Self-Understanding, Flourishing & Flow - Jonathan Beale & Brent Hogarth | Flow Research Collective Radio

I guess one dark side that springs to mind is that if you experience that level of engagement and enjoyment and, you know, the experience of accomplishment you get with flow, if you find ways to channel that more and more in your life from certain things, it can make other experiences where you don't experience that feel kind of not as fulfilling. And if human flourishing strongly consists in a sense of fulfillment, as I think it does— I mean, as I define flourishing —it involves fulfillment in the sense of fulfillment of potential, but also fulfillment in the sense of life satisfaction—experiences where you're not experiencing flow can feel unfulfilling if you find ones that really do give you flow. So that's a kind of a dark side, the kind of comparison, if you like. It's like comparing quality time with friends to small talk with strangers. I mean, the latter just doesn't compare, right? If you're really experiencing these great highs, experiences, and then the other experiences The comparison can just become more severe and you can kind of be constantly wanting that flow. And if you can't get it, that can be frustrating. 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 an 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.

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Our 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, and welcome to today's episode of Flow Research Collective Radio. This is a special episode because we've got our very own Dr. Brent Hogarth interviewing Dr. Jonathan Beale, who is a researcher in residence at Eton College and an academic visitor of St. Anthony's College in the University of Oxford. And he is the co-editor of 3 books which he's written on philosophy for Routledge, including Wittgenstein and Scientism, The Brain Can Do Handbook of Teaching and Learning, and Wittgenstein and Contemporary Moral Philosophy. He's also published articles on education and philosophy in academic journals and media outlets, including the New York Times, and has given invited talks at universities including Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Sheffield, Yale, and many others. And as you're going to be able to tell within this episode, Dr. Jonathan Beale is a true PhD in philosophy. He was also a fellow in philosophy at Harvard University from 2011 to 2013. And during this episode, Dr. Brent Hogarth, one of our peak performance coaches here, expert in high performance and flow in his own right, and Dr. Jonathan Beale go deep on a number of topics related to how philosophy impacts peak performance and flow and vice versa. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. It's a unique one. You're going to get a break from my voice for the next minutes, which is always a good thing. So with that, enjoy this episode with Dr. Brent Hogarth guest interviewing Dr. Jonathan Beale. It's going to be a pleasure.

All right, Dr. Jonathan Beale, it's a pleasure to have you on the Flow Research Radio podcast. It is without a doubt a great opportunity for myself and all our listeners to learn about flourishing. Before we get going, John, I really want to kind of help us understand your craft by learning a little bit more about you before we go into your areas of expertise. So I know you're a researcher, philosopher, also a consultant by trading. You've written 3 books in the space. How would you generally describe your craft and to someone generally in the public here?

Well, first, thank you so much, Brent, for having me on this podcast today. It's a real honor to speak on the Flow Research Collective's podcast. I'm a big fan of your work, a big fan of your podcast. Okay, so my craft, I love that way of describing it, craft. It's a great word to use. I would say I I work primarily as a researcher on philosophy and educational research now. I did a PhD in philosophy and then I was a lecturer in philosophy. I then taught in schools, taught philosophy, religious studies, and the first school I taught in, they had an educational research center, an educational neuroscience research center. I was invited to get involved with that, not for work on educational neuroscience because I don't have a background in that, but for my background in research. And my role there was kind of as part of an interdisciplinary team as a writer and a philosopher of education to be involved in, for example, assessing, you know, possible limits to the science of learning and clarifying the scope of the kinds of things we were trying to do with educational research there. I then in 2019 became Research in Residence at Eton College where I was entirely focused on doing educational research in a number of areas, and in that role I became increasingly interested in human flourishing and its role in education because it's increasingly believed that the kind of ultimate aim of education is to promote human flourishing. Or if you don't believe that, then one of the aims of education is to support human flourishing. And this fascinated me, and I've been working on that now for a few years. And that's kind of my main area of research now is what is human flourishing? What is its role in education? And how it can be best supported in education. And the various things I do now kind of all orient, I guess, around that theme in particular. Beyond that, I work on a number of things in philosophy of education. So for example, what are the aims of education, how they relate— that relates to the work I just described in human flourishing. And I do work on the science of learning, what its limits are, what it can hope to achieve, and how it's best done. And how we can best utilize that in education. I guess that's where I move away from research and human flourishing. Apart from that, I have a longstanding interest and passion for music. I was a professional guitarist for a while. I do a lot less of that now, but that's certainly an area where I continue to find a great deal of flow. And that's kind of the other side of my life.

To step back a little bit, I'm curious, what were the early experiences for you that led you to be interested in philosophy, particularly within education? I recently listened, re-listened to Ken Robinson's TED Talk on how education kills creativity. And I love his book The Element and sharing these kind of epiphany moments. Was there somewhat of an epiphany moment in you for education that led you along this path?

I mean, I went to, I studied philosophy because I had questions that I wanted to answer or figure out how to answer. And studying philosophy, you know, it didn't give me answers to many of all those questions, but it at least gave me the tools and skills that I have now in order to figure out how to answer questions, to figure out which kinds of questions make sense, which kinds of questions we can and can't really answer, and how to best go about addressing various questions. That's kind of one of those valuable skill sets I think philosophy gives you. I guess I wasn't interested in educational research during my time as a student until I started to teach. I loved teaching as soon as I started I started doing it at the start of my PhD, and that kind of led me to kind of start to think about at least kind of the best kind of ways to teach and how is the best way to engage students, for example, in discussion, because the lifeblood of philosophy is discussion. And so you have quite an interesting time when you teach philosophy because you're really trying to get students to actively participate in a discussion activity with one another, but also trying to utilize that as best as possible to complement their learning and trying to figure out how you assess learning through active discussion and so on, how you can best channel those skills then onto the, onto the written page and into their presentations and so on. So ever since I started to teach, I was thinking about, you know, various ways to teach better, as of course any respectable person who starts teaching does. But it wasn't until I got teaching in schools that I actually got involved with educational research because of this opportunity to be involved with educational research at the first school I taught at. That was in 2015, and since then I've just had more and more opportunities to do this, and I've been trying I've been trying to find a way since then, so that was 6 years ago, to tie together my background in philosophy with research and education, not wanting to just move way out of my experience because I don't have a background, for example, in educational neuroscience. So I'm not well equipped to go and work primarily on that. And I have a passion for philosophy. So we're trying to find the best way to tie them together. And human flourishing has been the best way I've found to do that. It has a huge history in philosophy going right back to the ancient Greeks, particularly the work of Aristotle, and his influence in research and flourishing is to this day profound. And it's a growing area of research even today. It's becoming increasingly widespread, uh, research and flourishing, with a number of interesting contemporary theories. And so I've, you know, I think I've found the last few years an excellent area where I can tie together my passions in a way that I can really try through research to help people improve their lives in meaningful ways. Well said, John.

I appreciate that. You know, one of the things we focus here at FRC is what Stephen's called this passion recipe, where we look at, you know, helping individuals identify their curiosities, looking to see where these curiosities intersect to develop interest in their passion, and trying to really develop that purpose by exploring how can they apply this passions to solving some big world challenges to create what we call this kind of massive transformative purpose. And I'm not asking you maybe to recite a perfect MTP statement, but if you were to kind of try to synthesize your kind of massive purpose, it sounds like, you know, infusing flourishing within education is a big part of that. Would there be any other just nuances that maybe it would be helpful for myself and others to know that's driving you in this path of yours?

Yeah, sure. So it's extremely useful to know the various areas of life that can strongly enhance your well-being and that you can use to enhance the well-being of others. Some of those many of us are aware of, but some of them we're really not. Flow is a great example of one. For example, people's understanding of what flow is and how to best develop it and find activities that cultivate it, that's knowledge that needs to be disseminated and can really help to improve people's experience of life for themselves and improve the lives of others. So it's extremely useful for any person to learn about the research on flourishing, particularly the research on flourishing that relates it to well-being, because not all theories of flourishing are focused on just well-being, but some of the most influential ones are. So for any person, no matter how good their life is, it's extremely useful to learn about what the research currently shows about the areas of life that we can most delve into to enhance our own lives and the lives of others and what we need to do to do that.

Well said, John. So maybe let's quickly operationalize what we're talking about, flow, and then we're going to get into your research. And so I'm going to share one of my favorite definitions of flow from Csikszentmihalyi. And I'm curious if we can maybe just build off this firstly and maybe add some more nuances or maybe even simplify it. So this is again, one of my favorite definitions. Csikszentmihalyi said, I think this was in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience in 1990. In the flow state, action follows upon action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor. He or she experiences it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which he or she is in control of her actions and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present, and future. Simply, you know, Csikszentmihalyi originally described flow as order and consciousness or structure and consciousness. And that's been one of the most simplest definitions that I've leaned into. And I think we're gonna probably build on that throughout our conversations, but How do you define flow and anything you might build off that?

Thank you for sharing. That was a great passage from Csikszentmihalyi. So flow is best understood, of course, as total absorption and immersion in activities such that one is able to achieve optimal human experience, both in terms of their performance— so how much they can fulfill their potential through the flow experience— but also optimize their experience of positive emotions. Now Csikszentmihalyi focused on happiness, but, you know, research on flow since publication of Flow, the book you mentioned in 1990, you know, we can broaden that to encompass other positive emotions too, such as comfort, joy, ecstasy, and so on. And so I think that we should understand flow as this immersive process, this kind of loss of the self, as you were alluding to in that quote, this kind of— this experience where one is— one's consciousness is just one with the object, one with the thing they're doing, but in such a way that they are maximizing their potential or on the path towards maximizing their potential through engagement in flow activities. And engaging in flow activities is a significant contributor towards one's happiness, both in the immediate and in the long term. And it's probably more likely to be in the long term because sometimes flow experiences, you know, they can be not entirely pleasant in the immediate experience because you're pushing right to the edge of your comfort zone. You're in the kind of flow channel, as it were, where you have this balance between where your skills are hitting their limits and how much you are pushing yourself within that and enjoying that— the kind of the sweet spot, if you like. So I think that we only think of the happiness in terms of its long-term gain here. How much are you going to gain in the long term? How much is your well-being going to be enhanced in the long term through immersion and flow activities? Well said, John.

I'm sure we're going to build on this throughout our discussion here today. So with that said, let's jump right into your research. I really want to make sure that we're able to share with our listeners really applied approaches, how to utilize the research you're going to be sharing. So we have both entrepreneurs, creatives, we have coaches that will be listening. We have kind of all walks of life. So folks, get your seatbelts on. We're going to dive deep, and it's going to be a lot of fun. So John, maybe let's just start off with what is human flourishing? How do you describe it? And what areas of life really constitute and enhance human flourishing?

I mean, well, I would define it as a long-term way of being, a long-term state in which you're in, in which most areas of your life are going well, and your recognition of how well your life is going maps on accurately to these areas of life. So for example, you're not kind of deluded about how your life's going. So it's not that you think that your life's going great in all respects and actually it isn't. Conversely, it's not that you think your life's going badly in various respects and actually is. Your idea of how your life's going needs to map on to a sufficient degree, at least, with how well it's actually going.

Would you say that maps to Csikszentmihalyi's initial definition of order in consciousness, the sense of structure, of feeling as if one right decision is leading to the next and overcoming any cognitive dissonance or questioning of one's path there?

Yeah, I'd say it maps onto it in some respects, and of course that would be an important part, and I do think that's an important part of what one of the domains that constitutes flourishing. But I think Csikszentmihalyi is getting onto something more detailed there than I was mentioning. The idea there is about, you know, for example, constantly setting goals that one is trying to achieve and that enhancing flow experiences and bringing one's conscious activity to the highest level to get into the flow channel of the it's kind of skills-challenge ratio, and also making sure that one's attention is always focused on what they're doing, because flow is ultimately an exercise in— as she points out— an exercise in focusing your attention as well as possible on the task at hand in which you're in flow, such that consciousness is not kind of disordered, you're not full of kind of distractions and so on. You're in a focused state, getting— trying to get as as close as you can to the goal you're trying to reach. So I'd relate that to it.

When you describe flourishing, do you utilize kind of Martin Seligman's PERMA model as a way to constitute all the elements of what feels like the order in life you're referring to?

Yeah, so you asked kind of two questions: what is flourishing and what are the things that constitute it? So if we look at the major contemporary theories of flourishing, of which one of them will be positive psychology, we can extract 8 key domains that constitute and enhance human flourishing. So these would be from 3 theories in particular: positive psychology, the theory put forward by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, and the account put forward by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues in the UK. These 8 domains would be happiness and other positive emotions, Some of the positive emotions being, you know, joy, comfort, and so on. Second, good close social relationships, for example, with friends, family, partner. Third, meaning— how meaningful you find your day-to-day activities and your life as a whole. The fourth would be flow. Interestingly, you get that in positive psychology, but that's not included in those other theories. Fifth, you have accomplishment. Again, that's included in positive psychology, but not in the other theories. Sixth, you have health, physical and mental health. That's not included in at least the PERMA model, but it is included in the Harvard Human Flourishing Program's model. There are developments of the PERMA model that add an H to PERMA, PERMA plus H to include health. Seventh, character, through the development of character virtues or strengths. And eighth is fulfillment. Now typically accounts of flourishing speak of fulfillment of potential, and that's really emphasized in other theories that you can extract accounts of flourishing from, such as Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But I think that we ought to think of fulfillment in a broader sense when we conceptualize flourishing. It should include both fulfillment of potential and fulfillment in the sense of life satisfaction, because the latter often captures more of what I think people mean when they say they are aiming for fulfillment, or they feel a sense of fulfillment, which is often how people describe kind of the ultimate aim in life, to experience fulfillment. That often involves fulfillment of potential, but I think people often mean something broader than that— fulfillment in the sense of kind of contentment, kind of an overall sense of life satisfaction. Those 8 domains I've described are regarded as the 8 kind of autotelic aims of life, if you like, an autotelic domain being one that human beings pursue as an end in itself for its own sake. And Csikszentmihalyi, for example, argued that flow is an autotelic end. And so does Martin Seligman in his work on positive psychology argue that flow is something we pursue as an end in itself, not for any further goal. It's just something that we want for what it is.

Hey there, just going to interrupt. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, 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 Sort of 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.

I want to maybe double-click on, on one of those elements, and then we'll get into, you know, what constitutes areas to enhance flourishing. But you mentioned one of the elements of flourishing being maximizing human potential. So Csikszentmihalyi talked about what he called the embarrassment of riches, where we have so many opportunities that it lacks our commitment or resolve in any one, and how that takes away any individual's defined flow or potential to find flow. How do you compartmentalize potential if there really is so many opportunities, so many talents we can build off of? Have you learned in your own experience, or does the research kind of define specifically how one can be clear on what that looks like, maximizing their potential?

Yeah, that's a great question. That's an extremely pertinent one in this day and age where you're absolutely right, there is this such an abundance of opportunities for people to take advantage of and so many things attempting to grab our attention. The intention is being increasingly described as kind of the most important thing in life, you know, attention and time, as it were, this kind of crude fundamental sense that it's so precious in this world and everything's trying to grab it. How do we figure out how to best use it? In terms of maximizing potential through it, I mean, there's multiple ways to do that. Let's focus on flow, for example. In order to best utilize what attentional space one has in order to best fulfill one's potential through, for example, flow experiences, one needs to identify those things in life in which one most experiences flow and at the highest level. And that's going to be the areas of life that most utilize your character strengths and character skills, where you are really stretched to your ability, but also you are deeply in enjoyment with that thing. And you might not realize that immediately, it will take practice. You know, when anyone's coming to me for the first time, it's not they might immediately enjoy it. It might take time to figure out how much they enjoy this thing. But over time, if that appears to be something that you find yourself completely absorbed doing and that it challenges you to a high level and you can keep building on those challenges and through setting yourself goals to reach, you can continue to strive towards something higher, then that would be something that merits your attention as long as it's a worthwhile pursuit in itself. And I mean, that latches on with the ways in which Csikszentmihalyi describes flow. And that's, I mean, something that, for example, educators deem to be very important as their role as educators to help students, for example, to find those things in life that students most enjoy doing and most utilize their character strengths and skills. If we spend a good amount of time in our lives doing those things, they can help us fulfill our potential, and they can also bring us a great deal of happiness. And it's through doing those kinds of things that we can significantly contribute towards our own flourishing. Now, you have to devote quite a lot of time to any pursuit to become excellent at it and to be able to identify how it really enhances your own character strengths and be able to see how much you become absorbed in it. So there's going to be a finite number of resources you can devote to find these things. So I mean, through doing exercises like that, I think individuals could discover where their time and energy and attention is best spent. And for most people, it will be a few things at most. For many, it will be just one. But for some, it might be 2, 3, 4 things that they really find best experience doing. And that's the kind of thing, as long as it's worthwhile pursuit, is certainly deserving of their time and is something that could help them fulfill their potential.

Thanks, John. I appreciate that. So we have positive emotions, meaningful relationships, or meaning itself, flow or engagement, accomplishments, health, character, fulfillment. A lot of different pieces here develop an autotelic experience, or to flourish, you could say. I'm wondering, is there any other areas that maybe isn't typically spoken about that constitutes what would it would mean to flourish and how to enhance it?

Yeah, good. I mean, that's a great question. So I don't think there's any other autotelic domains. So I don't think beyond those 8 There are others that we pursue for their own sake. I mean, I should add that there's disagreement across various theorists about whether those are all autotelic domains. I've taken the 8 there from 3 dominant theories, but those theories disagree on— none of them say all 8 of those. That's me extracting them. You know, they vary. For example, the PERMA model you mentioned in positive psychology holds that just 5 of those constitute flourishing, and the Harvard Human Flourishing Program has 5 domains itself which aren't the same as the PERMA model. But we can extract 8 from all those. I don't think there's any others. I mean, I suspend a degree of judgment there. We may learn in future research that actually there are others, but I don't think there's any others. But I think that an account of flourishing, a convincing account of flourishing, ought to pay attention to more than just what are the autotelic domains of life. And I also think it's useful to break down some of those autotelic domains we just discussed into subsidiaries, because there's a lot going on in some of those. Which by breaking it down and digging in deeper on some of them can— we can learn a lot about human motivation, well-being. So I mean, on the former, you know, my claim that flourishing should include domains other than just those autotelic ones or other things we should think about, I mean, I'm currently very interested in and I'm doing research on the role that truth should play in flourishing. That is to say, the degree to which flourishing requires that your beliefs are true or approximate to truth or aim towards truth. And what I mean by that is I think that to flourish, our fundamental beliefs should be guided by and aim towards truth. Fundamental beliefs I define as those beliefs about yourself or about the world that tend to have a significant practical influence on your life and a significant influence on your knowledge and understanding of yourself. And other people. And I think it's important to add that because if your beliefs aren't lining up with the facts about the world, but you're nonetheless flourishing according to all those domains of well-being, it can be the case that you're actually flourishing because you're unaware of certain things that make your beliefs actually not be true. Whereas you could actually have a kind of a deeper, more true understanding of the world, of the fact that you're more aware of certain things actually makes you flourish less because your beliefs are more true. So an example of that might be, um, someone who's a victim of structural prejudice. Their awareness of their victimization there could make them flourish less because they're less happy about, say, the opportunities they have to work, to take certain jobs, let's say, or in order to meet their potential, because they're more aware of the kind of the structural discrimination they're facing. Whereas the person who's less aware of this could perhaps have a higher level of well-being because they're, if you like, unaware of the limitations facing them, and so they're more satisfied with the situation they're in. Now you can account for that, and some theories do account for that, by saying that the flourishing person needs to be free. Now that could apply to kind of severe cases of structural discrimination. For example, women right now in Afghanistan who are, you know, their right to work and receive education may be threatened But it perhaps doesn't apply so much to less severe instances of structural discrimination, such as the gender pay gap in the UK, for example, right? You can imagine that a woman who's more aware of the gender pay gap and the fact that there are things that limit them from fulfilling their potential as a person, being able to earn as much as they're entitled to compared to their male peers, is less satisfied with their life by being aware of these true facts about what's going on. Than someone who's less aware of these things, because they're satisfied with where they are and they're not so bothered by what's happening because they're less aware of the true facts. So I think we need to build in truth, how much our beliefs map on with what's true, in order to really give a more convincing account of what it means to flourish. Otherwise, we have these worries about whether certain people can flourish more whilst holding beliefs that are less true, and these are beliefs that can have a significant impact on their lives and the lives of others.

One of the few articles I've read recently on flow was connecting flow to identity and how knowing that one is living in alignment with one's identity, as well as also in the specific place that their identity has been formed, can also facilitate flow. And you're, you know, you're giving this great of Afghanistan. And I'm wondering if perhaps any thoughts on how the change in government there and what's unfolding might relate to this lack of opportunities to live in alignment with that identity, and also maybe travel or be that free agent you mentioned to the place identity. So the locations that are important for one's sense of self. So yeah, any, any more you might add to just this kind of view of identity and flow itself?

A vital aspect of flow is self-understanding, because in order to discover flow activities, the kinds of things in life that through which you're able to experience flow, you have to have a sufficient degree of self-understanding. You have to be able to understand, identify and understand what your character strengths are and find activities in which you can utilize those and continue to build on them. And at the same time ones that you deeply enjoy that can bring you long-term happiness. Now, few people have the opportunity to explore lots of opportunities where they could do that in their life. You know, you have to have a lot of opportunities as a child, your education, and your family life, and in your life with your friends growing up to have a kind of an abundance of experiences such that you can say, okay, this one I really like, and this one's really challenging my skill set, I want to pursue this one further. —and in order to gain the kind of self-understanding where you can really have, you know, plenty of flow opportunities available to you, you need to have experienced these kinds of things. You need to have had an opportunity to see what your character strengths might be and try out various ways of channeling them and see the kind of things that bring you happiness. So there's kind of two, if you like, limitations in the kinds of scenarios you described. We don't need to maybe pick on one particular society where there are instances of structural discrimination, you know, that we could just say in general where people are prevented from various opportunities, they're kind of cut off from them throughout their lives or a certain period of their lives, there is a limitation there on being able to discover what flow activities are available to you. And through that, then being prevented from really being able to experience flow at all, because you have to be able to develop a sufficient degree of self-understanding in order to really even identify which flow activities you can get into in the first place. So in that way, there's a direct link between identity and flow in the sense of self-understanding.

I love how Csikszentmihalyi spoke about this process to developing what he called kind of complexity of the self or self-awareness of this kind of two process of both having to differentiate and individuate and then integrate back and and see how these strengths or characters or values can be brought back and integrated to supporting the whole in us. And so it kind of reminded me of some of that focus there. So with that said, I'm wondering, one of the last pieces I just want to hit on, on these 8 characteristics you shared here of flourishing, where does human suffering fit into this model of flourishing? You said in particular health, good mental and physical health is one element. And obviously, we all experience moments in our life perhaps more than others, where we don't have perfect mental and physical health. And can one still flourish if that's the case?

Absolutely. So it's not the case that flourishing requires you to be well in all of these domains. And I don't know of anyone who claims that. And I mean, the way I defined flourishing at the start was as a long-term way of being, that is to say, a way of being, a state you're in that you stay in the long term, in which most areas of your life are going well. So I mean, I would argue that it's sufficient to flourish that at least most of those areas are going well for you, you know, you're happy, you have good social relationships, you find your life meaningful, and you're engaging in flow activities regularly. But perhaps, you know, your health isn't as good as it once was at a particular time in life, but you know, there's scope for recovery, so we're flourishing there. Perhaps at that point in life you're not quite fulfilling your potential, but you see the path as to how you would, and you have a clear direction as to how you can get there. I mean, I think flourishing can take, as it were, it can take various levels and it can fluctuate in various degrees. But the idea is that most areas of your life, it should be a hard thing to attain. Defining flourishing is, if you like, the ultimate aim of life. It shouldn't be something easy to do, but it can have various levels. You can flourish more, you can flourish less, and it can fluctuate over a long-term period, but you can nonetheless sustain it as long as various of those domains are going well. I wouldn't want to give a kind of precise amount to any of them. I don't know any theories that do give precise amounts. They're purposefully quite vague on this. You know, you can take scores, you can do surveys, and with positive psychology and the Harvard Flourishing Program's Flourishing app, and it gives you a kind of a predicted score on how well you're doing based on these domains if you fill out questionnaires. And they don't say, oh, you've met this number, therefore you are or you aren't flourishing at that particular time. But yeah, you can— it can vary to varying degrees, and I can't give you a precise answer on what kind of level you'd need to hit or which ones you'd need to be performing well in at any particular time to flourish. That's certainly an area where research can advance, but I don't think there'll ever be some precise, you know, necessary factors that you must have in place from these domains to always be flourishing. They can vary to certain degrees. But to speak to your particular point about suffering, there is growing research on the role that suffering can play in flourishing. There's some interesting research going on right now, and I mean, one thing I'll say is that it's important to live a good life, to cultivate certain character strengths and virtues, one of which would be, for example, resilience, or associated character strengths, one of which we can maybe talk about later, which I've described as buoyancy, so a kind of more everyday sense of resilience, the ability to kind of deal with the everyday struggles of life. And also another related character strength of grit, kind of, if you like, long-term resilience towards particular goals. And in order to cultivate some of these skills, you know, suffering is one of the things one can endure in one's life that helps one to build these character strengths and virtues. If you've never been through any kind of never experienced any kind of adversity or suffering, and then you do, it can take a great deal of time to recover from that, such that one could, for example, be flourishing long term and then go through an experience in life where one is so deeply affected by it that it takes you an enormous amount of time to bounce back from it. And that time, your well-being may be so depleted that you're not flourishing for a sustained period of time. And in that way, suffering can be kind of cultivating for a person. It can cultivate a certain degree of strength. It can help one to see certain things in life as sources of meaning that one might not have identified before. There are studies on people that experience post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, and they say after coming out of those experiences that they, they've identified certain areas of life as, uh, more meaningful, or certain areas they want to focus more cases of what are described as post-traumatic growth after traumatic experiences, where people— you know, there's a strong majority of people that experience post-traumatic growth rather than post-traumatic stress disorder. And indicators of post-traumatic growth are things like identifying in one's life areas that they see as a source of meaning they didn't see before, or taking for granted certain things less in life, or having a clearer sense of the kind of direction they want their life to go in. As a consequence of having been through traumatic experiences. So those are some examples of the ways in which suffering can, in the long term, be beneficial to one's character development. That's not to say that suffering is a good thing, of course, but it is a way in which it can be related to human flourishing.

Stephen might argue that suffering is a good thing. Big fan of Nietzsche, he is. I said I want to kind of maybe jump into one of your specific contexts, which is within education. And I know you spend a lot of time understanding the philosophy of education. So I'm curious, what are the aims of education? And how do these support human flourishing? Again, I watched Ken Robinson's talk on how school kills creativity. So I'm curious, are schools getting better at helping flourishing? So yeah, again, what are the aims of education? And how does it relate to supporting human flourishing?

Yeah, great. Thanks. It's a great question. Now you've mentioned Robinson's talk again, I mean, I should say that— Yeah, Robinson's— Ken Robinson's talks are a lesson in outstanding public speaking. I mean, he's almost like a stand-up comedian when he gives talks. He gets the audience laughing so much. He's so engaging, and that talk deserves having been the most watched TED Talk ever, the one you mentioned, the "Schools Kill Creativity." So in answer to your question, you know, there's a variety of conceptions of what education's aims are and various kind of options are on the table for what education's aim should consist of. If you like, what we could call the kind of the standard view, I guess, or the orthodox view of the aims of education is that the aim or the primary aims of education are epistemic. That is to say, they correspond to knowledge. So if you like, the aims of education are to develop students' knowledge and understanding and to cultivate the kinds of skills that students need to enhance their development of knowledge, understanding, to give them the skills in order to gain knowledge and understanding, such as critical thinking skills, autonomy, intellectual curiosity, and so on. Now, whether or not you regard those as the only aims of education, it's uncontroversial that they're certainly among the primary aims. Then there's a question as to whether education should have moral or political aims as well, and what those consist in. Civic aims, so developing virtues in students, cultivating their students such they can actively contribute in a meaningful way towards society, and so on. There's a collection of various views. My view is that education has multiple aims, that the epistemic aims are the kind of primary ends of education, but education does also have moral, political, and civic aims, and it also has an overarching aim of supporting human flourishing. And something I'm really trying to do is to provide an account of education's aims that shows how human flourishing can be a co-beneficial aim of education operating in tandem with, that is to say, in such a way that it complements in a co-beneficiary way, the epistemic aims of education.

It can lean back on some of Robinson's kind of book, The Elements, you know, when he shared stories of, you know, certain individuals who were kind of going through education, whether flunking out or being seen as having learning disabilities. And, you know, he gives these great stories, and it really hit me, to be quite honest. It hit me in a kind of a deep place of not feeling kind of recognized and that I belonged in education. I never really did well as a youngster in my kind of path. So I'm just wondering, do you find that, you know, is it adding different classes, different teaching modalities, or is there a, you know, how is education shifting or changing? I imagine you have kind of a broad landscape on how, you know, education's shifting. Have you seen meaningful improvements maybe even since Robertson gave his talk, I think, a little over 10 years ago here?

It depends on the country we're looking at and the level of education. I mean, there is certainly a movement in the UK, I mean, in the Anglophone world at least. I'll just comment on that. I mean, I do work with an NGO in Uganda, uh, so I mean, I can comment on various educational contexts such as that one and the UK and the USA, for example. But I'll just start by at least outlining what's going on in the Anglophone world education, because I'm most familiar with that, and that's where I can give a kind of a more direct answer to your question. There has been a movement in the last, I guess, two decades towards— in various education institutions at the secondary level— towards enhancing well-being in education and finding ways to best do that in line with the various other areas that are going on in education. So One example of that would be the positive education movement that emerged through positive psychology, which aimed to show how all of those elements, the PERMA elements you mentioned earlier, which are partly constitutive of the kind of the 8 autotelic domains of flourishing I mentioned, how those can be enhanced through education. And that primarily took place through a project that Martin Seligman and others led at Geelong Grammar School. In Australia. That movement has been widely influential and has been adopted at some schools in the USA and the UK. The positive education movement is still to this day increasing. And then there have been other movements to do similar things in the last sort of 5 years, 4 to 5 years. For example, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University are engaged in various interventions with schools where they're aiming to enhance well-being in schools, in kind of projects collaborating with schools, trying to show how various aspects of human flourishing or well-being can be promoted through schools. Now, those are not taking place on, if you like, a huge scale yet. You know, it's not the case that most schools are doing that, but there has been— there is an increasing movement to promote well-being in education in education institutions in various ways, in such ways to enhance the well-being of students, or if you like, enhance the flourishing of students, if it's defined in terms of well-being. Now, how that would relate to creativity, to speak directly to your point, would be that there is evidence to suggest that certain areas of well-being can enhance students' abilities to experience creativity and their creative potential. Positive psychology argues that students who experience higher levels of engagement, which is flow, higher levels of positive emotion, and, you know, experience accomplishment more often, are able to experience creativity more and are able to be more creative and point to various studies on this. I would say that that's increased in general, the things I've described, throughout schools in at least the Anglophone world. Has it increased in a massive way? I don't think so. Is there growing research and creativity in education? Yes, absolutely. For example, the work of Bill Lucas is very good on this, on creativity, a UK education researcher. So it is changing, but the change is slow. You know, creativity in schools is increasing, and there's much work still to be done in this area, at least in those contexts I've described.

The final question on this point is, if you were to be speaking to a parent or even a teacher that's working with a student that might not have natural strengths in what education typically focuses on, whether it's academic or mathematics or language. Maybe they're skilled in the arts, skilled in developing deep relationships with others. Would you have any insights or ways that you communicate that their student could still flourish and there's meaning in doing— in focusing on flourishing as opposed to maybe just getting their specific kind of grades up, so to speak. Would you have any kind of feedback for them about nurturing their strengths and how that's a valued pursuit and not feel as if their, their child's gonna fall behind?

Well, yeah, that's, that's a great question, and that directly kind of relates to the point I was making about the kind of one of the main projects I'm involved in now in my work in the philosophy of education, trying to show how the aim of supporting the flourishing of students in education can be co-beneficial with meeting the epistemic aims of education. So it's very— epistemic aims of education being those described earlier, developing students' knowledge and understanding, and in a kind of, then, if an assessment sense, as a result of that, students attaining higher grades, let's say, than they have attained previously, you know, enhancing the way in which that's evidenced by their attainment of knowledge and understanding in school. In a nutshell, you know, my current research is the ways you can relate them are that it's clear that various of the domains for flourishing I've described enhance learning. So, you know, there's research in positive psychology, for example, that suggests that those domains are enhanced in various ways by by enhancing student well-being, you can enhance their, their learning in various ways. So for example, there's growing research on how having better sleep health or having better physical health is better for cognitive development and cognitive performance. There's a good podcast, you know, from Poy Research Collective on sleep research I listened to recently on the benefits that can have for cognitive performance and the problems that can occur if you build up a sleep debt and so on and don't get sufficient sleep. That's one small of many examples of ways in which well-being can complement your capacity for learning and also your cognitive performance in general, which is part of your capacity for learning, and thereby your performance in school— how well you're able to gain knowledge and gain understanding. But the inverse is true as well. That is to say, by increasing your knowledge and understanding, those can benefit various areas of well-being. I mean, I mentioned those various domains earlier: fulfillment of potential, Well, if you gain more knowledge and understanding, it's obviously going to help you fulfill your potential. It's going to help you have greater life satisfaction. It's going to help you identify certain character virtues or strengths you have. It's going to help you identify the areas of life where you find flow or find meaning. It's going to bring you more happiness potentially too. It's going to give you a sense of accomplishment. Those are 6 of the domains I mentioned earlier on flourishing. So there's a clear way in which they're co-beneficial for each other. One of the big challenges we face on the role of flourishing education is then to show how you can best relate the kind of pursuit of flourishing as an education alongside the pursuit of the epistemic aims of education in a kind of more detailed, rigorous way. So how can we best teach a subject such that it's bringing in things that can really enhance student well-being, such as, you know, enhancing those various areas? How can you really get into the narrow stuff of designing a curriculum such that it does that in such a way that it complements the curriculum. It doesn't pull away from it. You know, you don't want to be throwing in like a gratitude practice in the middle of a maths lesson if that's going to prevent you from learning valuable knowledge in mathematics, right? You've got to think of a clever way to do this and an evidence-based way to do this before you take risks of experimenting with any of these kinds of stuff. And that's one of the biggest challenges, um, and the biggest questions I think we face in current research on the role of flourishing education, and that's the kind of the main one I'm working on. So to then bring it back to your question about what would I say to a parent who has a child who, let's say, is, is really passionate about a particular area and they really want to focus on that, but spending their time and energy attention on that area means they'll maybe spend less time on something like their maths or their science work, and that has a problem for their grades. Let's imagine the student's fantastic at a certain sport or at art and it requires all their time to really meet their potential there, but that has a compromise of how much time they're investing elsewhere. I mean, I do think at the secondary level it's vital to make sure you do, do the best you can in all of your subjects. If someone does have an outstanding skill that lies outside of those subjects, or at least is something kind of tangential to them, so a student is fantastic, let's say, at rowing, but spending a lot of time on that is— or it has the potential to interfere with their studies. I think you need to strike a careful balance. I don't think it should interfere with their studies. I think there's a way that a student can spend a sufficient amount of time in those years to develop their skills without it threatening their studies. And then when they finish school, a lot more time should be then developed to nurturing that skill in a more rigorous, time-intensive way.

Yeah, well said, John. So I just want to give a shout out to my mom. Thanks, Mom, for telling my teachers to Just let, let Brent play sports and do art and it's all going to work out.

Good advice here.

So obviously, education for all of us requires resilience, I think, both for the students, but for educators, especially during— and parents during COVID pandemic and everything that's adjusting and adapting now. So if we were to kind of dive down into some of your research and thoughts on resilience, I'm wondering if maybe we can start off by defining what is resilience. And I know you had mentioned in your literature review I read recently this kind of 5C model, 5 Cs model of academic resilience. I'm wondering if maybe you could dive into that and maybe give all the educators, students, and parents some help here developing academic resilience.

Yeah, sure. So I define resilience in terms of two related abilities. Robustness and adaptability. On this definition, to be resilient means to be robust and adaptable in the face of adversity, to be able to resist being affected by difficulties— that'd be the kind of robustness— and when we can't help but be affected, having the ability to bounce back from those difficulties in a relatively short time. That would be the adaptability side of things, and it's an extremely important skill to possess. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, for example, in the book Flow, describes resilience as the ability to persevere despite having experiencing obstacles and setbacks. He says it's probably the most important trait, not only for succeeding in life, but also for enjoying life. Now that's a really bold claim.

I love that definition, John. I love he also builds on that saying that the reward we get from overcoming Setbacks is a brilliant evolutionary adaptation that I think somewhat builds on that too, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And so we can see by the way that Csikszentmihalyi expresses that how important it is to flow to cultivate one's resilience. And it's obvious if we look at what flow is, the ways in which it is very important. If we think about having to kind of constantly get past difficult setbacks, to constantly be striving to meet the skills challenge race, you're the highest to stay in the flow channel and to be, you know, developing yourself to your highest other potential. You can see why one needs to have this capacity to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks, which is one way of capturing at least an important element of resilience. Now, you mentioned the research on academic resilience, so that's something I've been involved with quite heavily the last 2 years. So The last couple of years, we've— I've been doing research into this kind of construct which is called academic resilience, which is, if you like, resilience within the academic setting, the kind of resilience that students need to deal with adversity in academic settings. And looking at research in that area, I recently wrote a literature review on academic resilience, and that's then feeding into some work we're doing— I've done with a colleague over the last year We've run an intervention at a school in London trying to develop the academic resilience of students aged 16 to 17 years of age. There is this so-called 5C model which is developed by two kind of leading researchers in academic resilience called Andrew Martin and Herbert Marsh.

You know, one of those 5Cs was around self-efficacy and what you're research had showed is that, you know, that studies in education suggest that differences in students' self-efficacy are better performance predictors than ability itself or even previous achievement. And I think if we think about the challenge-skill balance, I think this kind of ties directly to that. So maybe if a quick review of the 5 Cs model and maybe start off with any insights on, on self-efficacy itself.

Yeah, sure. So two educational researchers, Andrew Martin and Herbert Marsh put forward. From there, they've done a lot of research in academic resilience, and they propose what they call the 5C model of academic resilience, where it's a construct made up of 5 factors. First is self-efficacy, which they also just call confidence. The second is coordination, that is to say, planning skills. The third is a sense of control, for example, over academic work or academic success. The fourth is composure, which is basically a low level of anxiety. And the fifth is perseverance, which they also term commitment. And the current research, their research suggests that in order to best develop academic resilience, we should aim to develop all 5 of those areas: self-efficacy, sense of control, perseverance, planning skills, and to reduce students' anxiety.

I think that's a fascinating finding again, that self-efficacy is a better performance predictor than actual ability or perceived achievement. I think a lot of the times when I'm working with clients in our programs, I think of this in relation to, again, the challenge-skill balance and typically how, whether it's developing a growth mindset, an internal locus of control, employing mindfulness to get out of limiting beliefs about their confidence heading into whatever their domain may be, can be so powerful and transformative. Informational in their own development of their craft and their achievements. So yeah, I'm just curious, anything you might add to that? I thought it was a very fascinating finding here.

Yeah, of course. So it might be useful just to define self-efficacy. So self-efficacy is the belief we have in our own abilities and specifically the ability that we have to meet the challenges we face and successfully complete the tasks that we need to. And of course, that's very important for research on flow. Because in order to have a kind of an accurate perception of where one sits on the skills-challenge ratio and, you know, in the right point in the, in the sweet spot, in the flow channel as Csikszentmihalyi describes it, one needs to have a kind of an accurate belief in one's own abilities in order to identify what the next goal should be in the process, where one should be in that skills-challenge ratio, and so on and so forth. Now self-efficacy is argued in the research, identified by the research, that particularly significant predictor of academic resilience. And some studies suggest that differences in self-efficacy are better performance predictors, as you said, than ability or previous achievement. And that's to predict how kind of resilient they will be, but also how much they will perform in the future. And yeah, you've mentioned how that might relate to an area such as growth mindset, which, you know, research just can have a significant effect on education. Students with low self-efficacy may exhibit various behaviours such as avoiding challenges, having low self-confidence, underachieving, expecting results without putting in enough effort, and focusing on their weaknesses and their strengths. And research in academic resilience suggests that self-efficacy is particularly important for developing resilience. Having positive self-efficacy beliefs is likely to contribute towards increased resilience. It's a particularly important distinguishing factor between resilient and non-resilient students, particularly in the kind of 16 to 19 years of age bracket, and that it's a significant predictor of various areas of education. So I mean, what this research points to is that we should be aiming to develop students' self-efficacy skills, not only to develop their academic resilience, but also because that can really help to enhance their performance of and enjoyment of school. It's a very important character trait to develop.

Maybe if we can review some of the specific elements that you've identified in your literature review on how to develop that self-efficacy. But I also— one other finding I just thought may be helpful to mention here is the research suggests that students with a fixed mindset have been shown to be 58% more likely to show more severe symptoms of anxiety, as well as depression and aggression. And I know one of the key factors, or perhaps the most prominent factor in resilience, was reducing anxiety itself. So I thought that finding regarding fixed mindset was one of the things that perhaps we could develop within education to develop resilience. What else might you kind of point teachers or parents or even students towards cultivating?

Yeah, so I mean, I do think the development of a growth mindset is very important for developing resilience in general, so psychological resilience, but also to developing academic resilience, you know. And by growth mindset, I mean, um, you know, broadly speaking, drawing on Carol Dweck's influential work in this area, the belief that our character skills and our abilities are not fixed but are malleable are things that within our control to change to at least a certain degree. And this has been shown— cultivated growth mindset has been shown to have multiple effects, benefits for well-being, and including reducing anxiety, as you've mentioned. And that's why it's been recommended as a way of developing academic resilience, because having a low level of anxiety is one of the factors in Martin and Marsh's 5C model of academic resilience. So we need to have students have a low level of anxiety in order to have academic resilience. Now there's a lot of work in education on cultivating growth mindset and reducing fixed mindset, so that's, that's a good thing because that can really help this, and it's something that teachers are very familiar with. But there needs to be more work on disseminating good research on this and effective methods, because often the material that's disseminated is extremely quick and extremely brief there's a kind of a definitely a need in education for more, for more detailed dissemination of things in a kind of a more rigorous way, such that— because work on growth mindset has kind of become a bit of a parody of the way it's disseminated in some education circles, a parody of what it really is. It's not just about, you know, saying to people you can't do this yet. It's about teaching people what exactly it involves, what exactly, you know, cultivating a growth mindset involves, and then and in its various details and how powerful that can be in education. But you mentioned other strategies for the development of resilience. I mean, I'll mention a couple, one of which is closely related to flow. The first is that in order to become resilient, you've got to learn how to fail at things because resilience involves adaptability in the face of challenges. And you've got to learn how to recover from setbacks. And the best way to do that is to actually learn how to fail at things. So learning how to fail and learning how to cope with failure and recover from failure is important for developing your own perseverance and then reducing the time in which you bounce back from things. That is to say, becoming more adaptable, that being one of the definitive parts of resilience. The second part of that is related to comfort zone, and this relates quite nicely to flow. So there needs to be a high chance of experiencing adversity to develop resilience, because resilience is adaptability in the face of adversity. But you're very unlikely to experience it if you're always within your comfort zone. However, you don't want to move too far outside your comfort zone, because that can overchallenge you, and that can also mean that you stunt your confidence if you don't do particularly well. So one kind of rule of thumb here is that you need to kind of find, as it were, the right point at which your skills are challenged and you're just enough outside your comfort zone that there's a chance you experience adversity, but you're not so far outside it that you'll be way beyond your skill set such that you're not going to learn much. It's a waste of your time and the time of others, and that you risk stunting your confidence as a result of it. And here's where we can connect it quite nicely with flow, because the so-called flow sweet spot, the kind of ratio between challenge and skills, ratio between challenges and experiencing a level of anxiety and skills and try not to experience a level of boredom. You have to find that balance between where your skills are really stretched, you're right on the edge of your comfort zone, your skills are at their maximal capacity, and your challenges are too, and you're experiencing maybe a bit of anxiety, but you're not so far outside that you're outside what Csikszentmihalyi calls the flow channel. And that's where we can kind of learn something from that. And Csikszentmihalyi actually writes in Flow, he writes In all activities, enjoyment comes at a very specific point: whenever the opportunities for action perceived by the individual are equal to his or her capabilities. Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act. And that points also to the way in which this is very good for our well-being. He mentions enjoyment here. You know, flow is about meeting your potential, and also about experiencing happiness. And so this can develop your resilience, finding the flow channel, the flow sweet spot, but it can also be excellent for your well-being in the sense that it can help you enhance your happiness and help you fulfill your potential. So flow is nicely connected here to resilience, and maybe that points to one of the reasons why Csikszentmihalyi regards resilience as such an important character trait, as we discussed earlier on.

And Joe, there's one piece you had mentioned in your literature review that I thought may be helpful to follow back on. You mentioned it a little bit earlier, academic buoyancy, I believe the term is, correct? Yeah. And so you made this differentiation between resilience and academic buoyancy. And I thought it was really kind of focused on helping individuals deal with the day-to-day challenges that show up, maybe the unexpected obstacles and the way to— I don't know if it ties back to emotion regulation, but I certainly know with a lot of my work with individuals coming from an acceptance Commitment Therapy theoretical approach, I'm always focused on how to overcome kind of experiential avoidance. So moving away from that discomfort that we're kind of hitting on here. And so I don't know if that ties back into academic resilience here, but yeah, build on that for us. I thought it was very practical for day-to-day.

Yeah. Yeah. So thank you for mentioning that. So the way that academic resilience is defined is it's defined in such a way as to cover experiences that are quite severe, experiences that may result in a student having to withdraw from school or ultimately withdraw from school, you know, quite severe experiences. But there are various experiences that students encounter in their academic lives which require adaptability in the face of adversity, but not something so severe where they might have to withdraw from school, you know, the kind of more everyday challenges the kind of setbacks and pressures that are part of the kind of ordinary course of everyday academic life. How do we account for those? Because it seems reasonable to describe those in terms of resilience in some ways. How do we account for those whilst maintaining a kind of a tight grip on what academic resilience is focusing on, which is the kind of the more severe experiences students might experience that may result in them becoming completely demotivated and be at risk of withdrawing from school, such as, you know, experiencing a severe failure in their work, which falls way below expectations, getting suspended from school for a period of time, and so on and so forth. Something that's less severe than those, like getting a grade below expectation on their work, maybe for a few weeks in a row, and becoming a bit demotivated or quite demotivated from that, having a bad term at school, and so on and so forth. How do we account for those kinds of things? Well, here they propose a related concept which they call academic buoyancy to map onto such experiences. They define this as the capacity to overcome setbacks, challenges, pressures, and difficulties that are part of everyday academic life. And so it's distinct from academic resilience in that academic resilience refers to the capacity to overcome significant adversity that threatens a student's educational development, whereas academic buoyancy refers to the more common and by comparison relatively insignificant level of adversity. Now I think that's a very useful concept in education, but I think something we can learn from Andrew Martin and Herbert Marsh's research in this area is that this concept is something that I think we should use in everyday life to refer to experiences that we have that require a level of resilience, but not such a high level that we maybe call it something that requires resilience. Maybe we should just speak of being buoyant, being a buoyant person, developing the skill of buoyancy in the face of adversity. Because the concept of resilience has been used so widely in recent years, it gets banded around so much nowadays that we kind of lost grip on it having a precise meaning or a precise set of things that applies to it. There's so many articles on it and it's become of such great interest in recent years. And it is fascinating and it is extremely important, but I think that it's useful to distinguish it in terms of levels and distinguish it from related skills. So for example, there's a relationship between resilience and perseverance, a relationship to grit and so on, but maybe there's also levels of resilience. And maybe we could say that there's such a thing we call buoyancy, if you like, psychological buoyancy, which is this ability to adapt in the face of everyday challenges that we face, but they're not so severe as, you know, to be experienced as of trauma, for example, whereas resilience is that higher-level character skill that enables us to adapt to the face of more severe challenges that we face in our lives. Going through a very difficult breakup, losing a job, going through trauma, which you might have in either of those cases, but other cases too. Whereas buoyancy would be responding to everyday challenges that are very difficult, but we typically often describe those in terms of resilience, and maybe we should distinguish between types. And I think there's something that they offer from that research, and that's well worth exploring.

Building on that, I gotta just say, I love the word buoyancy. It feels good to say it and think about developing.

Ah, nice work.

So maybe we can go on to two of the last pieces I really want to explore with you, and I think it connects well to this. So relationships, so the, maybe even the value of relationships and resilience. You know, one of the things that kind of oriented me around a few times when showing these different models of flourishing is how relationships is the one constant throughout all of these models, kind of cultivating, developing meaningful relationships. And at FRC and in our flagship program, Zero to Dangerous, we really focusing on— sorry, we focus on developing what we call kind of a peak performance network. So developing support systems that are instrumental, companion, emotional, informational, really having a, a wide breadth of a network and and looking at that network itself as a strength. And so I'm just curious, maybe from your perspective, what role do you think relationships such as friendships play in human flourishing?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I mean, I said earlier, I don't think we should maybe rank— typically theories of flourishing, they don't rank the domains that constitute and enhance flourishing in terms of a hierarchy. And it will vary. Which domains are more important to certain people than others based on the certain kind of person they are. So, you know, someone— for some people, accomplishment will be much, will be much more important in their lives than, say, certain kinds of relationships. Maybe for some people, experiencing flow will be more important to them than developing certain aspects of their character or maybe finding, you know, spending certain time with certain people they have relations with. So it will vary person to person, but I mean, if you were to ask me in my opinion what is the most significant of all the domains for human flourishing, I would say relationships. I think they're certainly the most important in my own life, but I think that it'll be interesting to look at how research unfolds and develops in in the coming years, I can well imagine that relationships would be one of, if not the most important of all the domains for human well-being, for some of the reasons you've said, that they are one of the most reliable factors in predicting human well-being over time, how healthy their relationships are with others, having relationships with others. And so they are extremely important in our lives.

When we think about flow and the challenge-skill balance, I know Csikszentmihalyi described it initially as opportunities for action. I often think that, you know, we always have an opportunity to take action or challenge in relationships. And so the ability to find flow in relationships, I think, is one of the most maybe prevalent, uh, opportunity to consistently build a high-flow lifestyle. So I, you know, I'm somewhat of an introvert, but I admire individuals who are quite extroverted and, and finding flow consistently in relationships. And it's just something I've observed. I'm not sure if notice the same? Yeah, yeah, okay, that's a great question.

So, um, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks interestingly about kind of how we can find flow in, in relationships and the kind of things we need to do to do that, and it's, it's very interesting what he says about that. I mean, my view on that would be partly based on his work and my own views on this would be that friendships can certainly be a strong flow activity, a strong facilitator of flow. But it depends how we kind of navigate those friendships and what we do. I mean, if you spend all your time with your friends, or a significant amount of time with your friends, watching Netflix, whilst you might be completely absorbed in that activity, it's not going to be a flow activity because you're not stretching your skills in any way. But nonetheless, there are ways in which time with friends can massively enhance flow. So for example, one way to do it would be to identify the healthy activities in which you become most absorbed and most utilize your character strengths and look for opportunities to do those with people with whom you have relationships— friends, family, partner, loved ones. Ideally, people who also gain flow from them, but I don't think other people necessarily have to gain flow from them. They just have to really enjoy them. So for example, Stephen Kotler often talks about how much he loves skiing. Imagine you're somebody who loves skiing and you've got friends that also love skiing and you really get into flow when skiing. I mean, a great activity to do with them, with your friends, to kind of facilitate group flow would be to go skiing with them. You know, other common examples would be playing poker with friends, going climbing with friends. But on the simple socializing level, what about just socializing, just hanging out with people? Well, think about when it's a bit more challenging being in a social environment, so you're having to stretch your social skills. That would be things like being at a dinner party, being in a new social environment, you're introduced to new friends, but you're with friends with whom you often experience very high levels of happiness. There you're having to stretch social skills in certain ways. You're having to maybe focus more on your listening skills, trying to do simple things like remember people's names, trying to really show a level of inquisitiveness and learn from others by asking certain questions about what others do. There's ways in which you feel challenged in those environments and can, after a while of doing this, deeply enjoy them. Now that will of course vary significantly across introverts and extroverts. I just give that as one example of where you're in a simple social environment with friends, but you want to find some way of channeling flow through it.

I find that the ability to find flow with friends or even strangers tends to be the the easiest way for me to develop relationships. So for instance, I play a lot of basketball, and I love how basketball— you can go anywhere in the world, you show up to a court, you know, right off the bat, whoever is at the court, you're playing with them, they become friends. Even, you know, and just like that. And even with Steven and I, our relationship as friends and colleagues started with setting up a ski trip and spending some time on the mountain together. And, you know, again, that sense of losing a sense of self in the activity and feeling united, connected with others. It's, uh, it's one of the greatest feelings that I get in my life.

Yeah, that's great that you've had that experience. And so the example just gave skiing, Stephen, you've actually— I've got a real-life example of this in the call with me. This is fantastic. Yeah, I guess an example from my own life to kind of add to this, an example of where I have experienced flow with friends recently is, um, I mean, I gave a set of talks over the summer on human flourishing and well-being in Belize. I was staying at a kind of a remote work village that a friend of mine set up with some friends out there. And when I was giving talks out there, I was giving talks to friends, friends that I've had for a while, and then friends that I've made over the summer. I was there for a while, I was there for 6 weeks. So these became— so these people became close friends of mine. And, you know, in that environment, I'm really stretching my abilities in public speaking. I deeply value public speaking as a skill, particularly to a general audience, not to an academic audience, but an audience of just a diverse range of people that maybe don't have a background in the area in which you're speaking. And I'm there with friends in a social environment that's sort of work environment, but really having to stretch my skills as far as I'm going. I'm really pushing myself in that area, and then I'm hanging out with them afterwards and they're giving me feedback on how it went, and I'm feeling a great sense of accomplishment. And that's maybe would be a good example for me recently of a flow activity that was a social activity. I mean, that's the flow level of things. I mean, there's various ways in which friendship can massively support other areas of well-being.

Well, I'm curious even, and we can stay on this for a minute if we like, but for me, when I think about both of these examples, you public speaking, me playing basketball with strangers, or even skiing with Stephen, there's a level level of kind of having to show up and be authentic. And I know that's of interest for yours and kind of the sense of vulnerability that comes with showing up to the court or showing up to that conference. And maybe could you speak on kind of the value of authenticity in developing those meaningful relationships? And what do you think it means to really be authentic, perhaps?

That's a great question. And I do love this concept. And I've worked on this for a number of years. In a crude sense, to be authentic means to be true to yourself. What does that mean? Well, to be true to yourself, you have to have a certain degree of self-understanding because you have to know what it is you're being true to, to be true to yourself, right? And that requires you to have a good self-awareness and self-understanding. And then you need to live in such a way that maps on to that self-understanding without too much compromise, because there will be a degree of compromise. There is in life. I mean, there's no strong relationship with someone, you know, such as a partner, that doesn't involve— that involves no compromise whatsoever. Relationships with human beings often involve some degree of compromise. But the idea is that the things we do in life— relationships, jobs that we undertake, what we do with our time— don't compromise us so much in light of our aims and objectives and who we are that we are not being true to self, that we're deceiving ourselves, that we're making so much sacrifice over the kind of people we are that we're really not being true to the kinds of people that we are. And so that's why I say it's an efficient level of self-understanding, and also understand yourself to a sufficient degree and living in such a way that maps onto that without compromising too much. Now I can hope you can see maybe already various ways in which that relates to flow.

When I talk about flow, one of the— I think one of the most helpful ways to describe its utility is to relate it back to what I call kind of authentic self-expression. I think that when we're authentically expressing ourselves, and certainly there's research that connects flow to expression, that it really paints as far as the utility, the value in finding flow, and where authenticity kind of plays into that, that picture itself. So yeah, anything you'd like to maybe add on how flow relates to authenticity and and perhaps even anything with vulnerability, which I think is quite connected to this concept of authenticity as well. I know I said a lot there.

Right, yeah. So the ways in which— yeah, it's interesting you mentioned vulnerability. I'll start with relating things to flow. So as I've mentioned, and as you know, we get into flow best by engaging activities that best utilize our character strengths and bring us the most enjoyment. Now to identify what those activities are, we have to have a sufficient level of self-understanding. That relates to another point we were discussing earlier. To live a life in which we pursue those activities, we need to try to live in such a way that we're authentic, at least to some degree. So we're identifying certain things that we are very good at and aspects of our character we're strong at. That itself requires sufficient level of self-understanding. We're identifying the things that bring us happiness. Identifying flow activities involves identifying activities that do both, and then trying to live in such a way that you have the space and time in life to do those things is going to be part of what it means to live an authentic life. And I mean, Csikszentmihalyi talks about things related to this. He talks about how flow activities should be things that are freely— they are things that are freely chosen by the individual who chooses to engage in them, and they're intimately related to the sources of what people find ultimately meaningful. He says at one point in Flow, they are therefore perhaps more precise indicators of who we are as people. Okay, that flow indicators really point to, to who a person is, and authenticity is really about understanding who you really are. So in that sense, flow activities kind of have this cyclical kind of two-way relationship with authenticity in that flow activities can help you understand the kind of person you are, but also by understanding the kind of person you are, you can identify flow activities. That's a very interesting relationship between the two. Would you say, John, you mentioned earlier that you play the guitar.

I say this to people regarding basketball and even skiing. You don't know me until you've actually seen or play basketball with me. Be the same with, with guitar, that, you know, someone doesn't maybe truly know all of you if they haven't seen you kind of in the flow, even playing the guitar or jamming out there?

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I mean, certainly the highest flow experiences I've ever had have been in musical environments. I would say the highest level of flow I've experienced is— so I played a lot of jazz and funk, that was kind of the genres I focused on. And London has this amazing jam night scene where you just rock up at a venue and, you know, you put your name down or you tell whoever's running the night that you want to get up and play later on, and your name will get called out at some point and you'll just get on the stage with whichever musicians are playing. And you've either been told which song you're going to play in advance, or at the really high-level jam nights like Ronnie Scott's in Soho, you'll just get on stage and be like, right, we're gonna play this now in this key, and just go. If you don't know the song, you just got to find a way to get through it, and then that's a skill in itself, and people will respect that. If you do know the song, just make sure you're playing the right key and playing it well. And you're playing with red-hot musicians, you know, people who are masters of their craft. If you go to the best sort of jam nights in London— and of course you'll find these in various cities around the world— I remember going to Wally's in Boston, which I used to live in Boston and go to Wally's in Boston, which is a jazz club nicknamed the Training Ground, where young kind of jazz musicians at Berklee in particular would go to hone their skills. And it would be a sort of similar level of jazz jams at those nights. Those kind of experiences are the ones where I found the highest frequency, if you like, of flow experience. You just got into flow so quick because you're having a great time. You're totally absorbed in what you're doing. You completely lose track of of time and you are absolutely pushing your skills to the highest possible level. Your anxiety is about as high as it can be on the flow channel before it would get too high to be outside of the flow channel. Now, okay, so that's where I've experienced most flow, I would say. Does someone know me so they've seen me play guitar? I would— that's a great question. I mean, I would say that I'm probably at my most true most kind of revealing of who I am as a person, when I'm at least in the kind of environment where I, I act in, my personality is free to roam in the kind of way as when I am in a musical environment where I am amongst professional musicians, or in the years where I was a musician, in that I feel very free when I'm in that world. And, you know, my character takes, I think, perhaps more relaxed, more informal form and tone than it does. So yeah, there's a sense— I'm sorry, it's not like I have to be playing guitar, but at least there is a kind of aspect to my character that I think is noticeably different when I'm hanging out with musician friends of mine and when I'm playing a gig or something than when I'm in academic environments, let's say. And I'm actually, you know, I think I've been trying for years to find a way of living where that side of my character is, is the side of my character that is revealed, but within all of the activities I do. And that's a difficult thing to do. I mean, do you, do you find that the side of your character that's revealed from these activities where you're most authentic from playing basketball is revealed when you're maybe a coach for FRC or when you're giving talks or, you know, leading classes?

Yeah, I appreciate you putting that back on me, John. Because it is a tough question, you know, just for nuance. I, I ski, I play basketball very, very aggressively. That's, you know, for me, it's a way for me to tap into flow is to, to be aggressive, you know, in the backcountry, to be aggressive on the block, basketball. And, you know, obviously for self-regulation, to be socially engaged, that aggressiveness needs to be, you know, just expressed in a way that's going to be, uh, connect me from others and that disconnect. So it's a good— for me as a coach, I think it, it comes with challenging clients, right? Like being authentic and, and being vulnerable what I'm seeing in their progress and their systems, and, and not shying away from going to the difficult place, you know, as a psychologist but also as a coach, and, and upholding their, their boundaries. You know, if we think about flow as, you know, stepping into an activity where there's clear rule or clear goals clear rules to be followed and things to be learned. Really just holding up those strong boundaries, I think, is one way that I can do that. But it's similar to you, maybe it's I don't find the same level of flow in most contexts as I do skiing or playing basketball. So something I'm continuing to explore. Maybe as we begin to wrap up here, I wanted quickly maybe explore the science of learning, but I want to just maybe ask you one more question on that topic. Is if you were to think of an education facility, a school, a university that's most like a live jam session like you're just mentioning in Boston there, whatnot, you know, we could think of the flow triggers, uh, maybe as a rubric, but what else might you add if you could just infuse a little bit more of those triggers or the characteristics that you experienced at, uh, at the jam sessions there?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's important to give— if you really want to foster innovation and various character skills, like you mentioned creativity earlier— that a high degree of autonomy is important in an institution. I think that applies to any institution, not just educational ones. If you look at a lot of the most successful innovative institutions now, there's a lot of autonomy that the staff have to be free in their role to make it, to re-sculpt it, if you like, how they see fit, to see opportunities to change things. You look at startups and some of the most successful companies in the tech world, staff have a lot of autonomy there. They're given a role to do, but then they might innovate within that role and redefine that role in certain ways. They don't have very strict, rigid hierarchies in certain ways that traditional professional do. In education, I think it's really important to give a strong sense of autonomy to students and staff. In the case of staff, to really, you know, experiment within their role in terms of how they're teaching material, what the best ways to teach it are, and even maybe to choose kind of other areas of material that could be taught to complement the things they have to teach in such a way as to kind of enhance the learning and the degree to which students are kind of more roundedly read on the subject they're studying. And the case of students, to kind of set them activities to do and give them tasks to engage in that really allow them a degree of freedom to experiment for themselves, you know, to get them to engage in, for example, a kind of design thinking in an approach towards certain tasks in, say, project-based learning environments, or to set them questions about a philosophical topic that really get them to think in an autonomous way about it and to try and think of new ways of applying the things under discussion to their life rather than just thinking about things in the traditional way. You know, how can we apply these ideas from Plato to 21st— you know, to the UK in the 21st century or to international relations in the 21st century? What relevance do they have today? So I think autonomy is one of the most important factors that can help realize things such as flow in any institution, but particularly educational ones.

Well said, John. And I'm sure you could add a lot more. One of the things I would just also add to that, one of my favorite books somewhat on this topic within individual's occupation is Alive at Work by Daniel Cable. Really talks about activating the seeking system and having people feel as if they're going into their organization, not necessarily to just complete tasks, but to express themselves, to be creative, to iterate those processes, as you mentioned, and how that ties back to engagement. So I'm not sure if you've read that book, but I thought it articulates some really meaningful concepts there too.

Yeah, yeah, that's a great, a great connection there. Right on.

So maybe lastly, the science of learning, you know, and I'm wondering, you know, you're a gentleman that's writing a book, has written 3 books in the past, puts together presentations, and, uh, you know, you're quite an accomplished individual. Could you share anything on the science of learning and how you set up your day, uh, when you're working on, on a project so that you're able to get into flow, we could say, in, in the creation of your writing or whatever it may be you're working on?

Yeah, sure. So I work with the Pomodoro technique. Religiously. I learned this off a friend of mine, a very close friend of mine. His name's Doug, and I met him in grad school. Right on, Doug. He's a great guy, and he's taught me a hell of a lot over the years. He's a great friend, and he introduced me to Pomodoro Technique. And ever since then, I found it extremely useful. In a nutshell, for listeners that aren't familiar with it, it's the idea that you work in intense you know, blocks without distractions, typically for 25 minutes with 5-minute breaks, and you do that 4 times, then take a longer break. But you can mix the times up longer if you want, and there's research that suggests that, you know, to really get into deep focus, you need to have longer periods of work and so on. I think it's partly experimenting with what works for you. I find the 25-5 works very well for me, and the idea is that you really focus on a single task and you identify what that task is before you set the goal You work on that for those 25 minutes or as long as it takes you. It might take you more than one Pomodoro, it's called, more than one chunk of time or less than that. And then you take a 5-minute break and you do actually take a break from it and then get back into it.

I had seen that when you gave a presentation on that prior, that one of the steps was also reflecting on that 25-minute block, seeing what you accomplished and taking some time. I'm not sure if you can kind of expand end on that. And I'm going to introduce something else here that might take us on a tangent. Csikszentmihalyi, in that book Flow, he talked about, you know, what he called vita activa, I believe, and vita contemplative. So how a good life is a balance between action and reflection. And he actually mentioned how a life that has perhaps more time for contemplation or reflection is characteristic of a good life. And I think a lot of what you've spoken today is is on developing self-awareness and then taking action from that. So I went from a really small granular concept to a big one here. But yeah, is that reflection piece a big part of the Pomodoro as well?

Yeah, it absolutely is. And thank you for pointing that out. So the idea is that you— obviously, if you've only got a 5-minute break between each Pomodoro, you have limited time to reflect. But the idea is that you can reflect in each break, if you like, or in the longer breaks on how well you met the goal. And maybe how you might change up the goal for the next section you're doing. You know, maybe you set two bigger goals. The idea is to break down bigger goals into smaller goals and strive to achieve those within manageable chunks of time, say 25 minutes, and those will contribute, say, towards some bigger goal. So you don't want to, in a 25-minute chunk, something like write book or write article. It would be like develop this section of this part of the book, let's say, or rehearse this part of the presentation, you know, in that 25-minute chunk. So it can be achieved there, or something that could be achieved over 4 Pomodoros, you know, do the first part of 4 parts of this. But if you find after, say, a day of doing Pomodoros, or after 4 of them, that you're not really meeting your goals in those times and that you're getting distracted in that period, that's when it's time to reflect on whether you're maybe setting too big goals or too small goals, whether you should maybe adjust the amount of time you're spending each time. Maybe you want to take a longer break every 3 Pomodoros or every 6. You know, it is about finding what works for you because, I mean, this began with Francesco Cirillo at university who wanted to find a really good way to structure his time and so started using a tomato timer, just set it for 25 minutes and found that it worked very well. And since then, research has been published on how this does work. But in the first instance, it just kind of— it wasn't a research-based exercise. He just had a go with this and it worked very well for him, and since then it's been backed up by research. But research does suggest that the time you spend can vary, you know, depending on the kind of person you are. And to reach deep levels of thought and work, you might need a bit longer. So it's about finding what works for you. I find this 25-minute does work well, but you must reflect on it, yes, daily if you like, or when it's not working, just to see how you can enhance it as much as possible. Because the idea is that this can really it really can enhance your productivity on getting through things. You know, if you have a big task and you break it down into, say, 6 Pomodoros, be like, I'm going to do this over 3 hours, and then you do it, you can get— I find that I can get work done that it would often take me, say, 5 hours to do. And it can be a really nice feeling of satisfaction after that and also then give me time to do other things.

Yeah, I think the reflection is building in the immediate and relevant feedback.

Element of flow, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because in order to engage in what's called deliberate practice, you need feedback and you need to be giving yourself feedback on, on what's working and what isn't. The best source of feedback is a coach. And here's their, their advert for the coaches at Flow Research Collective. If you want to, you know, raise your game, level up your game, the best thing to have is a coach to help you do that in any context at all. But also you need to be giving self-reflective feedback to yourself, partly because it supports metacognition. That is to say, your understanding of your own abilities and level of knowledge and how to best develop those. And most people actually don't have that higher level of metacognition. Metacognition is often quite poor, and it's a problem, you know. We need to really focus on enhancing it in education and more widely. One way to enhance it is to regularly be monitoring how well you're doing at things in order to better calibrate your understanding of your own awareness of your skills and your abilities. You know, this relates to our kind of the leitmotif of our conversation, which I guess is self-awareness and self-understanding. But you've also asked, you asked kind of what my routine is. I mean, and this connects also, I think, with something that I've heard various of your guests talk about. I mean, I structure my day in such a way as to focus on the most cognitively challenging things at the start of the day because I find that best, and evidence suggests that is the best way to do things in terms of you know, getting tasks done efficiently and maximizing your focus. And so I try and wake up as early as possible and spend the first sort of hour and a half to 3 hours of the day writing to Pomodoros. So I try to get 6 Pomodoros done at the start of a day on whatever it is that I'm writing at the time. And it's usually writing that I want to do in that time because I find writing and public speaking to be the most challenging things I do, but also the things I find most rewarding. And so at the start of the day, it would typically be that I'm working on a piece of writing I'm doing, or I'd be preparing a presentation I'm doing, or rehearsing a presentation if I'm giving one. But it's usually writing. And then after that period, it would then be, say, researching or teaching or doing other things. But I think a bad way to start your day, to waste your cognitive resources, is to wake They start your day by checking emails, go through emails. That's a waste of cognitive resources. If you can clear the deck with emails the day before and check them after you've done your, say, 4 Pomodoros and you take that big break, that's a good use of time in the morning. You don't want to waste that cognitive energy on checking emails. Leave that till later if you can.

It's always— maybe you don't have a clear answer to this, but a lot of clients that come through our program will ask about utilizing that first morning block for their kind of, uh, their, their exercise, their kind of wellness routine. And we often try to jump right into, um, like you're saying, kind of eating the toad first, taking care of their, their hardest task. And just the level of feelings, if whatever shows up in the rest of the day, they've already won it by owning that, that morning block, is so powerful. But then again, when someone has a— their priority is their health, it seems like ensuring that that's top priority and utilizing maybe that cognitive resource of emotional buoyancy or resilience is important for them. So I don't know if you have any suggestions around that challenge. Yeah, yeah, that's a good—

I mean, that's a good question. And I'll admit that I often mix it up. So I exercise every day and try to exercise every day of the week and don't always. If I aim to do every day of the week, I often do do like sort of 4 or 5 days a week. And I often— I sometimes first thing in the morning instead work out rather than dive into the work. Um, it varies, but if I could describe my perfect day would be to get up to do what I've described. You work for 3 hours, then you do a workout after you've done 3 hours, then eat breakfast and then continue with work. That would be how I know I was doing that kind of in this year for about 3 months. During the lockdown, you know, where I had like no distractions for like going out in the evenings and stuff. In the UK, the third lockdown the first few months this year, it was just so easy to focus on doing— I find it very easy to focus on doing work because I just didn't have the kind of distractions, the social distractions, which I really enjoy having, but meant that I, you know, would be going to bed early every day and getting up and just working. So I think sort of 3 hours of work to Pomodoros, then doing a workout, and then cracking on. And actually, that maps on with one of your podcasts on FRC, which was on intermittent fasting. One of your guests there talked about how a very healthy way to live is to do this 16-hour fast a day, which is something else I do. And he described starting your day drinking Bulletproof coffee or drinking black coffee, working for a few hours, and then doing a workout, and then eating the first time maybe after that, or just continuing until you've reached the the 16-hour window. I know also that Stephen Kotler, the way he describes his routine, he wakes up and starts working at 4 AM or something and probably writes for several hours. I mean, that's a whole other level of self-discipline. I can't say I've ever once in my life, I don't think, got up before ever started writing except when I had an impending deadline. But, um, that's extremely impressive. Yeah, I mean, I don't have an answer as to whether writing first thing's best. It varies person to person, and I can see the merits of doing both.

Yeah, I see myself similar to you. It's, um, what's most sustainable for me is at times having to work out first thing in the morning. But traditionally, a perfect day would be jumping right into eating the toad first or taking on a cognitive kind of work task. So as we wrap up here, I have maybe 2 more questions. So the first is, and this is a personal interest of mine, I did my dissertation on the dark side of flow. So how flow can potentially lead to self-control failure, essentially we could look at it both going from these huge highs, these peaks to perhaps these valleys on the, on the back end of flow, but also finding flow in areas that might not lead to living a value-driven life, uh, to growth. And so when we kind of tie this back to flourishing being a long-term way of being, any thoughts on this kind of dark side of flow potential and how to mitigate it, uh, perhaps utilizing using this PERMA model or this flourishing model.

Yeah, I mean, that's a fascinating topic you wrote your dissertation on, Brent. I'd love to read that, learn about more about the dark side of flow. It's a great topic to work on. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm aware of some of the research on the dark side of flow. I remember Nick Houlton, a friend of mine, talked about this in the interview he did with FRC on the podcast. And yeah, I'd love to learn more about your research in this area. I guess one dark side that springs to mind is that if you experience that level of engagement and enjoyment and the experience of accomplishment you get with flow, if you find ways to channel that more and more in your life from certain things, it can make other experiences where you don't experience that feel kind of not as fulfilling. And if human flourishing strongly consists in a sense of fulfillment, as I think it does— I mean, as I define flourishing, it involves fulfillment in the sense of fulfillment of potential, but also fulfillment in the sense of life satisfaction—experiences where you're not experiencing flow can feel unfulfilling if you find ones that really do give you flow. So that's a kind of a dark side, the kind of comparison, if you like. It's like comparing quality time with friends to small talk with strangers. I mean, the latter just doesn't compare, right? If you're really experiencing these great highs, experiences, and then the other experiences the comparison can just become more severe, and you can kind of be constantly wanting that flow, and if you can't get it, that can be frustrating. How that can relate to flourishing would be, well, I mean, if you are in such a position where you're experiencing that much flow in your life that you are so attuned to what it is and so able to get it that certain experiences feel impoverished by comparison, well, you're really probably going to be really hitting the nail on the head when it comes to that aspect of flourishing, namely engagement, as positive psychology defines it, or flow. If you're able to get flow that much, that— okay, well, if you're having a kind of a dark side of flow in the way I've described, you're probably nonetheless going to be having quite high well-being in certain ways, at least insofar as flow is concerned. So I think it can counterbalance it in a positive way. The kind of way in which it would be negative would be if you were aware of what flow is and you were spending your life searching for that again and you couldn't find it. That would be bad for your well-being. So I described earlier how I found my highest level of flow jamming with musicians in jam nights in London. And I've not found things that bring me quite the level of flow except that. But I'm still deeply fulfilled because I have various flow activities that don't quite bring me that level of flow, but nonetheless bring me flow and plenty of them. However, if I couldn't find anything that brought me anything like that level of flow, I can imagine not feeling fulfilled and that would be my well-being. So I guess a dark side of flow would be if you're sadly in a position where you can't find them. And in that case, kind of the role of someone who works on flourishing or if you like a flow coach would be to try to help individuals to identify other areas of life where they can experience flow. Yeah, well said.

You know, part of what I explored or what the research suggests, John, They give examples of people, you know, whether it's video game addiction, so that's a potential dark side, or even big wave surfers who are just so addicted to the state that they keep putting themselves in bigger waves, smaller boards, higher consequences, and their life might be falling apart all around them, their relationships or whatnot, but they need to get back on the surf. They also spoke about the impaired risk perception. So particularly with kayakers and how when you're in a flow state, you lose a sense of self. And so if you're a beginner in particular, you can really have impaired risk perception and put yourself at, you know, self-control failure there. And also, interestingly enough, how you can find flow and kind of antisocial behavior. So in particular, they spoke about in combat, you know, where someone's in the act of killing someone and, you know, you're so engaged and absorbed in it in the past that, you know, obviously in combat and in war, maybe that's maybe functional, but, uh, always losing that awareness of long-term values or the impact to others might not be facilitative for a long-term way of being.

Right. Wow. Well, this is fascinating, Brent. I'd love to read your work on this. These are— yeah, I can totally see how these are areas of the dark side of flow. I'd love to learn more about this from you. Maybe I'd like to interview you about this sometime. Sure. Yeah.

I'll send it to you after. And I actually just started it off with a Plato quote. You, you might like this, that the first and greatest victory is to conquer oneself and how in a flow state, we certainly do that. If we think of the neuroscience, transient hypofrontality and just becoming absolutely absorbed in the moment, but then being able to conquer oneself through what again, Csikszentmihalyi called kind of Vida Contemplative, a more contemplative state where we maybe learn to let go of some of the contents of the the consciousness or the self to just be able to be and find flow in that. So yeah, I'd love to send it and happy to riff on that anytime there with you, John. So maybe a last question here. We often finish off with this research genie question. So if you were to think about, you know, one challenge or one problem or a research question that you could have a clear answer to, what might that be?

Yeah, thank you for asking. That's a great question. So the current research on human flourishing by the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, they identify what they call pathways to flourishing. So these are areas of life that strongly enhance all of the domains that they take to be constitutive of flourishing. In their account, the domains are— there's 5 of them— happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character, virtue, and close social relationships. And the four domains they identify are family, work, education, and religious community. Those are all areas of life that strongly enhance all those areas. Now, a big challenge for flourishing research, and what I would like to know right now, would be how can we enhance all of those areas of flourishing and others without relying on those pathways. Because when I give talks on flourishing and mention these, I mean, a piece of advice you could extract from that would be, well, have a family and become religious. It's just ways you can really enhance your flourishing. I mean, and that's not advice, you know, you want to be giving to people. Of course, you know, if you want to become religious, please do, and if you want to get married, please do, and if you want to have children, please do. But these aren't things that, you know, some people don't want to do this thing. Increasing number of people choosing not have children and, you know, choosing to not get married. So a challenge we face in flourishing research now is how we can kind of, as it were, support and enhance your flourishing without relying on these kinds of pathways. So I would love to know how we can do that without having to get married, without having to become religious, and that addresses a big challenge we face today in an increasingly geographically mobile society in a world where more and more people are living alone, more and more people are choosing not to marry, choosing not to have children, and we're going to have to address this in research on flourishing well-being. Right on. Well, Dr.

Jonathan Beale, it's been, it's been a pleasure. How do people stay connected with you? You're a good Twitter follow, I know that, but any other ways that people can stay connected with you and, and engage and follow your journey here? Yeah, sure.

So yeah, I'm on Twitter, tag is Dr. Jonathan Beale. I'm on Instagram @johnnybeale, J-O-N-N-Y. Uh, you find me on LinkedIn, and I'm currently setting up a podcast with one of your coaches, Nick Holton, which we're hoping to release in January on human flourishing. So keep a lookout for that.

All right, John, well, listen, next time maybe we'll get you jamming on the podcast.

That would be a lot of fun. Let me see you a little bit more. I'd love to watch you play basketball as well. That'd be great. Maybe shoot some hoops together someday.

So, John, it's, uh, it's been a pleasure. Really looking forward to staying connected with your journey. Thank you for sharing so much of the science of human flourishing, on the science of learning, of authenticity, of relationships. It's, it's been meaningful and, uh, a lot of fun for me. So thanks, John, and we look forward to staying connected in the future here.

Thank you so much, Brent. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

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