Finding ‘flow’
Make every second count.
Here are two of my take-away’s from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘Flow’ follow-on book, ‘Finding Flow’.
One: The book’s title, ‘Finding Flow’, may not do its contents justice in that it is actually a guide on how to create flow. It’s not about falling into or seeking out the flow experience, but about intentionally designing it. Here’s a few of Csikszentmihalyi’s thoughts on the necessary requirements:
• Flow tends to occur when a person’s skills are fully utilized in overcoming a challenge that maximizes their potential. For example, the climber when the mountain demands all their strength; or an assembly line worker whose self-created goal is to beat their own processing time by experimenting with tools and patterns of motion. They literally made every second count.
• Human beings experience flow when they are fully engaged in meeting a challenge, solving a problem, or discovering something new. Most activities that produce flow also have clear goals, clear rules, and provide immediate feedback, such as a lift in sales.
When you reflect on your day, what are the activities you might transform into moments of flow?
Two: Mihaly references the Buddhist advice to, “Act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.”
To me, this aligns with the notion of detached engagement, which is about bringing our whole self to any experience with no attachment to the outcome – no hopes or hooks, just a full immersion in the experience. It’s a slightly risky idea: to some, detachment can mean to numb out or pretend not to care. To me, it means to lose yourself in the energetic flow of the ‘doing’ of the thing while bringing yourself fully to it. To fully engage with it, without being distracted or influenced by any need or expectation of external feedback. Easier said than done, but there is personal freedom and empowerment available to us when we do, so it’s worth keeping this idea in mind:
“It is not external conditions that determine how much (one’s) work will contribute to the excellence in one’s life, it is how one works and what experiences one is able to derive from confronting its challenges.”
How might adopting an approach of detached engagement shift a challenging situation you are facing? Can you bring yourself fully to it while at the same time, remember to detach from the results? While you may care deeply about a certain outcome, the irony is that detachment from it often enables us to be more effective as it opens the space for additional possibilities to emerge, not to mention our experiencing greater well-being.