Remembering Csikszentmihalyi 3: Csikszentmihalyi‘s Grad Students On The Life, Legacy & Impact Of The Founder of Flow Research | Flow Research Collective Radio

I learned from him the importance of rigorous scientific study. He made very clear early on that if positive psychology was going to be successful as a scientific endeavor, as a subfield in psychology, that we really had to commit to this scientific rigor to do really quality research and to disseminate it in such a way that it it was credible and maintained that, that sense of rigor.

Hey there, if you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline. Like, it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

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Our mission My mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Rhian Dorriss here with Flow Research Collective Radio, and this is the third and final episode in our three-part series honoring the work and life of the godfather of flow science and research, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The first episode was with Stephen Kotler. The second episode was with Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly's son, and I definitely recommend checking those out if you haven't. And this episode, which is continuing the theme of honoring the incredible legacy of Csikszentmihalyi, is with two of Mihalyi's grad students and Scott Barry Kaufman, who is an indirect colleague of Csikszentmihalyi through being a leader in the positive psychology field that Csikszentmihalyi founded. Along with Martin Seligman. Now, the two grad students of Csikszentmihalyi that we had the pleasure of interviewing were Barbara Schneider and Christine Duranzo. Now, Barbara, who's a PhD and researcher in her own right, co-authored a book called Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work with Csikszentmihalyi. And we talked about that book in detail. We talked about how to parent in a high-flow manner and how to set expectations of the future for children in order to have them evolve effectively into adulthood and how to thrive. We also talked about her relationship with Csikszentmihalyi and how he impacted her life and her work. Now, Christine Duranzo co-authored a book on running with Csikszentmihalyi called Running Flow: Mental Immersion Techniques for Better Running. And Christine gave us a breakdown of the key message from that book and again, some really amazing personal anecdotes from her experience working with Csikszentmihalyi. And then finally, we interviewed Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, who many of you know very well at this point. He is the founder and director of the Center for the Science of Human Potential, an honorary principal fellow at the University of Melbourne Center for Wellbeing Science, a cognitive scientist, a humanistic psychologist, the author-editor of 9 books, including his recent one, Transcendence. End, which I know many of you have read. And he's the host of the number one psychology podcast in the world, which is called The Psychology Podcast. He's got a PhD in cognitive psychology from Yale University and many other incredible things that he has done. As again, I'm sure you're all aware of because we've got lots of Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman fans here. And I had the pleasure of speaking with Scott about his thoughts on Csikszentmihalyi's research on creativity, on flow, and his impact in the field of positive psychology. Psychology in general. While Scott didn't work directly with Csikszentmihalyi, he worked very closely within the field of positive psychology, which again Csikszentmihalyi co-founded. And so they have a collegial relationship due to that. So I really hope you enjoy this episode. It's going to be 3 parts, firstly with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, then with Barbara, then with Christine, and all related to Csikszentmihalyi's work and the personal impact Csikszentmihalyi had on these 3 great individuals. Enjoy the episode and until next time, all the best. Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. It's been too long. It's great to have you here again.

My man, it's so great to be here. Yeah, yeah. I can't wait to talk to you today.

Same as, same as. So a quote from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his book Creativity that I wanted to start off with and get your take on. Goes as follows. Mihaly said, "It's actually hard for creative people to know themselves because the creative self is more complex than the non-creative self. The things that stand out the most are the paradoxes of the creative self. Imaginative people have messier minds." And I know that this is an area of immense expertise for you as well. And you've done incredible work on the topic of creativity over the decades. So I'd love to hear what you think of that quote and then what impact Csikszentmihalyi's thinking on creativity had on you and all of the work you've done over the last few decades.

Yeah, yeah, may he rest in peace. This is a real influence on me, his work on creative people and the personality of creative people. A lot of people know Mihaly for his work on flow, but they might not be as familiar with his systematic investigation of what creative people are like and The idea of there being complexity there, I think, has been borne out by more modern research, and especially the contradictions of creative people. There's that famous Walt Whitman quote, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then. I contradict myself, I contain multitudes." And I think that's quite right. People who tend to live a creative lifestyle and are constantly trying to seek new meanings and discover new depths of their own being are those that aren't afraid of themselves. They don't shy away from the fullness of their humanity, as most people do. You know, we tend to cordon off certain aspects of ourselves that we don't like or that we're scared to confront. I think creative people are really brave in not only their ability to explore the external world but to explore themselves. And I think that was captured nicely in Mihaly's work. And hopefully I was able to carry that mantle on a bit in my book Wired to Create, because that was a central thesis in our book Wired to Create, the book that I wrote with Carolyn Gregoire.

And you've co-edited as well, Scott, a number of books on creativity, The Psychology of Creative Writing, The Philosophy of Creativity, and a number of others, Twice Exceptional: Supporting and Educating Bright and Creative Students with Learning Difficulties. What are some of the things that you have documented and argued for within those books that you think were most influenced by Mihaly's work?

Well, I mean, it really is, it's the creative personality work, I would say for sure. And just the spirit of wanting to understand the complexity of the creative personality. See, the creative process has been studied and is important to look at, but I'm personally in my own research interests have been really interested in the creative personality, the structure, and it's gone off in all sorts of directions like my work on openness to experience and other things. But a lot of this stuff really continues to bear out a lot of his seminal ideas on the topic.

Can you break down for folks what you mean by the creative personality type, and then specifically the openness to experience attribute and how that relates to the creative personality type?

Yeah, so openness to experience is a really broad domain of personality that incorporates intellectual aspects as well as imaginative and behavioral aspects. So the full openness experience domain, you know, you can have— you— there's a lot to explore. There's a lot to explore. Um, the overall umbrella is cognitive exploration, so the The idea is that you're exploring things with using your cognition and using your consciousness. That can be distinguished from extroversion, which is more behavioral exploration. You know, people who score very high in extroversion tend to want to discover things outside themselves. But openness to experience is a very broad domain that includes facets such as cognitive exploration of one's internal stream of consciousness, intellectual curiosity. You know, you can still have cognitive exploration of the outside world, but you're doing so in a meaningful way. You're doing so in a very cognitive way and, uh, exploration of one's imagination, beauty, of aesthetics. So there's various facets of openness to experience and people who score high on this trait do tend to be more imaginative, intellectual, appreciate beauty more, tend to appreciate poetry and the arts, and they tend to, uh, even have more awe experiences or self-transcendent, uh, emotions. And it's even been linked to higher preponderance of chills. Feeling chills for looking at beauty and things like that.

Oh, that's interesting. I know you've met Mihaly in the past, and I'd love to ask you a little bit about your personal relationship and how you both interacted. But before we go there, I want to ask another question on the research side. So another one of your domains of expertise with your book on Gifted: Intelligence Redefined, and then again, being a co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence, is intelligence. There's another quote from Csikszentmihalyi that I find interesting, and I'd love to get your take on it in relation to intelligence. Mihaly said, "Talent emerges over the course of a lifetime of reciprocal interactions between the developing brain and a stimulating environment." I'm curious how you see that relating to your work on intelligence and also how you see talent relating to intelligence and the distinction between those two concepts.

Well, clearly the environment matters. Mihai Chixemi had really pointed out in his model the importance of interactions between self and the environment, that the domain has to be ready for what you're proposing, that people have to understand and be aware of what you're saying. It doesn't, you know, talent doesn't operate in a vacuum, intelligence doesn't operate in a vacuum. So I very much agree with that conceptualization. Intelligence is more of a domain-general thing than talent, as far as I'm concerned. There's a sort of general intellectual capacities that can operate across domains. However, talent to me seems to be more domain-specific. You know, we don't really tend to say, oh, that person is so talented, and, and for that to mean in general, in everything they do, you know. But we do tend to say that person's smart, and that does seem to have a connotation of something that's quite domain-general.

Could you tell us about your own interactions with Csikszentmihalyi just over the course of your career? I mean, obviously I know that you've been very much so heavily involved at the pinnacle of positive psychology, having close relationships with people like Angela Duckworth and Seligman. And so I would love to hear about whether and how your paths crossed with Csikszentmihalyi and what those experiences were like.

I didn't know him too well. I never really got a chance to a level which I would call him a friend. I saw him periodically. I saw him— I remember seeing him in Dubai at a World Government Summit conference. I saw— attended a talk he gave and talked to him afterwards and got a picture with him. It feels like almost a decade ago that happened. He was always very cordial.

What do you see his contribution being to the field of positive psychology in general irrespective of the specific domains of research that he engaged in, like flow and creativity?

I think that he's probably underrated, even as much of a giant he is. I think probably because of his personality. He's not overly effusive, but he seems to have a lot of humility. He never struck me as someone who was braggioso, braggadocious, whatever the word is. But many people might not know that he was actually a co-founder of the field of positive psychology. Martin Seligman will be the first to tell you, he was the founder of the field of positive psychology. I don't feel like Mihaly was always the first to tell someone that he was one of the co-founders of positive psychology. And I think that just gave him an immense sense of humility. I mean, I just, I get the sense from him, from what I know, and from people I am good friends with, people who worked very closely with him, I get the sense that he wasn't really terribly concerned with fame or with notoriety, that he cared about the science, he cared about getting it right, but that he was an introvert, you know, go introverts. Right. I think he was an introvert for sure. I feel like his work on flow has impacted so many domains outside of what he ever expected, probably in sports and medicine, in the sexual domain. You know, there are a lot of people interested in flow in the sexual domain now, business, rock climbing, you know, with dance. It has pervaded so far and wide, the extent to which the idea of flow has permeated our culture and, uh, and fields.

Yeah. I find it really interesting, the mention around humility and a lack of chest-beating. I wonder if that relates to the high intrinsic motivation that he felt due to access to flow that he got himself. There's a quote from Wired to Create on this topic that says inspired people also have a strong drive to master their work, but are less competitive. That reminds me of what you're describing, where there was a high level of drive and curiosity and obviously contribution and achievement, but potentially coming from a place of intrinsic motivation rather than a place of extrinsic motivation or competitiveness.

I believe his original term was not flow. It was the autotelic personality. And the publishers were like, no, that's not going to sell any books. So flow was a much snazzier term. But the whole point of autotelic is that that it's done for the intrinsic enjoyment of what you're engaging in, that what you're doing brings you immense satisfaction and meaning regardless of whether or not it's being acknowledged by others. So I really think that that is a central part of his thinking and creators in general tend to be more intrinsically motivated.

And you mentioned in some ways you view Mihaly's contribution as being underrated. With respect to positive psychology, I'm curious what other aspects of his research or his contributions that people presumably are less aware of do you think are generally underemphasized?

I think a really big one today that I just wanted to bring people's awareness to is the research he did on the creative personality. That's a big one. And his study of the complexity of creative people. I mean, we already covered this, but I just, I really, I mean, I can't impress upon people enough to really look into his writings on creativity studies, not just as well. He has published books on creativity more specifically.

In the interview with Steven, Steven was actually saying that personally, the book of Mihaly's that he actually found least compelling was Flow and that Mihaly's work on creativity, he said, he thinks is just phenomenal and is his favorite book of Mihaly's. Do you have a favorite book?

Well, obviously Creativity, always the book, Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention. I think a really underrated book was his book, The Evolving Self. Yeah, I thought that was a really cool book. And again, it went a little bit outside of the sort of flow paradigm, but the wages he made between not exploiting our society and not, you know, creating a consciousness that respects inequalities and transcends identity. Especially identity that's related to money and things like that. I mean, people might not associate that with flow, but I think that was a seminal book too. And a lot of people haven't heard of it.

What about that book did you find most compelling? Were there any big shifts in your thinking that can be attributed to that, to The Evolving Self?

Well, just the call for a new consciousness that we can direct, you know, that we can as humans play some role in, in our day-to-day interactions and in reducing the chaos in our lives and the chaos in our consciousness. It's a very inspiring book in a lot of ways.

So Scott, your latest book, which is Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, really built heavily on Maslow's work. And I'm curious if you're aware of Cikszentmihalyi and Maslow having any interaction or Cikszentmihalyi being influenced in any way by Maslow's work?

I've often wondered that. I want to do a more deeper investigation of that because it's very interesting. Mihalyi's first writings on this were in the early '70s or so, just when Maslow died. In his book Flow, there's a footnote, I believe, where he mentions Maslow. Well, first of all, I'll say the main descriptions of the self-actualizing person that Maslow proposed are very in line with Mihaly's writings on the creative personality. And I also think that Maslow's description of the peak experience was almost identical to Mihaly's, except for one really important difference, which is one that I've— I don't think needs to be a necessary condition of flow. And that's that one's challenge needs to be a little bit higher than one's skill set. Maslow didn't emphasize that part. So that is a new feature of Mihaly's conceptualization of flow. However, the rest of the main descriptions are really descriptions that Maslow had for peak experiences, and I am so curious to what extent to which he was influenced by those writings on the peak experiences.

From here on out, Scott, what aspects of the work that Csikszentmihalyi really developed do you see as being most important to be furthered by current day researchers?

I really do think that he laid a really strong foundation for a lot of work that needs a lot more empirical testing. There's just not as many researchers in the field as I'd like to see, you know, on this topic. I think we both share this, right? Who's doing tremendous, tremendous empirical work on flow. It's not the topic that can get you tenure so easily for grants. So I would like to see a lot more work, the neural correlates of flow, um, on the potential for certain interventions to deliberately increase the flow state, the use of self-transcendence and self-transcendent emotions to help people get into a flow state. Cause I do think there's a really strong link there. I think that, uh, the more we can kind of feel these self-transcendent emotions like awe, gratitude, love, things like that, the more we can get into the flow state. But there needs to be more research on this, and there's no doubt that Mihaly left a really huge legacy, but it doesn't mean we don't need to get to work.

Yeah, it's a great point. You know, as a creativity researcher yourself, what are the biggest open questions that you have within the creativity work and that, you know, you are seeing being advanced by people in a compelling way?

People have really moved a lot in, in my field for better or worse, but towards neuroscience, looking at the default mode brain network, or the— I've called it the imagination brain network, but it's the area, you know, the area of multiple areas that work together in a network fashion to help us simulate the future and also get deeply absorbed in our associative network tree. Like when we're jamming, when we're doing improv, or we're doing jazz, like jazz or comedy improvisation, or we're deeply in flow and writing and working on a poem or writing a book. But, uh, you know, you do tend to see this imagination brain network is, is more active. Also, you see a link between the imagination network and the openness to experience domain of personality and just creators in general. You know, can we come up with better measures of capturing creative potential in children? The gifted programs say they, they look for creativity in their gifted kids, but how much are they really screening for it or really selecting for creativity or pro-prone, flow-prone kids? I just made that, that expression up, but flow-prone kids, you know, uh, why are we leaving them out of the table, right? So these are things that are, that I'm personally passionate about.

I'm curious if there's anything you would like to leave people with in memory of Csikszentmihalyi and all the work that he did?

Well, I think he was a great model of scientist, the human dimension of being a scientist. A lot of people in the field have such huge egos and they do things for the grant money, they do things for the notoriety. I think that it can't be impressed upon people enough that not only did Mihaly leave such a great legacy, but that he really, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, was really interested in science, in getting it right, and also having humility and not needing the spotlight all the time. He didn't need the spotlight. And all that work that he— all that time where he wasn't in the spotlight, he spent, you know, cultivating deep relationships with people in his life, but also doing good work. And I think just as a person as well, it's just a great model of the right reasons for doing the work you do.

That's a great point. And as a legacy to leave, you know, if through his work and flow he inspires more people to be intrinsically driven and less time in the spotlight and more time doing the thing, that's definitely, you know, an incredible impact to leave. So thank you so much, Scott. Appreciate you.

I appreciate you too.

Hey there, just gonna interrupt. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the next level, while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches, you'll go through our whole curriculum, you'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up. And I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that, and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. Barbara, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. It's so great to have you here.

Oh, thank you. And thank you very much.

So you and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi co-authored a book called Becoming Adult a few decades ago now. And the subtitle was How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work. I would love if you could give folks a breakdown of the core message that you were attempting to get across with that book and then what the implications have been since its publication in flow and education.

Let me kind of give you just a little bit of history about how the project began. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation was very interested in trying to understand why we didn't have more scientists and why we didn't have more minorities and more women. And so they put out an invitation to 10 major universities in the country to propose how they would study the problem of how young people think about work and look at specifically why they were interested in science or not. And we put together a group— Charles Bidwell, Larry Hedges, Charles Hughes, Mike Shiksmahai, and myself. And we were an unusual group because Charles was a sociologist, as was I— am I— and Larry Hedges was a statistician, and Mike was a social psychologist. And none of us had ever studied vocational education per se, but all of us were— had a very strong interest in understanding about how young people think about their lives and make the transition from high school into college or the workplace. So we figured that we were an unlikely group to be chosen. Everybody was betting on a group from the East Coast. And when I got the call from the Sloan Foundation that, um, we were one of the finalists and they wanted us to come to New York and tell what we were going to do, We were probably more shocked than the people who didn't win. And what made our group so unusual was, of course, that not only were we going to rely on large-scale datasets that Larry Hedges and I had worked on and interviews and case studies that Charles had done a lot, but we were going to use the experience sampling method. That Mike had developed and used to study flow. And we had thought that if we use the experience sampling method in schools with 6th and 8th graders and 10th graders and 12th graders, that we would get a really good understanding of when kids were seriously engaged in learning and how they started to formulate ideas about careers. So, um, we designed a study. It was a nationwide study. We looked at 33 schools, both middle schools and secondary schools. We had student surveys and interviews, and we went and we visited the schools. And then we also gave the students the experience sampling method. At this time, Mike had worked with Reed Larson on this idea that you could in fact find the time when people got so engaged in something, the time just flew by. Mike had thought about this a lot and he had this wonderful book on flow and optimal experience. We thought, wow, this would be a great thing if we could use this in schools. We took the instrument that he and Reed had developed when they were studying talented teens. And at that time, the idea is that you look at the feelings that young people are having in the moment that they're having it. And in that way, not only do you learn about the experience from the person's eyes in terms of what they're concentrating on, who they're with, but how they feel about what they're doing. And if you think about it, in school these are assigned activities in different courses. And because of the fact that we really wanted to get a better handle on how young people were thinking about careers, and we knew that families had such a major impact, that we were also interested in looking at the students in terms of what they did in school, in school and out of school. So Shiksa Mahai was really the big person here and the major driver of how we were going to conceptualize these ideas about how young people started to think about what they were going to do when they graduated from high school. And then in talking to our young people, we found that most of them were finding that school, especially in high school, was very uninteresting to them. And they were mainly the most uninterested in listening to the teacher lecture, having video experiences. So all of these kinds of things that typically made up the experiences that young people had in school Because of the ESM, we were able to see and learn that the learning experiences that young people were experiencing while they were in their classrooms were not anything that were motivating or in that fact helpful in understanding about their career pathways or what they needed to do to go to college or to choose work in the workplace. And this was occurring just at the time when the technology was really starting to make a huge difference in young people's lives. So the major story that we found— and we found this through the ESM and through Mike's work and, and the work of our other colleagues, of Larry Hedges and Charles and myself— that essentially what the biggest problems were is that school classrooms for secondary students, especially in science and limited experience with technology, were not places that were motivating children to think about science as a possible career.

There's some really great chapter titles within the book that I wanted to ask you about. One of them is Learning to Like Challenges, and some of the subchapter titles are The Relationship Between Enjoyment and Challenge, The Flow Model, which a lot of our listeners are familiar with, and then the variety of challenges in adolescence. So I'd love to hear about what the approach was to helping adolescents embrace and like challenge and how that impacted their ability to engage and access flow.

We wanted to understand how engaged the students were. So with the ESM, Mike had two— they're called tunnels. And so for Mike, the most important thing was at the time interest, skill, and challenge. It was really the question about if you were skilled at something and then you had a challenge that your learning was likely to improve. The idea was that challenge for us was something that you didn't know, but you could know. In other words, It was not that you knew the answer right away, but that you felt you could get the answer. But what prohibited people from moving into that challenge state that would get them into flow? The problem here was that first, in many classrooms, that the skill level was too high for the challenges that the teachers were giving. So the students were bored. In other words, it wasn't that they were getting different kinds of activities to participate in that they already knew the answers. Now, in the case of another group of students that didn't have the skills, when they got the challenge, they were likely to stop. Why? Because they were confused and felt that no matter what happened, they couldn't do the challenge. And this is something that we in our own work today have spent a lot of time and really worked on this in a learning mode to get it more clear. And we've kind of worked on the model to be one of interest, skill, and challenge, and seeing these as preconditions by which you move into an engaged state of flow. And then we can tell that you're in flow by very different kinds of things that you feel. So it's really important to get that from the student. You know, you can't really tell if a student's engaged by just looking at them because a lot of kids stare out the window when they're thinking about things. Lots of kids kind of, you know, might be fooling around with a paperclip, but they're really listening. So that it matters whether they tell us whether they're concentrating, that they find that the activity that they're engaged in is important to them. And then just capitalizing on that flow idea, that when they're doing this, time just flies by and it goes so fast and it goes faster than when they're in their other classes and when they're doing other kinds of activities. And for us today and with some of my international partners, we're working on that and basically what we're going to see and hope that we'll be able to find is that the kinds of experiences that we can bring to young people in their science classes are experiences that will bring them to that time when things are moving so fast that they want to keep on being involved in the activities and experiences that they're having. So that was the point of challenge. And the enjoyment part, if in fact your challenge and your skill was higher than your ordinary average, then you were more likely to be in this state of flow. Well, one of the things that was really important is, were you enjoying it? Because if you look at, and this is one of the most wonderful things about Mike, who was really just such an important Renaissance individual who loved art and music and sports. And if you read the Flow Book, you— and when he was interviewed on television, of course, he started always to talk about Michael Jordan and how he could just kind of get in that flow state by keeping to make sure that he hit all those baskets. For young people that are in school, That's exactly what we're trying to do, and how much that they can enjoy it and then lose themselves in that experience. Now I'm going to take a little bit of a sidetrack here. So all of us and human beings overall, we have that time when we're doing something we really enjoy and we turn around and we say, oh my goodness, This was something that I didn't expect that I would have taken this much time. But we're not just talking about being in a movie or a pleasurable experience, but we wanted, and Mike wanted, to think about this in a way that you were learning something. So could that happen to you when you're in a learning situation? The other thing that's really important about this, this is all happening within the individual. So yes, we can watch, but we need to be able to get that from a person, and we need to be able to get that from the person multiple times. Because if we only get it from a person once, well, that might be some experience, but it's by seeing it multiple times over the course of a week or a month, and that, that kind of experience repeats itself and grows, that you really start to understand how flow can be that magical ingredient to help students in learning. And I think that Mike has really made two extraordinary things happen in our understanding of learning. One is that young people can be in an experiential time learning when they are challenged and they're enjoying that challenge. And it is those two things together that really talk about a learning experience that is engaging. And most importantly, we can, and we've been able to show this, that is a period of time when kids learn more and their social and emotional learning also increases.

Barbara, I'd love just as we're coming to a close here for you to describe to our listeners what it was like to actually interact with Mike and spend time with him and work with him at a personal level. Because I think a lot of people don't have a sense of what he was like to actually interact with, even if they've read or been very much so impacted by his research. And I know that that's a point of curiosity for a lot of folks.

Well, he was first of all the most generous person you can imagine. He's just kind. He was this amazingly kind person who was an excellent listener but could be pointed and directed when he was asking you questions. He had this amazing artistic sense, so his office was so much like Mike, and, and he was just such a special human being. And he had this wonderful house in Montana, and I remember he had invited me a few times to come out there to work, and it was just such an exciting experience. He loved good food, he loved wonderful music, he was so thoughtful And he appreciated when you disagreed, and he pushed you to think, well, why are you disagreeing, and what do you think you might be able to do with that idea? He was very supportive of his students, making sure that they could finish their work. And the one thing that I really loved about Mike is that He took people where they are. So if someone said, well, I want to be an academic, then he actually did all he could to help that person achieve those goals. But someone else might have said, I think I really want to be a clinical psychologist, and he would help that person kind of come to, you know, what that needed to be. He was a family man. Oh, he loved his children. I had dinner with one of his sons a few times His wife is just charming and lovely, and he loved his grandchildren. He's a human person, a family person, someone that you would love. And yet, his younger years, he lived in a very privileged lifestyle. He always wore an attacheé around his neck, and you always appreciated the fact that he had had this amazing life of growing up with, you know, just wonderful opportunities, the war and what that meant to him, then coming to the United States and having to work as a night watchman because he didn't have enough money and resources, and then being able, you know, to have this fabulous career and all these marvelous interests and be such an amazing writer and thoughtful individual. He was just unbelievable. I remember one time someone had said, "What do you think about Mike?" I said, "He's a Renaissance man of our century," because he just could appreciate all that our lives can bring us and And you always felt good when you would leave his office. You never felt like, oh, you know, sometimes you go into a professor's office and you think to yourself, oh God, that was really awful. And you never left his office feeling that way. You always felt you got something out of it that you didn't expect to get, and that it was done in such a way that it stayed with you for a very long time. Time, and he has unquestionably been a huge impact on me. I have been able to use these ideas in understanding and how to develop engagement in science at both primary, elementary, and secondary level, and we're seeing amazing effects. And I've continued to the Experience Sampling Method. And it is amazing to me how he was so prophetic beyond his years in terms of seeing that life can be very complicated and difficult, but that these experiences are very much contextual, and you can put yourself in a place where you can be able to exercise an optimal experience or not and learn more about yourself and the people around you and how you feel when you're with different people and how you feel when you're doing different activities.

Barbara, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and, and sharing both your expertise and your experiences with Mike as well. I know it's going to be a joy for everybody to have listened to So thank you so much. And thank you for being on Flow Research Collective Radio.

Thank you.

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Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com. Pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. Christine, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. It's great to have you here, and thank you so much for being so generous with your time.

It's great to be here. Thank you.

In the book Finding Flow, which you co-authored with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Part 2 has some really interesting chapter titles that I'd love to dive into. One of them is Flow Racing, which I'd love to hear more about from you. But, but beforehand The one that I think is particularly intriguing, especially to our audience, given we emphasize the benefits of flow so much, is Chapter 8, which is about flow's limitations. So I would love to hear a bit of a breakdown on what you were getting at with Mike on flow's limitations there.

You know, we each brought our own expertise, our unique expertise to this book. But certainly talking about limitations was something that Mike and I did quite a bit of conversation, you know, over. And he often talked about different types of limitations. Certainly there were the types of limitations, the internal like mechanisms of the individual that can make getting into a flow experience really difficult, you know, personality traits for instance, anxiety, the context in which, you know, you're attempting to enter a flow state, you know, the more you want to be in a flow state, the more challenging it's going to be to get into one essentially is one of the key limitations. The other thing that he and I interestingly talked about quite a bit is the more you research flow, the more you disseminate this information about flow, the more conscious people become of what flow is and how beneficial it can be, the more challenging you make it for that person to actually enter flow. Because it's just such a— like, you don't really know if it's going to happen, you know. And if you go into an experience saying, I want to experience flow while I'm out on this run or skiing down this slope, the chances of that actually coming to fruition are pretty low. And talking about the limitations, you know, we certainly spent a lot of time talking about the research in terms of internal states and processes that make it more challenging and the context.

So you were mentioning just before we jumped on that Mike was your academic advisor. I'd love to hear about what that experience was like, what he was like, Mike as an academic advisor and the nature of the relationship.

I met Mike when I decided I wanted to go to grad school, uh, in his program. I was first introduced to his work as an undergrad, and I went back to college later in life. So I was introduced to his work as an undergrad and really just fell in love with this idea of living the best life, you know, and When I read his work on flow, it immediately captivated my attention because it was something that I had been experiencing and just didn't know it had a name. So I went to grad school, worked under him, and was just really captivated not only by his incredible intelligence and his passion for positive psychology and flow, but also his role as a mentor. It was such an honor to work with him, not only as my academic advisor and my dissertation chair, but as my teacher. You know, he was that person who, you know, guided my, my academic experiences, helped me choose, you know, the right courses and the right research and the right opportunities along the way. But he was also this person who was super accessible you know, I could go sit in his office and we'd start talking about something we were doing in a class or a research project or my dissertation, and by the end of the, the time we were talking about our children because we both had adult children. So we were comparing notes, you know, about what it was like to, to parent and to balance that as an academic. And so it was really an incredible honor and privilege to be a part of his flagship crew. And I was one of his first PhD students in the positive developmental psychology program at CGU. But also to be able to work with him and have him really form my understanding of what research was and what positive psychology was, was incredible.

What was the biggest shift in your understanding or your awareness of positive psychology or your work from his mentorship?

I learned from him the importance of rigorous scientific study. He made very clear early on that if positive psychology was going to be successful as a, a scientific endeavor, as a, as a subfield in psychology, that we really had to commit to this scientific rigor, to do really quality research and to disseminate it in such a way that it, it was credible and maintained that, that sense of rigor. At the same time, it was important to live it, you know. So being a grad student is, is a challenging experience on its own. To do it as I did later in life as a single parent was incredibly challenging. But to have a mentor who says this has to be rigorous, but it also has to be the way you live your life. You need to find that balance, and he was truly committed to that, was really life-changing. I mean, you don't hear that very often in grad school where, you know, someone has an academic mentor that says, you know, maybe you should try meditating since we're talking about meditating. Maybe you should find those flow experiences outside of, you know, your coursework if you're going to to say you're an expert in that.

Second last question, Christine, which is about Claremont in general, because I know you were there for what, a decade roughly?

Almost.

A fairly long period of time. What was it like being at Claremont for that long? And if there's anything else you'd like to mention about Mihai's impact and presence in Claremont, which is obviously where he spent a lot of time as well.

I had a wonderful experience there. Such a unique environment. You know, so many times when I think of, or when I used to think about grad school, I thought about huge programs with big labs. And, you know, when you came in as a first-year grad student, you kind of plugged into a research program that was a finely tuned machine, you know, and you were one kind of cog in the wheel. And there's a lot to learn in those environments. They have their, their value. But what set CGU apart for me, and I think for most of the people that go there, is that you bring to the school your own interests, right? So for instance, with me, it was this love of positive psychology in general, but flow. So Mike and I had that connection, but I was free to do what I wanted to with it. You know, I didn't have to plug into some specific lab. I could do what I wanted. And of course that has its benefits and its drawbacks. You know, the benefit is you get to really pursue or explore the things that are of interest to you under his tutelage or other professors there, but it also requires a lot of self-discipline and self-motivation, right, to do your own research and to create your own lab, essentially. One person's lab. I loved that. I loved that I could work with Mike and with Gene Nakamura and create the plan that I had for myself with their support.

The final question, Christine, is, um, what aspects of Mike's research are you most excited about being advanced in the future from here on out? And, um, what aspects of his do you think are potentially underemphasized or underestimated that are important to also be advanced by current-day researchers?

That's a good question. I mean, I think that there are certainly still so many things that we don't understand about flow. So I think that that's certainly an area where research will continue, should continue. Understanding the neurobiology, you know, behind it for sure is an area I think that is still in need of more understanding. He had started some work that I think has not been tapped into quite as much as I had thought it would be, and that is his work on what he calls good works. This is some work that he and Jean Nakamura, his partner in directing the program at CGU, they worked on quite a bit together and she continues to work on. And I would say that that's an area that seems in need of more research and more attention.

Thanks so much, Christine. All the best, and thanks for your time.

Thank you so much.

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