Steven Kotler | Performance Begins in the Mind

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What if the biggest barrier to your potential isn't your skill, your resources, or even your opportunities, but what you believe is possible? In today's conversation, I'm joined by Steven Kotler, a leading expert on human performance, to explore the powerful connection between belief and achievement. We'll unpack the Banister Effect, the remarkable shift that happens when a single breakthrough shatters a what the world thought was impossible. Stephen reveals the neuroscience behind why our beliefs shape our abilities, how flow states can overwrite limiting stories, and practical ways you can rewire your own mindset to expand what's possible in your life and work. If you've ever wondered how to push past your limits and step into your next level of performance, this episode will give you both the science and the tools to get there. Let's dive in.

My name is Dr. Fleet Mall, your co host for this session, and I'm really thrilled to be here today with none other than Steven Kotler. Welcome Stephen.

Good to be with you, Fleet.

So in your book the Art of Impossible, you explore the science of peak performance. So how significant is the role of beliefs, the beliefs we have, the beliefs we inherited that were conditioned into us in determining our ability to perform at that highest level?

I think there's a two part answer to this question. Part 1 It's helpful to talk about what psychologists call the Banister effect. So most people are familiar with Roger Bannister ran the first sub 4 minute mile. The slightly larger version of the story is it took forever mile times dropped a fraction of a second a decade for 80 years before Bannister does it. Nobody believes he could do it. It's completely impossible. There are New York Times editorials written by doctors at the time who said the first person runs a sub 4 mile is going to die. You know, you should have a hearse waiting for him at the finish line. And Banister breaks the record. And that's amazing. But what's really interesting is what happens next. Within a month somebody else is breeding this record. Within a couple of months, a bunch of other people have done it. Within a couple of years, teenagers have done it, women have done it. And you got to ask yourself what changed, right? The physical task of running a sub 4 mile remain the same. The only thing that changed was our belief. What was believed to be impossible became possible and suddenly became possible for a whole lot more more people. This is known as the Banister effect. And we sort of understand why it happens. There's just a very tight correlation between our beliefs, our visual system and our ability to enact on the world. That's part one. Part two is the thing that has come out of my research on optimal performance and especially the relationship of altered states like flow or even psychedelic experiences. Or we can very quickly overwrite limiting beliefs and change limiting beliefs. So yes, on everything you said nature, nurture, a million other things. I think flow, these fatal performance plays a real big role, I believe gets laid down. But I think that really important point is one, it's very tied to performance, deeply tied to performance and what we actually do in the world. And two, it's very easy overwrite those beliefs if you know what you're doing.

Well, let's talk about that. So we know from primarioscience, we've known this for a while, what's called neuroplasticity, that the brain can change our nervous system can be rewired, so to speak. And certainly I think the science shows that flow states and a lot of your work around flow states facilitate that. But maybe if you could talk specifically how we dismantle beliefs that may be hampering our performance. And can, is that done just organically by being in flow states or do we need to look at what are some of the specific beliefs that are holding us back and either deconstruct those or override them or replace them in new beliefs. How does all this work?

There's a bunch of different. There's a million techniques here, right. And let's just start at the really simple end and work our way up to sort of more complicated techniques. And don't let me go on for too long. It depends. It could go everywhere. But things that I think about on the front end and one of the things that, you know, my organization is lucky enough to train people in like 150 countries, 28 industries. So we have a really good map of sort of globally what works, what doesn't at a very diverse level. And as you mentioned, we focus on the neurobiology of peak performance. That's what we study, that's what we steer our trainings with. And on the low end, on the front end, it's just like a simple filter. When you're looking at Yes, I think it's helpful to look at your beliefs, limiting or not. And one of the things I always point out is people rarely trust their own history. Your own history is proof of what you can and can't do. It's really clear if you look at it. And most people never stop. Like people who live with a victim mindset who think the world, you know, happens to them, who have a fixed around learning and growth and talent and things like that, often don't bother to look at their own life. Your life is a lot of layers of success that contradict your beliefs, especially these limiting beliefs. One of the first things I have people do is sort of do an inventory of like what you've actually achieved, the skills you sort of needed to achieve them, and how that list either, you know, matches up or doesn't matches up with your beliefs about yourself. So that's sort of really low, low under stuff at the really extreme end, I don't know exactly and I don't think anybody does where beliefs come from. So just nature some it's nurture. We know that memory, the more neurochemicals that show up during experience, the better chance that experience has of going short term molding to long term storage. So one way or another we can think of beliefs as very potent memories that act in a Bayesian sense as priors. Right. This is the thing that determines the probability of our predictions about the future, which is essentially what the brain is doing all the time. That's sort of how I think about those beliefs. Flow can override them very quickly. And the really interesting proof there, my lab wrote a paper a couple years ago. They showed up the neuroscience and bowel behavior reviews and what happens in the brain at first couple of seconds of flow. And one of the things that we learned in that paper and in doing that research is that flow overwrites ptsd. PST is a very called a strong memory or a really strong belief about how the world is and, and flow can override it very quickly. This also I've worked with a number of and other branches in the military terrorist training camps. They are putting people into flow and then telling them what to believe. I always tell people, when you're in flow, don't ever let make people make meaning for you, because you're very susceptible to setting up new beliefs. Flow, like many psychedelics and other altered states, seems to open up a neuroplastic window. On the back end of it. We don't know how long it's open. Like we have numbers for certain things. Ketamine, for example, opens a 72 hour neuroplastic window, which is why it's so useful in the treatment of mental health disorders and things like that. Flow opens up a similar window. We don't know how long it is because it probably correlated with how long you're in flow, how deep the state is. There's a bunch of different factors we have yet to determine. But it seems to open this window where we can overwrite old beliefs very quickly.

Yeah. Let me just ask you to begin with, define flow. Do you use flow in the sense of chicks and Mahal's work, or do you have your own definition of no?

So there. Yeah, I don't. One of the difficulties in flow research is every 10 years somebody tries to redefine and rename flow. The scientific definition of flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, it's any of those moments of rapt attention, total absorption, so focused on the task at hand that action awareness starts to merge. Your sense of self starts to diminish. Time passes strangely. Usually what happens is you just so into what you're doing, just get sucked in. A couple hours go by, it feels like two minutes. And throughout all aspects of performance. So that's mental, physical and emotional performance, all skyrocket. Skyrocket was not an exaggeration I can go through various data on various numbers, but let's just say it optimizes for everything and it's available to all of us, which is really cool. It comes built in as a built in feature of being human evolution. It shaped all of us to get into flow, which shaped all of us for optimal performance. So that's how I think of flow. We can go into greater detail in any which way we want.

Yeah, let me ask a further question about that. So it seems maybe putting flow states on a spectrum somewhat. There could be various spectrums in terms of intensity, but one is kind of breadth. It seems some flow states that often have to do with really challenging ourselves to the edge of our abilities with kind of some super focus are very narrow flow states, very data rich field of awareness, but maybe not a lot of broader awareness, like really focused in some flow states seem to be broader and then some of the states with that are induced by psychedelics like ketamine. Some other mystical states maybe more open and broader. And then there's a question of how much meta awareness is present in flow. The awareness that one is inflow, the awareness of oneself inflow, the awareness of how that's moving or changing. So I wonder if you could talk about.

Yeah, none of these questions have fast answers, but let me. The first question is, you are absolutely sort of correct. We work with Dr. Richard Husky a lot. In fact the first few seconds flow paper was written with him and so he's done really interesting work on this. And we've done really interesting work on this. We've got a couple papers coming out. Think of it as a search space, right? With flow it's very task specific. So you have a tighter search space but you have wild, almost psychedelic like connections. I'm using that term literally when you look at psychedelics in the brain. Super wide search space, right? The whole brain is active, the connections are everywhere, right. It's literally like a giant spider web of the brain. And that's what happens with the connections. Flow, same spider web, much smaller container. So it's all your ideas are pinging along, new thoughts, new ideas, creativity, all that stuff. But it's on the task at hand. Now there are. So I'll give you just like a simple example from sport, my own experience, what you're talking about is sometimes it broadens out and this happens. Most common flow state on earth is reading. So I'm going to give you a skiing example and a reading that will. They're roughly the same. There's an experience you have in flow often think is the high perch experience. There's no technical term for it that I know of, but you sort of get this feeling of like, I'm 200ft above my life and I can see the out to the horizon. And you can in a much greater distance than before. That seems to happen. And flow. And there's a bunch of reasons. We could talk about why, but I won't go into that right now. But when you're reading and like, an idea jumps together and something you're like, wow. And your thoughts just go, that feels incredibly expensive. It's a very expansive flow state. That's what you're talking about. But it's still in that container of spark. Something sparked by what you were reading with skiing. When I'm on the hill, right, I'm skiing the bumps, I'm entirely focused on what I'm doing. But I get to the chair left, I'm still in flow, and suddenly I'm one with the universe and I'm melting into the. We know why all these things happen as well, and it tends to correlate with where our attention goes. So oneness with everything is very common in flow. And it works the same way as in meditation. If you're Buddhist monk and you're meditating on absolute unitary being, you are one with the universe, right? Slightly smaller scale. You're a Franciscan nun. You're experiencing unia mystica. Now you're one with Jesus's love. Maybe that's not quite as big as the infinite universe, but it's a slightly smaller but still expansive container. I'm a surfer on a wave. I'm one with the wave, right? Still expansive and infinite in a weird way, but much smaller. So that's sort of how that works. And there's. We understand the science that I can talk to, the neurobiology of it. These sound like mystical experiences, and maybe they are. Maybe they speak of a higher connection. But we understand that there's biology that mediate them or possibly mediate that connection. So I'll stop there. There's another part to your question, but I don't want to talk to your face off.

And I want to get into maybe different means for accessing flow states. And. But before that, still looking at how flow states can help either deconstruct or override limiting beliefs that we have. And then we could also then talk about, you know, do we end up outside of the flow states with belief?

Yeah, let's just talk about beliefs about performance and flow in two parts. Because this is really actually probably I can get through this quickly and then we'll go to your next question. The first thing to know is that when we talk about flow is optimal performance, it's really optimal. So McKinsey did a study of top executives in flow. They report being 500% more productive than normal. The Department of Defense looked at soldiers in flow doing skill acquisition tasks in they learn 240 to 500% above normal work my lab did out of university Sydney summit at Harvard. Creativity, innovation, creative problem solving, great decision making. 400 to 700% above baseline. Same thing happens to well being, meaning, purpose, life, satisfact. I can go on and on. We now know that flow doesn't just override PTSD like I just mentioned. It is neuroprotective against burnout, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, cardiac related stress conditions, depression and anxiety. And really amazing like gat on that out of like 10,000 person twin studies and really solid. So tremendous amount of stuff gets optimized. Learning was among them. So like low is this extraordinary state of performance. And we see strength and stamina and fast rich muscle response, et cetera. We perform at a. I mean it's a step function worth of difference from how we normally behave. So the first thing that happens is we literally see ourselves performing at our best simultaneously. Flow amplifies memory. Why? Because five of the most potent field good neurochemicals the brain can produce all show up in flow. Right. It gets locked in. If you want to like if close your eyes, think about your path, you got all your happy memories. If you're thinking about something that is not pegged to a date, like an anniversary or a wedding or something like that graduation answers are you're remembering a flow state. This is what it does. It locks it into memory and you're also locking that performance in the memory. This is serving a growth function checks at me. I other researchers have pointed out that flow is the engine of adult development and it's this way we go into flow, push our skills to the utmost, we level up, we see that performance and it gets cemented into memory and it's a various with really great feelings attached to it. Right. Like it's in static state. So this is the foundation of or the overriding of belief. That's why that's what's happening so fast and that's why it's so tightly linked with performance. I want to take this one step further because this is essentially the reasons why affirmations sorry Louise Hayes fail so miserably and Gratitude works so well. Affirmation, we have an internal bullshit detector. You know this, we all know this. It's very strong, it's very loud. The affirmation, I'm looking in the mirror and saying, you were a millionaire. You, I'm a millionaire. I'm a millionaire, I'm a millionaire. My brain is going, buddy, you work at Walmart. What are you talking about? Totally demotivating. It's not going to get you. You know this is not the secret, right? Gratitude works because if I look in the mirror and go, I am so happy and grateful that I woke up this morning and I'm alive and I'm breathing, my brain goes, well, those things are true and those things are good. So maybe the world is a little less threatening. Maybe you're a little more capable than you knit right, does a bunch of foundational things. And to just take this one step further, to tighten the link between performance and belief and gratitude and belief, we did a really great study with Dr. Glenn Fox, who's probably the world's leading expert right now on the neuroscience of gratitudes at usc. We found that subjects who have regular gratitude practices also are way more flow prone. So it's very simple. Like you want more flow in your life. One of the very simplest ways to do it is a daily gratitude practice. It has all the other benefits of a gratitude practice. Lowers stress, all the psychological benefits, but it'll also make you more flow prone.

So absent flow and what a lot of people are dealing with, although we probably all have had glimpses of flow in some way or another, but you know, the limiting beliefs that often hamper our performance to get in the way of optimizing our lives and experiencing results we look for tend to be fear based. Again, as we spoke before, there's what we inherit genetically, what we inherit epigenetically. There's early childhood conditioning, there's our own adaptations to that, there's our societal conditioning as we start to go through school, all of that, that influences belief structures. And it's all influenced by what's called the negativity bias, the assumption of risk. And the brains need job one is survival for any species. So we focus more on threat than anything else. And so that's the kind of baseline to whatever degree. And of course, the more trauma you mentioned, flow can override trauma. The more trauma or PTSD there is, the more exacerbated all that's going to be. So when we're in a state of flow, contrary to that, we feel safe, we feel resourced we feel connected, we don't feel afraid. We have this very positive experience. So it would seem that flow kind of overrides. Kind of being in a moment of flow can override all that conditioning, all that experience, all those belief structures, all. All that fear. And at least for a moment that we're in flow, we're not being very influenced by all that. We're outside of that domain. And thus and that. And you said that in Prince's memories, so that could be, you know, creating a new neurobiology.

I mean, that's another. You just rephrased everything. I spent the best 10 minutes saying in a sentence, well done. But yes, exactly.

So then how is the process then of accessing flow again? We'll get into hacking flow and accessing flow in a minute. But being in flow, you know, let's say we have a meditation practice and we're able to kind of meditate our way into some quality of flow every morning. Or we have a gratitude practice and we're accessing some kind of flow. At least, you know, not maybe the super intense flow states, but we're getting a flow, or even we have some things that are inducing more intense flow states on a regular basis. But does that just automatically begin to cancel out, you know, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years of conditioning?

Awesome question. And all right, we need to back up a handful of steps before we can answer this, because one, there's one belief, one. You meant. You talked about flows of the recurrence in our lives. It's not we know except me. I figured this out back in the 60s. It's been proven again and again. We spend 5 to 10% of our work life in flow, often without realizing it. It's a lot more common than people think. First of all, that's micro flow, the low end of the flow scale, where flows, core characteristics, time dilation, the vanishing of self. You go to work, you sit down to write an email to your colleague, supposed to be a quick email, and you look up, hour later you've written an essay. Where did time go? And maybe your sense of self didn't totally go away, but when you pop into consciousness, you have to. You're like, wow, I got to go to the bathroom. So your bodily awareness certainly diminished. Right? That's microflow, macro flow. The really intense feels like a mystical experience. That's a rarer occurrence for sure, to be made more reliable and repeatable. But like, we're in microflow all the time, and blocking microflow is almost immediate. Symptoms of burnout as you also pointed out, it's amazing, she sent me how I did an experiment back in the 70s. Two days of blocking microflow produced extreme burnout. And when I say extreme burnout, the kind that comes with paranoia, self destructive behavior, I've been really interesting fact and I mentioned this because I think our lives and our, definitely our offices these days are leading, our companies are designed to block microflow. So I think that's the condition, you know and I think society contributes to.

All of this, all the distraction, the continual distraction, the digital.

So when I started training people in flow actively it was the sort of, let's say the late 90s, email existed, phones existed, people could knock on your door and you could get an SMS text message. Those were the distractions you have to block essentially to get work done. And today I just finished working with, we don't like to name names but a very big global consulting agency. Their top executive working their C suite had an average of 14 different communication channels that were required to open at all times. So like Slack and WhatsApp and Messages and email and like it was, we're like, you need complete concentration for flow. We gotta talk about like some distraction management here. Where do you start? Sometimes right in the modern world it's a little crazy.

Flow can take us out of an unresourced fear based state driven by. Oh yeah, what happens in terms of longer. Longer term.

Yeah. So the two other things I want to mention around this one, if you have a dictive mindset, a external locus of control, it will completely block flow. The first thing like you literally, you can't, your brain doesn't believe you can take charge of your life so it won't expend the energy to try. Why burn the calories? So that's one limiting belief that has to get changed right away if you really want an understanding of trauma. Take a look at George Bonanno's work. He's the global leader in the study of trauma and resilience and stuff is awesome. Every time you retell a traumatic story, you are adopting a victim mindset, an external locus of control here and you're giving up all your power and you have to get out of that. So you have to reframe that and get out of it. I don't think flow is going to help. I mean flow can help prove to you that your story is wrong, elevate your performance, all that stuff. But you have to stop telling that story if you want to get past that belief.

Beliefs that are pretty predominant for human Beings, I think, and get reinforced by society a lot outside of the existence of whatever levels of trauma. Just a sense of I'm not enough unworthiness that most of us get. You know, arrive an adult with something and then we have a whole consumerist society that's reinforcing that. You know, if you buy this, you might be enough shortly to be loved by somebody. And then.

Let me ask you a question. I got to stop you there because I hear people say that crap all the time. I don't know anybody who like walks around and looks at stuff they can't buy and go, God, if I could just buy that thing I'm seeing in the advertisement, my life will be fulfilled. I mean, that's the message that people keep saying is happening in society. But I don't know anybody who's that dumb, really. Like, this is 21st century. We understand advertising, we understand media. Kids get this stuff. They know they're being lied to. I don't think it's working that way. I think that's a straw dog people want to poke at. I think one who told you it was always going to feel good inside. What world is that? And you don't want it this way. It's like when I meet people who are like, I want to live in flow all the time. No, you don't. All the information is in the difference. This is flow. This is normal life. This is like, there's the richness of life, the experience. All that stuff is in the difference and the variety. If it was permanent ecstasy, we would acculturate to the ecstasy and it wouldn't notice it very quickly. We only get to have experiences like flow and these great, wonderful experiences because of the difference. So I think there's a lot of. I hear the hype, I don't buy it. I don't think any of it's true. So it's not that I can't talk about some of this stuff, but I like the presuppositions in the questions I have to push back against. Now, I have very strong opinions. They're often loosely held. So if you bring data, I'm happy to throw them out and have new opinions, but I have to push back on some of that stuff because there are performance consequences for all of it.

Well, interestingly, I'm not prepared to push back with the data, but I do think that there's a certain base level of a lot of unworthiness or lack of self worth that a lot of people experience. My basic question we can argue about what's, you know, before but inflow, you're not experiencing that inflow. The question of worth is not there or you're feeling a natural sense of okayness and self worth. My question is beyond the flow. The more people have these flow experiences, does that then reinforce in your work their sense of innate goodness, innate confidence, innate self worth? So that becomes less of a question in their life and they're oriented more towards sort of manifesting from that rather than trying to confirm their worthiness in their life.

Two answers to that question. One, blow. Flow is usually taught, it's usually tied to goal directed behavior. Right. And we're sort of goal directed machines as humans. And in flow you accomplish a great deal. Productivity goes up, according to McKinsey, 500% above baseline. And that tracks with our data and what our clients experience and things like that. And so flow itself may not override the belief, but success. Proof of productivity, proof of I am denting the universe. I'm getting through everything on my to do list. I'm hitting my goals and hitting my goal. That coupled with flow becomes this like feedback loop. That's confidence. And interestingly we know. Well, okay, I'm not going to go there. Let me tell you the other thing. I can answer about this. So this is interesting. We, you know what emotional set points are.

Define it for me.

Okay. When we're usually about around between nine and 12, we have emotional set points. This is the low point in our life, the worst we're ever going to feel. This is the high point, the best we're going to feel. Right. And we live generally in between. Right. And nobody knows exactly why they set up. There's nature, nurture arguments. But we do know that there's only a couple ways to move them. On the low end you can actually start to feel worse. It's very hard. But the death of a child and chronic unemployment will do it. Suddenly it'll move the bar move down. The only way we know to move the bar up is repeated access to flow. So that does seem to do something over time to happiness. Well being, I would also guess you were asking a question about confidence. Haven't seen exact data, but I think the combination of the gold directed feedback loop that I'm talking about and the upper bandwidth of human experience expanding, I think the answer is yes. But I don't, you know, I don't have exact data on it because I don't think it was luck.

And so let's talk about accessing flow in order to enhance our performance. We want to perform at our best, we'd like to maybe even achieve peak performance in whatever aspects of our life. And that might lead to successful outcomes, however we define that for ourselves. So what might be some of the best methods or available methods for people to spend more time in flow? And I assume that if you spend more time in various levels of flow, that's going to increase neuroplasticity. It's going to overall get your neural networks reshaped in a direction where you're going to overall have more access to flow, less tendency to move into out of flow and into fear. And so how does that process work and what might be some of the levers and what might be some of the specific tools that people can use to build their capacity in that direction?

There's about a dozen different answers in there. But let me just start simply, which is the first thing to know is that flow states have triggers. These are preconditions that lead to more flow. There are 28 that have been discovered. There are probably way more, but that's what we know about. They come in two varieties, individual triggers that will drive me into flow or you into flow. And then there's a shared collective version of a flow state. If it's two people talking, right, they get lost in the conversation. Hour goes by, that's interpersonal flow. When it's a team, a fourth quarter comeback in football or a band, you know, totally tight in sync or improv comedy, that's group flow or team flow. And then at scale, when it's like everybody's a rock concert, you're all clapping and sink and you merge with the music, that sort of stuff, that's communitas, brute flow at scale. But the triggers are on either side of the equation. But essentially under the hood, they all work the same way. Flow follows focus. It can only show up when all of our attention is in the right here, right now. That's what all the triggers do. They help us drive our attention into the present moment. Neurobiologically, they do it one of three ways. They'll either push dopamine to our system or push norepinephrine into our system or lower cognitive load, you know, cognitive loads, all the crap I'm trying to think about at any one time, if I lower it, what I do is I liberate energy and the brain immediately will repurpose it for paying attention. So that's how that one works. But. And there's some combination, some triggers hit two or three of those effects, but anyways, this is how we drive flow. So the most obvious thing here is to start at the start. Complete concentration as a flow trigger. And obviously, and what that really means in the real world is we must practice. We talked about it earlier, distraction management. So you know, when I sit down to write a book or put together a PowerPoint presentation, I'm turning off my cell phone, turning off email, all of my messages get turned off. I keep one emergency channel of communication open with my CEO, my wife and a couple other my parents and a couple other people. There's everything else is shut down. That's distraction management. Knowing what I'm doing, having a clear goal for the thing I'm doing, so I know what to put my attention to. That's distraction management. That's one way to think about complete concentration. We can take it a step further because you can ask well how long do I concentrate? Or to maximize flow. And here you can't fight your biology, you should work with your biology. And we know we have 90 to 110 minute focus cycles, much in the same way we have 99 and 10 minute REM cycle streaming cycles. Right. We have the wake and alert and a focus cycle as well, but 90 minutes long. This is to say your brain has a preexisting slot for paying attention to about 90 minutes. Now this gets fractured in the modern world and a lot of people don't believe they have this. But you'll find if you start wallowing yourself off from the world, sort of trying to maximize complete concentration, you're going to slip towards that 90 minutes very naturally and easily because we're designed for it. That's a really simple example. Then there's a whole bunch of the so called dopamine triggers. Novelty, complexity, unpredictability, risk. This could be physical risk, this could be social risk. Fear of public speaking is the number one fear in the world. Pattern recognition. Why is reading such a powerful flow state? When we connect ideas together, that little rush of pleasure we get done across the puzzle. Snow could fill in an ass. You get that rush of pleasure, that's dopamine and it's tightening focus and amping up. Pattern recognition and albinus drive further into flow. So there's a bunch of triggers that work that way. Autonomy is a really crucial flow trigger. So little known fact that autonomy is coupled in the brain neurobiologically to attention. If you your belief you like, I don't I want to do this. You can maximize attention if you don't want to do something. If it doesn't align with where you want to go in your life cannot maximize attention. Which is why I always tell people you have to do a task that you're really not into. Like, boss gives you an assignment. Something along those lines, reframe it. Say, okay, 90% of this task is crap. I could care less, but, like, 10% of it, it's going to make me a better speaker communicator, more empathetic, a better salesperson, whatever. It is a thing that aligns with your purpose and your greater, you know, passions. And really, that's the. Because that's the only way you can maximize attention. So there's a bunch more. But I gave you, you know, a bunch of different things to sort of work with. I want to speak into the last thing you said, because it's a. I think it's wrong. You said that regular access to flow is going to diminish fear. I don't think that's true. It diminishes fear when you're in the state, and it makes you more confident over time. But the reason I'm not 100% sure if it's true is the most important flow trigger. What's long been called the golden rule of flow is the challenge skills balance. The idea here is we can maximize focus and attention on the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. Basically, if I were to put that. Describe that emotionally, I'd say it's not exactly dead center between, but it's near the midpoint between boredom. There's not enough stimulation here. Can't pay any attention. And anxiety. Whoa. Too much stimulation and too much attention. In between is what's known as the flow channel. This sweet spot to maximize flow. But it's usually about, like, when the challenge is like, 5% greater than your skills. Now, that doesn't sound like a lot, but here's the question about fear that I want to raise. Once you're 5% greater than your skills. If, especially if you're shy, timid me cord, like doing something that maybe you're not super well versed in, new to the task, that's the point where you're going to be uncomfortable. You're outside your comfort zone. So you got to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. So it's not that you feel less fear. It's that your relationship to fear changes. I always say this one of the. This is one of the commonalities among the world's top performers. And there aren't that Many a couple of them are what they really all start as ordinary people. That's one. Right. They climb this challenge, skills ladder and flow towards extraordinary. That's how progress gets made that way. But every one of these people and myself included will use fear as a compass. So it's not that there's less fear, it's that you learn to work with it. Why would you use fear as a compass? Why would you go in the direction of fear? So the brain is 2% of our body mass, but it uses 25% of our energy at rest and way more when we're doing a task. One of the biggest things the brain can ever do is pay attention. It's very expensive, your focused attention. Right. So anytime you can get attention for free, the big deal from a performance standpoint, you'll have more calories, you'll have more energy. So performers will use. So I'll give you an example. Every time I write a book, there, there's a challenge, you see, the communication of the ideas and maybe even the style of the book. But there's a challenge that I see, which is, oh, if I have to write this book, I have to level up my writing skills and learn how to do this and this. And while those things are really hard and isn't this something scary? That's the challenge I see because it focuses my attention on something that way. So it's yes, you are right, that you do end up sort of overriding fears, but you run right into the next one. Is it like you level up and you just, you're, what's the next challenge? I know it's going to be scary. The fear, the bad feeling inside doesn't go away. What instead happens is your bad feeling goes inside and then you get another feeling, which is the sense of belief of, oh, I've felt this before and I know I can deal with it. I know exactly what to do. And it doesn't mean disaster. It's giving me some focus that so you, the way you communicate with fear, fear becomes something of an ally.

Yeah, I think that's a very important distinction. In many spiritual traditions, the idea of fearlessness is not the absence of fear, but it's a different relationship with fear, as you're pointing out. So I guess what I'm also pointing to is a couple different directions. Like, so what I'm hearing is in terms of goal oriented flow, like to make use of in your work and other.

Flow is always goal. It's always.

Well, I have a question about that in a moment. So eliminate distractions as much as you can. Train yourself in focus and concentration. These things are going to help you be able to get into a state of flow and accomplish what you're trying to accomplish. And then the reason I'm asking these other questions about, you know, beyond flow experiences like are there actual lasting changes in the neural structure of the brain? And if that's the case, also comparing the kind of work oriented flow goal or employee you're talking about experiences like you alluded before in ketamine assisted psychotherapy. I've experienced the integration of ketamine and ifs and retreats in the last couple years. Deep meditative experiences of what are usually considered samadhi, very deep states of unitary consciousness or other types of peak experiences. Many people report. And in my own experience, there are some ways that this fundamentally changes your relationship to death, for example, or to other things to where you really do have a different posture or way of being in relationship to yourself, to life, to death, to what people often have an ongoing abiding fear about.

Yes. I mean, not new information. William James pointed this out in the Varieties of Religious Experience.

Right.

He said, stay what you want about these experiences, but they are psychologically real. We come out the other end radically different people with radically new beliefs. Flow. You know, these are all the north, the happy experiences we talked about. And like I wrote about in Stealing Fire. Right. Grant states, mystical states, flow states, psychedelics, they're all related. They're very, very similar in the brain. Similar things are happening neurobiologically. You can do comparison, contrast studies and you know, we've done really fun studies with like Imperial College in London where we looked at psychedelic states versus flow states. What are they good for? Like, are psychedelic states better for like, they're better than flow. If you want to experience synesthesia, have a mystical experience or have a negative experience, they have the upper hand. If you are looking for creative problem solving or things like that, flow is better. And so you can do these kinds of studies now. But clearly all of them are psychologically real and having a deep impact. And as you pointed out, a lot of them can actively override really deep, like deep beliefs. Right. Like our, you know, our innate fear of death. Yeah.

So another way to talk about this is the idea of states and traits. So when we're in a state of flow, that's a state. So in terms of training myself to be a high performer, if that's one of my goals, what is a process and a pathway of turning flow states into traits is Another way to kind of what I've been asking.

Yes, again, I mean, like we. And we've been answering like repeated reliable experience of flow or any of these, you know, more positive states. You know, this is on a certain level, this is no different than Barbara Fredrickson's wonderful work on the broad and build theory. Right. Where you have positive experiences and they build on each other and they expand and they build on each other and expand and expand. Right. I think of it often in terms of Steven Johnson's work, you know, about these states unlock the adjacent possible. So we have, you know, a larger selection of things to work with. This is interesting. So this is related to an older question you asked and one way I like to think about it. So I talked about George Bonanno's wonderful work on resilience. Resilience is really hard to train. Oddly, one of the only ways you can actually train resilience is through training flow. And the reason is resilience is actually adaptive flexibility. So you hear things like, oh, meditation is really good for training resilience sometimes, but if you have really racing thoughts and you're in distress, meditation is actually going to make them echo louder and make you worse. And so it won't always help flow because it's optimal performance. And a lot of stuff gets optimized. Right. You're adaptively flexible. So in a weird way, abortion of like, overriding beliefs and resilience and things we've been talking a lot about and you've been asking about, we've been trying to probe and poke into. It's the confidence even. It's not even like, oh, the fear won't be there or this won't suck. Those things don't go away. It's the. I've got the adaptive flexibility. No matter what direction the shitstorm comes, I got a shield and a sword. Right. And can fight back is sort of how I'm thinking about it. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. So in one of your books, you've talked about a habit of inferiority that people deal with. You've been referencing also earlier in our conversation, the kind of victim mindset where we have the external locus of control. I mean, this is pretty predominant, I think. And what's the process of people really shifting out of that? I mean, I. My book and kind of what I focus a lot of my work on, my book is called Radical Responsibility. And it's all about not living your life from that state, but, you know, inviting people into that level of ownership, which has nothing to do with obviously it's not about blaming others, but it's not about self blame. It's really ownership because that's where our power so embracing the internal locus of control, embracing autonomy, embracing agency, all these things and seeing the power of choice. How do people make that shift when they've kind of developed habits of victim mindset thinking.

Great question. So that's another the habit of inferiority you're talking about. This is another William James turn. The great William James was something he pointed out and his example, which I think is still irrelevant today, when he was talking about it, he's like, most people don't even know they have a second wind, let alone a third or a fourth or a fifth. Like this is something you've ever run a triathlon or done an endurance. Anything you discover it's not just a second wind. There's a third, there's a fourth. But most people never push themselves far enough up that challenge. Skills, balance ladder, using flow to stretch to discover what they're capable of. And what's interesting here, I always say this about people. Our capabilities, our ceiling is invisible and it's invisible to ourselves. We can never know. And the reason is our capabilities are emergent. They literally are what emerge and flow at this superior level. And we're always surprised. We're always like, whoa, that's I can't believe like what that level up is, right? And so it's this ladder of like superpowers that you suddenly step into. And again, and it's literally an emergent property and we can't. It's invisible before it arises. So that's. I think, I don't know if this is quite the answer to how do we override the living beliefs? Which is one of the things I want to point out that like you have the eliminating beliefs because the system that lets you see what you're actually capable of, it's invisible. You can only go sort of so far at once. You can only go basically the edge of your belief to that banister effect, right? Wherever that is. And you can't, you can't go any farther. You know, I don't said it earlier, and I'll say it again, maybe in a slightly different way, but when people come to train with the flow research collective, for example, what's a goal? What's a win? Right. How do I know? I've done my job. What am I trying to do? I'm going to have to define a couple terms here for this makes sense, but it'll land for everybody. Hopefully I want to make so we have a daily to do list. In flow science, we call that a clear goals list. Clear goals are a flow trigger because they tell your brain what to focus on to do it on. It's a well established, well set up. You build it in a very specific way. But when I can make the execution of a clear goals list. Autotelic. Autotelic is a fancy group word. It describes flow. It means an end in itself. It means the experience is so joyous, so fun, so immersively entertainingly astounding that we want more and more of it. So when I can make your daily to do list, I 10 things on my list and I got in the flow along the way and I'm so fired up to do it again tomorrow and do it again tomorrow. What starts to happen is you accomplish 10 things every day again and again and again. And it doesn't really matter how you feel. Like oftentimes I say with all artists learn this. I think everybody learns this. Like the great thing about flow is I can like I'll wake up. It's not always great up here. Sometimes I wake up and the voice in my head is gnarly and saying horrible things. And more often than not, in all honesty, but I get into flow in my morning writing session. It shuts that voice up. It destroys those limiting beliefs and I can go out and have a great day. And that's more common than not in my life. And I think in a lot of people's lives are, you know, we talked, we're our harshest critic and how we talk to ourselves is serious. I also loved what you had to say. I think we have to take responsibility for our own lives. I think one of the like areas, just most powerful realizations is our life is going to be nothing more or less than what we make of it. And I also, I've said this a lot is and I think this is related to the belief question. You said we're talking about how to overcome living beliefs. I've talked a lot about flow and other things. I want to go in a couple of directions. This is something I'd like to point out and I think it's certain spiritual traditions talk about this in others. It's sort of like they don't like it's glossed over. But I believe that taking that the act of getting the life we want, rising into our potential is a violent act. We are taking it in a sense from the universe. I don't mean we have to be mean or harsh or Any unkind or any of those things. But there's a. There's an aggression to it that's required and it's the same aggression that's required to override those limiting beliefs. I don't know if that's been your experience.

No, absolutely. So as our audience is listening to this and you know, even sometimes there's all kinds of different audiences. We have a pretty broad audience and many are interested in mindfulness and meditation. We have a whole lot of folks interested in psychological assistance, psychotherapy. We have a lot of people interested in resilience, a lot of people interested in just optimizing their lives. Some. For some, the idea of even the focus on performance and success brings up, you know, notions of achievement that have to do with comparing and valuation and all this kind of stuff. And for me, I think that's a kind of a subtle or maybe not so subtle form of a victim mindset and not wanting to step into one's life, you know, just out of conditioned fears around self shaming and so forth. And so if someone, I think to even embrace, at whatever level in life to just embrace the idea of personal mastery or becoming a high performer or just wanting to really optimize any area of your life, like just any of my life, I'm going to really, you know, try to be, you know, the best parent I can absolutely be, or the best spouse or I'm going to really try to master something in this area of my life. It takes a certain act of courage. But then, you know, there's a lot of payoffs for that. We've been kind of talking how once you step in, once you start taking those acts of courage, there's all kinds of reinforcing benefits that can support you and guide you on your path. And maybe there's even some internal innate dynamics of our being that we're tapping into that can carry us forward. But people have to make that first step. So what do you suggest in terms of how people can begin to tap into this notion of optimizing performance of flow?

That's a really great question. Thanks for asking it. The question of where to start now, two answers depending on who I'm talking to. So one, if you're burned out, right? If you're starting subpar to get to normal, you need seven, eight. Flow is a high energy state, right? So you need seven, eight hours of sleep a night to regularly access it. You need hydration, drink lots of water. You need high quality nutrition for your energy and you need to regularly manage your nervous System. Because we talked about that challenge skills, balance, too much anxiety. And we live in this world. We're all hyper anxious. You get blocked from flow. So I always tell people, I literally, when I work with people, I got a checklist. You got five minutes. Give me a daily gratitude practice because it will lower anxiety. You've got six minutes. Read a novel, read fiction. Actually, it lowers stress levels a little more than a gratitude practice. You got 7 to 11 mindfulness, right? 7 to 15, breathwork, mindfulness. You got 15 to 20. Go for a walk in nature. You've got 20 to 40. It's exercise. You're super stressed. Do two of those things, right? Epsom, salt, bass, restorative, yoga, infrared, sauna, get a massage. Like, the list is sort of endless. But, like, we gotta manicure our nervous systems, right? The front end of this stuff in terms of making this stuff reliable and repeatable and, you know, getting in our lives and start there, right? And then do what I'm about to tell everybody else to do. If you're fired up, you motivated, I always say, like, if you have the time, we have what are known as what is called primary flow experiences. This is literally the thing that you've done most of your life that drops you into flow. For me, I can tell you it's skiing for my wife, attack dogs in the backcountry, or my best friend is playing the guitar, you know, for my other best friend, it's coding, computers, architecture, salsa dancing, ballroom dancing, horseback riding, yes. Macrame, gardening, it doesn't really matter. And if you don't know what your primary flow activity is, think about your favorite memories that are not pegged at dates. And don't even, like, ask yourself what you were doing, but look for the qualities. Was I indoors? Was I outdoors? Was I alone? Was I with a group? Was there motion about? Was it an embodied practice? Was it a cognitive? Ask yourself those questions, look for commonalities, and find an activity like that. It's very close to your primary flow activity without one. And just spend, if you can, four hours a week, an afternoon a week doing that. Because our primary flow activities are sort of, from a nature nurture perspective, lined up with the flow triggers we're usually most susceptible to, and that often work best for us. So flow, as you pointed out earlier, you talked sort of around this, didn't come out and say it, but you brought the point up, like four different ways. The more flow you get, the more flow you get. It's like any skills like meditation, right? You want to get good at meditating and producing that trans state. Meditate a lot. You're training your brain to focus in a very particular way. Low we talked about right at the front of our discussion, slightly different than meditation. We know that Michael Posner, the dean of intention science in the 70s or 80s, said hey, it's very clear that a regular meditation practice is going to make you more flow prone because they're focusing skills and they're related. There's same thing with more flow you get, the more flow you get. So I get a lot of flow on Saturday skiing, right? I got a better chance of getting into flow at work on Monday and Tuesday. That's the first part. The second part is when we move into flow, there's a global release of nitric oxide. It pushes stress hormones out of our system so the feel good neurochemicals can take their place. And it resets that nervous system so it calms us down, which also helps us get into flow. And finally the heightened creativity and possibly the heightened productivity and the heightened mood. This is work that came out of Harvard. Triest modelists found that it will outlast the flow state by a day, maybe two. So like you get this afterglow effect that you know. And I think that's the neuroplastic window we were talking about. I think that afterglow correlates with that neuroplastic window when you can kind of rewire some of those limiting beliefs. So if you're burned out, start by taking care of yourself. Sleep, manicure, your nervous system. If you can't get there, you know, take vacation. If that doesn't work, psychedelic therapy, you know what I mean? Like there's a list depending on how far where you're starting from. And then double down on your primary flow activity. If you're starting from. I'm all fired up. Start doubling down on your primary flow activity. If you want to take it one step further, if you can control your schedule or if you. This is how, when I work with companies, this is one of the things that we do to create high flow organizations. Not even companies, just organizations. Because we've done this with like the San Francisco Police Department and the Air Force and like a lot of other things where we all have activities that will produce microflow. I know when I write or make a PowerPoint presentation or give a speech, for example, guaranteed microflow for me, I know that when I have to do accounting or talk to my lawyers or like do you know, hardcore COO tax ask, it's anti flow for me, I'm now not inflow. So what we try to do is outsource things that are anti flow and maximize opportunities for micro flow. How do you increase employee retention? Right. Mute problem in the workforce today. For example, amplify opportunities for microflow in employees. Don't you can't hire for flow, but you can certainly assign tasks in groups and teams based on what do you get absorbed in. And we actually will take it one further. We have found that if you have an employee who's excellent at something but it doesn't produce microflow for them versus somebody who's less excellent but it produces microflow, you are better off as an organization training up the less skilled person because this activity is self fulfilling and it's a feedback loop. The other person is just going to get burned out and they're going to leave your organization. So long answer very practical. Hope it was helpful.

No, absolutely. And so you know, begin with taking good care of ourselves, you know, good self care and all the different ways you talked about and then outsourcing those things that take us out of flow as much as we can, you know, setting ourselves up for success to enhance these microflow experiences. That all makes tremendous sense.

And I think I have to say this by the way because this is often people, they want sexy whiz bang, you know how the world is. They want a neat technology or a pill or whatever. And like I always say the stuff with flow is like it's not very sexy. Nothing I teach from a practical level is going to win you popularity contest. Is like the coolest thing in the world. It's just very sort of fundamental, practical and it works incredibly usually works better than those other sexier things.

So within all that maybe we'll wrap up our conversation here. What is not to make these a thing like everything you just talked about I think is really in some ways the pathway and the on ramp for all of us. Is there an importance to cultivating peak experiences of flow, macro flow experiences and also maybe just as a rabbit hole second part to that question for me you talked about some works have been done comparing flow states with psychedelic states and there being some differences. So in some ways are they really different? Are these two different versions of flow? And that could also talk about other profound states.

Yes. Okay, so that's really cool questions. Let me take the second one first. The difference and similarities. So we have been doing a lot of work and I've got a. We've got a paper coming out in a couple of weeks in the Neuros Consciousness the journal of the neuroscience of consciousness on the relationship between flow and intuition. And this is, it's not quite psychedelics but like you'll like how we phrased it. There's this belief that flow is intuition in action and intuition is cognition and flow. So very related now are psychedelic experiences similar to flow experiences? I think you can have flow experiences inside of psychedelic experiences. 1 like I think that it's certain psychedelics more than others but there are differences. Most of the major psychedelics are heavy serotonin agonist. Serotonin shows up in flow but it's at the tail end of a flow state. After a flow state that calm and rest and relaxed niece in the world that's serotonin. But serotonin and dopamine work in opposition to one another. Like a lot of neurochemicals, you know this, they work in opposition. So as serotonin goes up, dopamine goes down and vice versa. So a lot of psychedelics are very serotonin heavy. The other neurochemicals that show up in psychedelic experiences they all map, they're all the same neurochemicals. But serotonin is turned really up in psychedelic experiences. And it seems like dopamine and endorphins are cranked and anandamine are cranked really up in a flow experience. Answer the question about like I could answer it at network level. Like we know you're in flow when your goal directed network and your executive attention network are active and you'd swatch to the default mode network are turned off. Right. So do those conditions exist in some side of some psychedelic states? Probably like there are moments you can be on LSD where you're having a goal directed thing interlude and but there are moments where like you're you know in 17 different parts of the universe at once that there's nothing goal directed going on. I would say that's very unflowing.

Right.

Not a bad experience but not a flow experience. Just like. But if you were going from the psychological definition of flow, these six characteristics make up the state. You might say they're prevalent in both. I'm. I look at things neurobiologically and I see differences. Are they, you know, are they in type or in PI? I don't know. It's a great phenomenal question and like future research needed here for sure.

Absolutely. So one last reflection, I'm really trying if we're talking about really we're talking here about rewiring your beliefs. So really building on the possibilities of optimizing our brain, optimizing our neural networks to optimize our lives. So Dan Siegel talks about kind of an optimized brain, that the neural networks of the brain are becoming more complex to solve more complex problems, but they're communicating very efficiently with each other. So it's becoming differentiated but well integrated. And a differentiated, well integrated brain. Brain is a brain that's in flow between either rigidity and chaos. There's this river that he calls flow of an optimal brain experience. Robin Carhart Harrison his theories in trying to explain what's going on with psychedelics and psychiatric assisted therapy as his entropic brain theory, where he posits a kind of Goldilocks zone that's somewhere between rigidity and chaos. And so is this the brain in flow? Maybe one last piece of that. John Barbecki talks about flow in terms of this concentrated. You know that one of the things the brain's doing is constantly making meaning from data, making new connections within data. So there's this kind of rapid fire connecting and insights. We're connecting things in new ways. And this is happening kind of rapid fire and in a concentrated way. And thus we're experiencing this kind of elevated state of flow. So it all seems to be with like somehow the brain is in this optimal space would be.

Yeah, you're actually all those phenomena are roughly the same phenomena. Right. If I were to put it in layman's terms, when we're in flow, we're taking in more information per second. We're processing it more completely and more quickly. To put it in terms of. We worked with Robin and his lab folks in his lab and he's now moved his lab to Adam Gazali's lab, who's on our board. And I've worked with him too. He talks about. Well, we know, we've worked on. A lot of people worked on psychedelic states in flow states. Don't know if this is true. This is probably not true in all meditative states. And not all meditative states are flowy. And the difference is actually dopamine. A lot of meditative states don't produce any dopamine. If you're doing a kabbalistic visualization, six sided die meditation or whatever, you're transmogrifying letters and numbers or you're doing some of the Tibetan Buddhists, especially the white lineage stuff where there's some certain things they do in Zen Buddhism that does this too. It will produce dopamine and thus can produce flow. So meditation doesn't always produce flow, but when it does that. It does. That was tangentially related to what I was saying. But we talk about the edge of criticality low in psychedelic states. The brain is best when it's poised on the edge of criticality. Chaos is the next step over. It's right at the edge of chaos, but it's not. It means there are. It means the patterns are repeating but they're not locking in. Right. They're oscillating and they're present, but you're not locking in on one state. That's the anti criticality. It's maximum flexibility. So we know that sort of like, to answer your question, resilience and all these, it's adaptive flexibility. And the edge of criticality is the brain at like maximum adaptive flexibility. Brain inflow on the edge of criticality is like, that's your maximum maximum. Or you know, I'm saying this authoritatively, as we've discovered so far. Right?

Well, extraordinary, I mean, fascinating and illuminating and just overall, I think inspiring and encouraging and empowering that we, you know, this human journey is quite so much we don't know, but we know a lot more. But the possibilities seem to be pretty limitless. And having the courage to step into, you know, taking good care of ourselves but also bringing ourselves to the edge of our performance can really produce an extraordinary life and a meaningful life in so many ways.

Agree completely. That's definitely, you know, our standard flow training was just 70 to 80% increase in flow. It's reliable, it's repeatable, it's trainable. So. And this is what's in all of us. So you gotta ask yourself, when you think about these questions, what am I capable of? Well, what would I do if I could be like 500 more productive or, you know, 300% more creative or cut learning times? Now, this is literally what, you know, the size of flow makes available to each and every one of us. But I think to your point, what we do with that information, it's entirely up to you, you know.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, we all have different goals in life. And I love that you actually said we all experience a lot flow a lot more than maybe we think we do. And, you know, one of the questions sometimes you hear people talk about or try to help people identify what their superpower is. And our superpower could be anything. It could be like doing the laundry, it could be cutting the grass. We all have things that we're really good at that we feel really confident about, we enjoy doing. And they're going to take us into some kind of flow, and that's really accessible to all of us lately. Okay, wonderful. Well, thank you, Stephen Kotler, and just really appreciate you giving us, your audience, your time today and sharing all your insight and ongoing research with us.

Thank you, Fleet. It was my pleasure.

Be well.

Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present, and stay true to you. Take care.

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