Flow

Have you ever been stuck in a class, a lecture, a meeting or an assembly and found that time seemed to slow down to a crawl?

Perhaps there wasn’t an opportunity for you to get involved, or perhaps the information seemed irrelevant, or perhaps it was just too early in the morning and too boring for you.

However, the more disengaged you felt or the more you resented being there, the slower the time passed, right? 

This can become a vicious circle. When we associate frustration and boredom with an experience, we automatically launch those same emotions the next time we repeat the same or similar experience. 

Have you ever been in a class, a lecture, a meeting or an assembly and been asked to do something you were completely unprepared for? Did it cause a wave of high anxiety? Did it put you on edge causing you to make mistakes? There are few things that cause quite so much angst in the working week. As a result we often put up defensive barriers to protect ourselves.

However, have you ever been so engaged in a task or activity that time passed with unusual speed? Have you ever been writing an essay and found the words just poured onto the page? When you looked up, expecting that ten minutes had passed, were you surprised to find it had been an hour? Have you ever played a sport and found yourself so in sync with the game that you were anticipating and making moves with an almost preternatural insight? Have you ever acted in a play and found yourself so completely immersed in that scene with all your body, mind, heart and soul? Have you lost the sense of time whilst being intently focused on applying a mathematical formula, or whilst painting, or reading?

If the answer is yes, you’ve experienced the state of flow. 

Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi have described flow states as:

• Having an intense focus on the present moment or being ‘in the zone’

• Fusing together action and awareness

• Letting go of self-conscious feelings

• Increasing your sense of personal agency

• Experiencing a distortion of your sense of time

• Experiencing the activity as intrinsically rewarding

When we experience flow we have temporarily entered a perfect state of ikigai. When we experience flow we are temporarily living in a nexus of meaning, purpose and joy. Whilst we can’t live there all the time, we should aim to increase the frequency that we experience flow states. 

So how can we get there? Let’s take a look at the diagram below. 

We can see that achieving a flow state requires just the right combination of high skill application and high challenge of task. Flow state requires us to be intensely engaged whilst stretching our talents. If those two elements are not in tandem, it's hard to attain flow.  

Have a think about the following activities, where would you place them on the flow state diagram above.

• Organising my books by alphabetical order

• Reading aloud in class

• Making a meme

• Walking the dog

• Skydiving for the first time

• Playing first chair in the orchestra on opening night

• An oral language exam

• Earning you scuba diving license

• Conversing about your favourite film

• Year two of learning a language 
  
  

Take a moment to think about the times when you have experienced flow. 

What similarities connected these experiences?

One unifying theme is that experiencing flow state requires us to use our signature strengths in activities that significantly challenge us.

So it seems like we need a pretty straightforward combination of things in order to achieve flow. So why aren’t we in a flow state more frequently? 

We live in an age where personal success is not measured by one's qualities as a human so much as it is measured by our social and material status, or what we call extrinsic rewards like salary, job title and grades. Indeed, because we have over-promoted the value of extrinsic rewards, we have constructed a high stakes, high risk, high reward world. 

In this world, following your passions has become somewhat devalued because the world constantly asks ‘how much will you earn doing that?’ In this world, learning something strange and unusual simply because you are interested in the topic has become devalued because the world constantly demands high grades and perfect scores. It's hard to follow your passions under these sorts of pressure. 

Let’s put it another way. Imagine you are the world’s most talented young footballer. Sure, there’s no guarantee of success and you’re going to need to work extremely hard. But you are also the world’s most talented young football in a world that grants footballers great social status and financial rewards. Now, imagine you are the world’s most talented young lawn bowls player. Did you laugh at the idea of lawn bowls? Not so much social status and financial rewards there, right? How many people would choose to be a mediocre footballer for the rewards rather than be the world’s greatest lawn bowls player for the joy?

So pursuing extrinsic rewards at the expense of the things we care about makes it harder to achieve flow states. In fact, over-promoting extrinsic rewards has led to a whole host of problems. Indeed, extrinsic rewards lead us to make bad decisions. Chief amongst them is the creation of a permission structure to cheat. 

Why do people cheat on tests and work? What do you think teachers and school leaders would say? What do you think parents would say?  

Are you tempted to say that people who cheat are lazy, selfish and unethical?

There are certainly unethical people out there. There may even be a few sociopaths and narcissists lurking amongst us. However, young people usually cheat because they feel that the stakes are too high to make any errors. Paralysed by the need to produce work beyond their ability, believing that their social status and self worth depended upon the outcome of the work, and not the process of making the work, people panic and make bad decisions.

When they are scared that failure will result in an unrecoverable catastrophe, people panic and make bad decisions.  In other words, people usually cheat because society hasn’t made it safe for them to fail. As a result they have never developed a strategy to cope with failure.

Marva Collins, creator of the Montessori school system, once said that “if you can't make a mistake, you can't make anything”. So if we want to experience flow state more frequently we have to rewire our brains so we can give extrinsic rewards their appropriate weighting. This will free us to follow our genuine passions, and to focus on the processes and skills required to turn those passions into our expertise.

So how can we achieve flow states?

Adopt a Growth Mindset

To do this we need to adopt what Carol Dweck called a growth mindset. 

The growth mindset is a philosophy arguing that with the right conditions, attitudes and attributes human beings are capable of significant improvement in almost any field. This is not a new idea. Confucius said something similar a couple of thousands years ago. The growth mindset claims that if we put aside extrinsic rewards as prime motivator and place intrinsic values at the centre of our education system we’ll then encourage students to take risks, innovate and experiment. Those experiments will often end in failure but those failures will lead to new ideas, methods, and techniques. 

The growth mindset has become a common phrase in schools today but even Dweck has argued that it has become somewhat misused or misapplied. The most common misconception is that student attainment will simply improve over time. Another is that student attainment will improve if the student just tries harder. This is really just a fanciful wish. Having the potential for growth is not the same thing as taking effective action for growth.

The growth mindset requires a willingness to engage in challenge, developing capacity to overcome obstacles, the open mindedness to receiving criticism, and the ability to make concerted effort. In other words, those with a growth mindset are agile.

Those with a growth mindset have worked hard to put aside their ego. They can take action on feedback and are not threatened by the success of others.

One cannot flip a switch from a fixed, change resistant, ego-centric mindset into a growth mindset. It takes practice. To help support you on this journey, copy and complete the following table…

Don’t worry if achieving a growth mindset feels far away. Everything you are doing in this programme is helping you to adopt and internalise those attitudes. 

Through adopting a growth mindset we can better contextualise the value of extrinsic rewards and reposition our passions and our signature strengths at the centre of our daily life. Through adopting a growth mindset we’ll discover new passions and develop new strengths we didn’t have before. Through adopting a growth mindset we’ll develop the skills required to enter flow states. 

Self Perception Theory

Another tool we can use to help us more frequently achieve flow states is called Self Perception theory. 

The idea of Self Perception theory is that we change our attitudes through observing our own behaviours. For example, by observing ourselves being curious we can learn to become more curious. One of the best ways to spark your curiosity is to focus on something you're already familiar with, or something you're already really good at. 

Let’s return to your signature strengths. If we can find a way to use our signature strengths more frequently and pay attention to ourselves (to how we feel, think and act) when using our signature strengths we will spend more of our day edging closer to flow state. 

Here’s another table to help you raise your awareness.

If we want to increase the frequency with which we experience flow, it would also be helpful to reduce the negative impact of the time we spend struggling through uninspiring obligations. 

That is to say, there will still be many things in your day that just don’t inspire you no matter how much you shift your mindset. That’s ok, it's normal. We can’t love everything we have to do. And in fact, learning how to manage those uninspiring obligations so we can still meet our responsibilities is important. 

One tool we can use is to apply one of our signature strengths in a way that transforms each uninspiring obligation. 

For example, it is possible that someone who sells mortgages in a bank, a very normal job, finds much of their job uninspiring. They might not like the paperwork, the hours, or the demands on their time. Even so, there are people who will tell you that they love their job despite those uninspiring elements.  “Why?” you might ask. They’ll tell you that they love their job because despite all the paperwork and long hours their job makes people's dreams come true. Yes, they sell mortgages but what they really do is help people realise their dream home. 

People who see the world this way have discovered their signature strengths and use them to turn even the most ordinary job into a passion.

Can you do the same?

Journaling

Another way for us to achieve a flow state more frequently is to be more intentionally aware of what we do to achieve that state and how it feels when we’re in it. Journaling can help us here. 

Think of a time that you were in a flow state. Write about that experience in as much detail as possible. Allow yourself to relive that experience and try to write continuously for 10 minutes.