brain, reduced stress symptoms, enhanced Self-/Awareness and more.
Exercise of any form – deeper sleep, well-functioning immune system, greater lung capacity, flexibility and healthy blood flow, boost energy, balanced mood, connecting to Nature and more.
It can be Family-Friends-social events, healthy sleep patterns, good eating, minimalism (to keep our inner and outer environment clutter-free), Gratitude, positive Self-talk.
Identify ways to induce, amplify, maintain and best harness Flow through them.
Habitual thoughts and emotions are really precursors of our habitual actions, so we want to make sure we optimise those with priority.
Growth Mindset, fluidity of Mind, Mindfulness, practising being present are habits that help shed misconceptions, bias, limits. They encourage a higher quality thinking which helps with higher quality Awareness and clarity for better choices.
Considering this context, in the Work together we identify how and which of the social, creative, environmental and psychological Flow-state triggers work best for you. We amplify the efficacy of your habits further, by embedding them into the concept and practice of Flow.
Integrating habits and practices so that they facilitate your desired results, your inspiring Leadership practices and ultimately, your Life Vision.
In this interpretation we apply in the Work together:
Flow is rather a state of Mind, a way of living.
Overcoming challenges
Aiming for mastery in improving our dominant states and eliminating Flow-blockers.
I can liken it to that scene where in Cast Away Tom Hanks is by himself in the middle of the vast ocean on a stormy night. Not seeing in the dark, feeling powerless, not knowing how and whether he would manage to survive.
When we are further on in our Personal Growth Journey, it's not that easy any more to exactly recall all the feelings of those hard times when we were way less consciously aware of ourselves, our thought and belief patterns and to gauge what's happening around us.
I just remember that it felt like a confused mess when many things hit at once: grief, physical pain, things working out differently than planned. I felt disconnected and very disempowered.
I recall that I wanted a more conscious Life. I had no clue how that would look like, but I knew that I wanted more mental, emotional, physical and spiritual capacity to deal with Life's truly tough turns when they came around.
And as a possibly best way from that: to know how to not navigate straight into the messy middle of it when it was unnecessary and not for any good purpose.
Preventing unnecessary drama, distractions and loopholes, so that I feel that I steer my Life as best I can on all those levels.
Flow may be the optimal experience, in Life we will have however a wide variety of experiences.
To clearly put Flow in a context, we need to address its cyclical nature as well. Acknowledge that our human capacity does have ebbs when there is too much load we want to carry and Life adds another tweak or turn into that mix.
Steven Kotler describes 4 stages how we usually operate: Struggle - Release - Flow - Recovery. As we become more aware of our patterns, habits, preferences, we can notice when we are longer stuck in one phase than is desirable.
The "usual suspects" are the Struggle and the Recovery phase.
Struggle can lean into us dwelling in all the painful mental-emotional-physical experiences and grabbing so tight, we slow the progress into the Release stage.
An elongated Recovery phase can lean into apathy where we do not feel we have motivation or energy to start momentum going, and need to push a little to transcend our fears, gather Courage and get into thinking-planning-doing mode to gallop through our Struggle phase that propels us through Release into Flow again.
Keeping the cycle going is a practice and to find our preferred ways and durations for these stages.
Self-reflection points
In what form do you recognise the 4 stages Struggle-Release-Flow-Recovery in your current routine?
Which pattern, thought or action tends to slow down the flowing of this yin-yang sort of process in your experience - as you cycle from creativity and go-go-go to rest and recharge?
How much do you respect your own needs in this?
Where are your needs neglected?
What (even seemingly small and easy to do) tweaks can you apply right-away to honour those needs?
Your needs speak to your Values - which of your Values do you want more reflected in your habits?
Examples for Values: Freedom, Fairness Integrity, Authenticity, Compassion, Courage, Awareness, Leadership, Curiosity, Humour, Learning, Love, Wisdom, Community, Recognition, Success, Prosperity, Stability, Contribution, Impact, Trust, Trustworthiness, Respect etc. Basically those things that you say after "What I value most in Life is ...".
For us who approach Life as an Adventure, wanting to explore, have our enterprise thrive, Self-actualise as well as transcend the Self via our contributions as Leaders, there will always be risk-taking and the potential that we face some challenges along the way. The next mountain or storm to be conquered and learned from.
Therefore the focus here is not the complete elimination of hurdles, nor to just "let Life happen to us".
The focus is...
...increasing Self-empowerment and Awareness, so that we discern much better and then make better choice;
...to apply the tools and practices we are learning to move through challenges wiser and more effortlessly;
...to optimise our dominant states. Those states that shall make up most of our Life. Challenges may come and go, but the practice is to increase the proportion of Flow, for it to be our dominant state.
I can tell you from my experience, that when facing challenges in certain areas where things feel dragging, not satisfying, at times very frustrating, the ability to gauge, reflect, utilising Awareness to not be stuck in unhelpful thought loops and limiting beliefs, is an immense positive difference.
This ability improves our Lives for the long-term. Once you gain more Awareness, it doesn't go away. You learn to master it more so. The insights coming in faster, clearer. The context so much more understandable, even when there is information overload.
This is permanent improvement.
The Work together
For a greater quality Life and Leadership.
My Work mostly focuses on experienced Leaders, business owners, who are currently prioritising to hone their Leadership practices, expand their Value-footprint by finding better ways for better outcomes.
Leaders who are willing to look at their Life holistically, finetune their Life Vision to reflect primary Values, hone their Character, and filter out sabotaging beliefs.
If you want to learn to become more conscious in your choices, benefit from Flow-inducing habits, overcome behaviours that are currently not optimal for neither you nor your surroundings or your quality of Life, you might want to consider Coaching as an accountability partnership that helps you with all this.
When ready, explore the options I currently provide through the main page:
Feel free to utilise the Self-assessment page on the website.
In the meantime: stay inspired, keep your Growth Mindset engaged and enjoy the Journey at its highest potential.
Recommended resources
I'm a firm believer of basing our beliefs on our own experiences, even when learning from many sources.
Once you understand the basics and general characteristics, methods to induce Flow, the individual benefits reveal themselves in your trying out habits, activities that induce YOUR Flow.
The aim is to discover your unique way to connect to Flow that fits your ideal lifestyle and learn to best maintain and harness it.
My own theoretical knowledge is based on more books, hundreds of articles, masterclasses and courses over the past years. The following 3 resources can serve as deep foundation.
Then, just like me, you can experiment with how you best put this all into practice and find even more learning, beyond theory.
Aligning choices to the greater Vision and current priorities.
These resources will give you the essence of Flow, you'll get the gist of it from them:
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Steven Kotler: The Rise of Superman
Joseph Rodrigues' You Tube channel on living in Flow and Entrepreneurship. He provides practical examples and insights on the progression of it. Example: TRANSMUTE obstacles into FLOW... (Maintaining the IDEAL STATE of MIND)
Check out more of the resources in the Blog or on my social media channels.
See what you can utilise for your own Life-mapping.
And then embark on the next chapter of your Journey.
We shall make the most of it while we are here.
All the best,
T.
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