Chad Silverstein explains that love (emotional connection) is essential to sustain work and achieve flow. He describes how individuals who love their work enter flow and how teams can attain shared flow—like athletic teams with strong camaraderie—while noting it requires deliberate practices (e.g., a "seven good minutes" exercise) and starting from what you love to do.
Chapters
So there's no way around it. You gotta have. You gotta have the emotion of love if you want to carry you and sustain you and not tire. And I think the finding flow for anyone who loves their job, who loves what they do, is. It's such a beautiful thing to see when you have people live in that and they are aware of it, they can embrace it, and they can capitalize on trying to lift it higher than where they currently are at. There is something really special when you can do this with other people on your team, when you can find that flow like a sports team would have, as they're running down the court and they just kind of know where each other's going to be. I think a team that cares about each other enough. And this is why a lot of the athletic teams are just favorites of Built to Lead, because they have this camaraderie, they have this chemistry, this flow that they find when they've gotten tired together, when they've hung out in the locker room, when they've bonded afterwards. And it's harder to do that at work in the boardroom, by the water cooler. But you have to go out of your way and you have to build. This is one of the reasons why we put ourselves in flow. When we're in seven good minutes and we do that exercise, it's because we love to have that connection. People like to feel understood. It's a human need, and it's one of the ways you can put yourself in flow. And by doing that, then when you go back out to your job, you're just doing it better and you don't realize it, but it's like that afterburn effect. So finding flow and being creative with how you're building it in your life, on your team, you have to be very deliberate, and you got to. You got to figure out what puts you in flow. And usually it comes with starting with what do you love to do, and then doing it.
