Do You Know How To Flow?
Strategies for performing at your peak
Flow is a big topic of conversation in our family. Whether you call it being in the zone, mindfulness, or hyper-focus, it’s about finding that state of peak performance, where everything seems to unfold without conscious effort. It’s a state often ascribed to athletes, although lots of us find it in other pursuits as well — including creative endeavours like writing or composing, making love, listening to music, cooking, gardening, and even studying and working.
When we’re in flow, the outside world seems to fall away. As our awareness narrows to this very moment, we often lose track of time — and can even lose track of self. It’s the practical application of that old aphorism to dance like nobody’s watching. When we’re in flow, nobody is ever watching. All we are is subsumed by the activity we’re engaged in. Both the object and subject become one. All time comes to the now.
From here to there
Because flow is such a powerful state, there’s been a fair amount of research on how to reach it. Two of the more famous researchers are Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist who’s written extensively on the topic, and Steven Kotler, a best-selling author and the co-founder and director of research for the Flow Genome Project. Both of these experts have identified a number of triggers designed to help people cultivate flow. I’m using Kotler’s language here, but Csikszentmihalyi’s concepts align. Both agree that entering flow requires:
- Intensely focused attention, characterized by long periods of uninterrupted concentration
- Clear goals that allow us to stay present because our mind knows what to do next
- Immediate feedback that we can use to improve our performance in real time
- A balance between challenge and skills — in essence, we enter flow when we’re engaged in challenges that are somewhat greater than the skills we have, but are not so difficult that they overwhelm us
- High consequences, which can encompass either real or perceived physical or emotional danger
- A rich environment where we don’t know what will happen next or where there’s a lot of information coming to us at once
- Deep embodiment where we have total awareness of multiple sensory streams
Control and letting go
One of things that seduces me most about this topic, though, is that it seems to combine Western concepts of control with Eastern concepts of letting go. In a 2011 article in The Huffington Post, Lance Hickey put it this way, using the example of a skier who has found flow:
“To take our ski example once again, the experience of flowing down the mountain can be described as “being in total control” and “dominating the mountain” or as “effortless” and “being one with the mountain.” The equal validity of these perspectives is what makes the flow experience so unique: at the same time that one is in complete control, one doesn’t feel that one is “doing” anything at all.”
It’s kind of like that old quadrant designed to map the learning cycle (see image). Before we’ve gained knowledge, most of us begin as unconsciously incompetent: we don’t know what we don’t know. As we commence on the path towards learning, we move towards conscious incompetence: we become aware of the skills we lack. As we absorb new skills, we gain conscious competence: as long as we concentrate, we tend to succeed. And mastery is found at the level of unconscious competence — when we no longer have to think in order to do; where our muscle memory, knowledge, and experience combine to drive our success. Therein lies flow.
Just groove
The trick, I’ve found, is to not overthink it. When you find yourself grooving, just groove. When I’m in flow, there’s sometimes that little voice in the back of my head asking needless questions like “How am I doing this?” If you stop to answer that question, you lose the state. The key instead is to stay focused on your task, ignore the extraneous, and welcome the winds of possibility as they blow through you. Sometimes I unfocus or even close my eyes so I can avoid distraction. Other times I find myself in a state of near meditation, even if my eyes are wide open. Like the lightbulb metaphor, we don’t need to know how it works to use it. We just need to be sufficiently open to recognize its arrival and invite it to stay.
What’s it like for you? How do you enter flow? Share the love. Let us know.
