230: Creating Flow States (BookRx)

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello friends. Today we are talking about what quite likely could become a multi part ongoing series on finding a flow state.

Somebody recently asked me how can you more easily get yourself into a state of flow? And my friend Josh Allen Dykstra at Helios, he even centers his entire work around the question how can we not just look back and see when were we in a flow state at work, but how do we unlock that even more in the future? How do we predict it? Even more so, how can we create it? What are the ingredients?

It is impossible to talk about flow and finding a flow state without invoking the one and only Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the book V book called Flow the Psychology of Optimal Experience. The first edition of this book came out in 1990, so 30 years ago now, and it is this seminal work on flow and finding a flow state. That's why this is going to be a multi part series because Cszentmi has so much to say on the subject and it is absolutely fascinating. This is a book that I've returned to many times over the years and I talk about when I give Pivot keynotes. I actually talk about Csikszentmihalyi and the access of skills and abilities which we'll talk about and how that can help you more accurately predict and create a flow state, and also to unpack why or when you find yourself in a state of boredom as it relates to your work, or even anxiety.

It's also interesting to talk about Csikszentmihalyi's work on FLOAT during this time because in a way he talks about it as organizing the chaos of consciousness or certainly that we find flow states. It's this. He describes it as an almost ecstatic bliss, an out of body experience. And this came from countless interviews that he conducted with others to find out what is a flow state. So it's this time is flying. You don't even realize time is suspended and you're so engaged, you're so locked in. It's at that exact sweet spot of your abilities and the level of challenge that it's that ecstatic state. Given the chaos of the outer world, Csikszentmihalyi writes in the introduction as he ties this flow state conversation of optimal experience to happiness. He says, we have all experienced times when instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions. Masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark memory for what life should be like.

Contrary to what we usually believe, he says, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times, although such experiences can also be enjoyable if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.

Consider the times that we're all living through of heightened uncertainty and what can feel like heightened chaos. At least the chaos of not knowing what's next and not really being able to feel a solid footing beneath us as we might in quote, normal times. In a way, we are primed if we can pull ourselves out of our anxiety, if we can pull ourselves out of worry or apathy and boredom. On the other hand, we are primed to create a flow state, and that is something that, he says, we are actively involved in creating. We can make that happen. Actually.

Csikszentmiai writes, the optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy or attention is invested in realistic goals and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order and awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives. A person who has achieved control over psychic energy and has invested it in consciously chosen goals cannot help but grow into a more complex being. By stretching skills, by reaching toward higher challenges, such a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.

Let's unpack that for a minute. This is about not only an optimal state of inner experience, but ordering our own consciousness. It is about growing into a more complex being and becoming increasingly extraordinary.

The axis that Csikszentmi high presents involves abilities on the X axis and challenges on the Y axis. We find a flow state at the sweet spot, that intersection of having just enough skill and just enough challenge. If the level of challenge is too low and our skills are too high, we'll find ourselves feeling apathetic or bored. At best, it's a state of relaxation, kind of the comfort zone, confident, content. On the other hand, if the level of challenge is too high and our level of skill to meet that challenge is too low, that's where we tip into worry and anxiety. In a best case scenario, we're what he calls aroused. We're alert and focused. Consider when the pandemic first began to hit wherever you live and everything started changing. Maybe your work shifted dramatically, or you were worried for your safety or the safety of others. Well, the. The amount of challenge is enormously high. And if you're not somebody who has had a lifelong practice of meditation and adapting and pivoting and getting used to uncertainty, you might have been in that over aroused state of anxiety and worry. Because your skill to handle a pandemic, if you've never lived through a pandemic before, is not yet there. Over time, part of what helps create at least a semblance of a new normal is that our skills grow. We learn how to physically distance, we learn how to wash our hands, we learn how to make and wear masks. These things aren't permanent, but we feel that our skills are growing. And those are just the practical skills. The skill also increases of the skill of sitting with uncertainty, of being with uncertainty, the skill of pulling your mind back from ruminating and worrying too much, or worrying about things you can't control, or future tripping and worrying about things that haven't happened yet. That is a skill. You might also be developing job related skills. For many of you, you pivoted to working from home and you're learning all the working from home adaptations and skills. Maybe this involved your role shifting and learning new skills, technical skills that help in your work. So the relationship to the challenge of this moment, which was heightened for all of us, we find a sense of flow and possibility and even potential for that optimal state as we grow our skills.

Anytime in your work, when you feel that you're hitting what I would call a pivot point or a plateau, it's likely because you've outgrown your current set of projects or the nature of the work that you do, whether you're self employed or you work for someone else. Part of that boredom and apathy is that your skills have grown too high for the level of challenge that you have. Again, that's on the job. We're looking as a society, as a global collective, at a level of challenge that is far greater together than we've ever had to confront. But you can also zoom in on the work you're doing. Is the work that you're doing boring to you? And if so, how can you increase the level of challenge? Or do you feel happy? You know, you don't have to leave your comfort zone. I get that question a lot in talks, at least more than once of what? If you like your comfort zone, do you have to leave? Chances are we all get pivoted soon enough by some change in the market, the economy, the organization, our clients. So I think if you're happy in your comfort zone, no, you don't necessarily have to reach and try to find a flow state. And it's very difficult to be in a flow state all the time. What Csikszentmihalyi describes is a flow channel. So as we move through skill and challenge, skill and challenge, there's a flow channel that's going in this graph, if you can picture it, kind of up and to the right. So whenever you're feeling bored or apathetic, you can ask, how can I increase the challenge? If ever you're feeling anxious and worried, you can ask, how can I increase my skills? What skills would be most helpful for me to develop in this moment?

When it comes to flow activities, Csikszentmihalyi says that every flow activity, whether it involved competition, chance, or any other dimension of experience, had this in common. It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance and led to previously undreamed of states of consciousness. Again, he writes, in short, it transformed the self by making it more complex.

In a chapter on enjoyment and the Quality of Life, Csikszentmihalyi writes that the key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself, that even if we initially undertake that activity for other reasons, it becomes intrinsically rewarding over time. He calls this an autotelic experience, which derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos, meaning goal. So he writes, it refers to a self contained activity, one that is not done with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward. Playing the stock market in order to make money is not an autotelic experience, but playing it in order to prove one's skill at foretelling future trends is even though the outcome in terms of dollars and cents is exactly the same.

He says most things we do are neither purely autotelic nor purely exotelic, which is what he's calling activities done for external reasons only, but are a combination of the two. One thing that gets in the way for a lot of creatives or people undertaking new projects or even pilots while pivoting is overly worrying about the results. I was just reading a profile about Steve Carell and in it they said, and he even said that it took 10 years after the Office went off the air for people to fully embrace it. And he said, quote I'm telling you, nobody cared about it. When it was on the air, it had a core following of several hundred people. Maybe he's under exaggerating a little bit. The question is what would you create for the intrinsic reward of creating it itself, for the learning involved, no matter the outcome? Imagine that for something you were going to undertake, it would not hit popular success until 10 years later, if at all. Would you still create it? Could you create something with faith that it would find its right place in the universe no matter how large or small the audience, when it was the right time? What might that look like? In other words, how can you and your mind get out of the way when it comes to impediments to flow? I found this very surprising when I was revisiting the work for this episode. Two major impediments to flow are being a self conscious person or a self centered one. Because Csikszentmihalyi writes, neither is in enough control of psychic energy to enter easily into a flow experience. Both lack the attentional fluidity needed to relate to activities for their own sake. Too much psychic energy is wrapped up in the self, and free attention is rigidly guided by its needs. Under those conditions, it is difficult to become interested in intrinsic goals, to lose oneself in an activity that offers no rewards outside the interaction itself.

I have often said that for me, one of the biggest examples of an intrinsically rewarding activity in my business is this podcast. Why? Because thinking about an episode, recording it if it's a solo one, is intrinsically rewarding. It has me thinking and synthesizing information and creating something even when I have no clue how it's going to land. But creating it with you, the listener in mind and creating it with the intention to bring something new into the world. The conversations that I have with guests are intrinsically rewarding because I'm learning something. If they've written a book, let's say I'm learning from their book. I'm learning how to be more present, how to ask powerful questions, how to dance in the moment, and I'm building a relationship with that person, even if nobody ever listens to that episode. So in both cases, a solo show and an interview show, there's magic happening. There's something intrinsically rewarding that I find myself, almost always, with rare exception, in a flow state. More often than not. Even editing the show for me is somehow weirdly intrinsically rewarding in the same way that tidying the house is. Do I really look forward to doing the dishes? No. But there's something tactile and satisfying about editing, of removing clutter and tightening something up and then creating a finished product. So do I enjoy tidying? No. But I love the way the house looks when it's clean and organized and the light can filter beautifully throughout the walls and halls. Back to Csikszentmihalyi on this topic. He says attentional disorders and stimulus over inclusion prevent flow because psychic energy is too fluid and errat excessive self consciousness and self centeredness prevent it for the opposite reason. Attention is too rigid and tight. Neither extreme allows a person to control attention. Those who operate at these extremes cannot enjoy themselves, have a difficult time learning, and forfeit opportunities for the growth of this self. Paradoxically, a self centered self cannot become more complex because all the psychic energy at its disposal is invested in fulfilling its current goals instead of learning about new ones. The impediments to flow considered thus far are located within the individual himself. Later in the book, he gets into social and cultural and societal political factors that could impede flow. Certainly external circumstances can impede flow. Let's say people who are trying to find asylum in the US and they're put in what are essentially camps. Of course, that is an incredibly challenging situation. When he interviewed people who were in solitary confinement during World War II, he describes, and he used that as an example of people who even survived by finding ways to turn the bleak objective conditions into subjectively controllable experience. They followed the blueprint of flow activities, Csikszentmihalyi writes. First they paid close attention to the most minute details of their environment, discovering in it hidden opportunities for action that matched what little they were capable of doing given the circumstances. Then they set goals appropriate to their precarious situation and closely monitored progress through the feedback they received. Whenever they reached their goal, they upped the ante, setting increasingly complex challenges for themselves.

In a way, gamification as a survival tactic. Although it would be futile for us to control too much of our environment and too much of our situation, wherever you find yourself now, the question is, especially when it comes to your work, how can you gamify it? In a sense, to create goals, to create intrinsically rewarding activities, that the goal itself is the activity, not the results. For me, when I hear the word goal, sometimes I feel allergic to it, because sometimes I associate goals with fixed numbers where it immediately sets a bar of expectation. That expectation, as, as it goes, are resentments and waiting. So let's call that a big G goal, you know, X number of podcast listeners. But a small G goal is the intrinsically rewarding challenge. For me, it's shifting from weekly to daily episodes that creates a new relationship with the podcast. It creates a new relationship with production, creates a new relationship with ideas, creates a new relationship with thinker's block. Not knowing what to talk about creates a new relationship with you, the listener, because I'm going to be around more. So what does that mean? What does that mean in terms of how frequently you listen to what topics I might discuss? So much shifts that beyond the numbers themselves, the little G goal of this daily podcast creates a challenge that often initiates a flow state. Much more so than I was experiencing, or at least turned up the volume or the frequency of the flow state for me as it relates to this project. But I encourage you to apply that to whatever it is you're working on, that even when you find yourself in circumstances, the external circumstances you can't control, or extrinsic rewards that are not within your control, how can you turn that inward? How can you look at how you are growing more complex as a self? How can you get out of the way? Look at those two inhibitors, both self centeredness and self consciousness, and figure out which one do you lean more toward? Are you making your projects, your work, all about you, or are you worried you're not good enough? All about you is that self centeredness. Whereas self consciousness, let's say if it's imposter syndrome, is also going to be paralyzing because you're not going to take action. You are in the way. Get out of the way. I've often said for people who are working on a book or a big idea, I borrow a phrase from Tosha Silver, who wrote a book called it's not your money. She would also say it's not your book, it's not your podcast, it's not your project. If you can get out of the way and tune into your intuition at the same time, you can create. You can be a channel for the creative energy and ideas that want to come through you and can only come through you. I guess this ended up being an unpacking of Csikszentmihalyi's book on flow. It's just a start to the conversation. I would love to hear what follow up questions you have@pivotmethod.com ask and and I do plan to do at least one more episode on this, if not two, because there are some very interesting sections of the book that come later on once we get into deeper conversation around this on the flow of thought Work as flow. There's even a chapter on cheating chaos and one on enjoying solitude and other people. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I look forward to continuing our conversation on Flow. May you all find some beautiful, ecstatic out of body flow states this week in whatever it is that you're doing. Thanks for listening everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

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Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.