PNTV: Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (#009)

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This is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes TV. We're already on episode number 10, which I'm quite excited about. Today we're going to do a great book. What is it? I was going to say Learned Optimism. That was yesterday. Today is Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. As always, book Philosopher's notes. We've got six pages of PDFs. I've got about a dozen big ideas in this note. I'm only going to cover a few of them right now. And I actually just mind mapped this one as well. You probably can't see that, but I'll put a link to how I mind map. I just blogged it yesterday and I can show you how I capture my ideas and thoughts and to prepare for things like this as well as just writing notes and all that good stuff. But let's get to work. So Flow, awesome book by another great author, great teacher, positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He is one of the godfathers of the positive psychology movement. He and Martin Seligman really were the leaders in kicking this whole thing off. And this book is extraordinary. So you might have heard of the state of flow or being in flow, that kind of thing. Well, he talks about it scientifically. The subtitle to the book is the Psychology of Optimal Experience. Right. So he talks about the science of how we experience life in the most optimal state, which he calls flow, and how we can get in there often, all that kind of stuff. So we're going to talk about what that is today and some of the ways we can get into that state more often. First, he starts the book talking about the importance of being able to shape what he calls the contents of our consciousness and how it's essential that we have the ability to consciously shape the contents of our consciousness. Really cool idea. The simple way to say that is can we determine and choose what we're focusing on or is our mind a lot of control and it's pulled this way and pulled that way. You're never going to be in flow unless we can put our mind in one point and be in that moment and be in flow. So he talks about how important that is and also how important it is to practice cultivating the ability to do that. And again, we've talked about this again and again and again. This is the whole learned optimism idea, this idea that we need to be able to shape our Minds. But I want to stress here that it takes practice. He says this to develop this trait. I'll go back and read it a little bit earlier. He says a person can make himself happy or miserable regardless of what is actually happening outside just by changing the contents of consciousness. Then I have a little bit more here in the note, but I'll go to the end. He says to develop this trait, one must find ways to order consciousness so as to be in control of feelings and thoughts. It is best not to expect shortcuts will do the trick. Meaning we got to do the work. Which leads us to the next big idea I want to talk about. I skipped another really good big idea here. I'm going to leave for the note. But he has something that he describes as knowing and doing. He says it is not enough to know how to do it. One must do it consistently in the same way as athletes or musicians must keep practicing what they know in theory. So we're going to talk about this tomorrow as well. We're going to do another great book, the Six Pillars of Self Esteem, which is all about practicing certain things to build our self esteem by Nathaniel Brandon. In the note, I also talk about Reverend Michael Beckwith. You might know him from the secret. I mentioned him before. He wrote a great book called Spiritual Liberation. He has a great church called Agape out here in Los Angeles. Check it out if you're ever here. And he says that there are two things to think about. Knowing something, theory. Beckwith says theory is rudimentary spiritual practice. The actual practice of what we know to be true. That's advanced spiritual practice. So theory is rudimentary, practice is advanced. But too often we get caught up in the whole intellectual understanding of something. And it's really important that we actually do what we know. And so in these notes I come back to this idea again and again and again and again. And in this note I ask, what's one thing that you know your highest self would be doing in this moment, in this day, in this lifetime? What's the one thing that you just know you could be doing to live a more extraordinary life? And is now a good time to start doing that? So what's the number one thing that if you started doing, it would have the most positive benefit impact in your life? Think about that and move from knowing to doing. We want to have knowing and doing, not just knowing. And the irony is usually when we're just knowing and we're not doing, we criticize people who aren't doing the thing that we Want to be doing. Very interesting thing. We'll talk about shadow projection more when we get to dark side of the light chasers sometime in the future. I don't know when yet, but anyway. So that's all kind of the context and some things to think about as we shape our consciousness. But now let's get into the whole idea of flow and what the flow state looks like. So to do this, let's imagine that we have in the note. Actually, I don't describe it, I don't draw it out in the note. But imagine this. You have, you know, an x axis and a Y axis. Is that right? Whatever. We've got axes, right? And one has your skill set on it and one has challenges. So your skills and your challenges. Now, if your skills are really high and the challenge is really low, so there's a dot right here, you're going to be bored. Your skills are greater than the challenge. Now, if the challenge is bigger than your skills, let's say there's a dot out here, right? Then you're going to be overwhelmed, you're going to be stressed. The challenge is too great for your lower skills. What we want is flow. Flow is in between. Flow is where your skills match the challenge, right? So. So really big idea that we've come back to already a couple times in these notes, and we're going to come back to again and again and again. Remember when we talked about the idea of a comfort zone versus a stretch zone versus a panic zone? Well, it's kind of like the same thing here, where we have an overwhelmed state. We get to when our skills are too low and the challenge is too high, that's a panic zone, right? But if we're just in our comfort zone where our skills are really high and the challenge is low, we're going to be bored. So we're either going to be bored or overwhelmed or in flow. So if you're bored, consider the fact that your challenges aren't high enough and think about how you can challenge yourself more in whatever you're doing. If you're doing something mundane and you're bored, see how flawlessly you can do it, right? Or see how quickly you can do it, or see how flawlessly you can do it quickly. There are always ways to match our skills and the challenge so that we're in flow. And. And people who are happy do this. They focus their mind into a state where they experience this flow often. He tells some great stories about people on an assembly line. One guy is super bored, right? And Complains about life and complains about his job. And the other guy right next to him, same exact job, has made it a challenge to see how great he can do his work and if he can exceed the quota and all these different things. And he deliberately creates a flow experience for himself. It's really cool stuff. Now, if you're overwhelmed, it's because the challenge is greater than your current skills. No big deal. Just recognize that and see what you can do to either build your skills or maybe reduce the challenge a little bit. For now, maybe you're in your panic zone because you're stretching too far. So that's the idea of flow very quickly, obviously. Hopefully you got something out of that. And I go into it in more detail in the note, so you can check that out more. He's also got a great idea here on cultures building flow. And he tells a story of this one Indian tribe. What are they called? Called the Shuswap, who would actually. They had lived in this amazing area that was rich in natural resources. And what they would do is, every 25 or 30 years, they'd actually pick up the entire community and move them because they were too easily satisfying their needs. And this was a challenge that would put them into a flow state. Extraordinary example. And he tells the story beautifully. What else? How about another quote? He says, we need to know how to control consciousness, a skill that most people have not learned to cultivate. Again, it's a skill we've got to practice, just like we were a musician or an athlete or something along those lines. So we've got a whole other big idea here about flow that you find in work versus watching TV in leisure time. Just so you know, TV is correlated to mild depression. Why? Because you're super bored and you're not happy when you're that bored. So we want to find ways to challenge ourselves in our leisure time. Really cool idea. Then the final big idea here is he has a quote. He says, when a young man asked Carlisle how he should go about reforming the world, Carlisle answered, reform yourself. That way there will be one less rascal in the world. I love that we talk about changing the world, but if we want to do that, it all comes back to us being the change. So what's the change you can make? What was the number one thing you can start doing in your life today to get yourself more rocking? Go ahead and do that. Have fun with it and hope you enjoyed.

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