After struggling and failing a number of times to complete a 10k run, you decided to take the time to develop your stamina and speed.
The grueling months of practice and dedication have finally come to an end and you now feel more ready than ever to go to the track and give it one more try…
… you start hitting your strides slowly, but with every step you take you gain more and more confidence. Each step begins to feel more natural, more rhythmic. Your breathing feels more disciplined and under control, your vision narrow and focused, and your mind is empty of negative thoughts. It doesn’t feel like you’re exerting yourself much. You don’t feel blocked anymore. Your mind, your feelings, and your body are aligned and you feel in-sync with the track. You’ve now entered a “flow” state. You begin to experience intense feelings of euphoria much like a spiritual awakening to your greater power. You feel unstoppable. With each stride, you become more and more certain that the race is yours, and you effortlessly power yourself through until you’re finally there. You’ve reached the finish line.
Like a runner, everyone who has experienced a “flow state” has described it as magical. You’re wholly immersed in what you’re doing and you experience spontaneous moments of pure bliss and joy. It’s like a trance.
Athletes, artists, composers, and writers are particularly well-suited to have an abundance of “flow” experiences. In fact, this experience is born as a result of the nature of their tasks. They’re all engaged in activities that requires a high degree of concentrated effort as well as a high level of creative input, both of which are necessary to meet and complete the challenges they face. However, they enter the “flow” state only at the point where their skills and the difficulty of the challenge are in balance. That’s when they start having something like a transcendental experience and achieve “flow”.
The concept of “flow,” however, is not only reserved for professionals. In fact, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a researcher of Hungarian origins and a professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate College who is credited with introducing this concept into western discourse, believes that anyone could in fact achieve it – doing any kind of systematic activity like yoga, fishing, carpentry, etc – provided they meet certain conditions. See his TED talk.
1. Matching Skills With Challenges
Flow begins with setting a clear goal to which you can direct your full attention. This entails understanding the objectives of your goal and approaching them tactically and purposefully. Without this clarity, the mind will operate in a naturally unorganized and unsystematic way.
But not only does your goal have to be clear, it must be meaningful to you. You have to be intrinsically motivated to pursue it and see it realized. And the more satisfaction you experience from working on it, the more likely you’ll enter the “flow” state. Contrary to what people think about such experiences, the source of “flow” is internal to you. And you bring it about when you pursue it for its own sake. That’s different from pursuing a goal out of fear of punishment or in order to receive a grade or win the approval of a friend. In these cases, external influences can interfere, and quite directly so, with your ability to “become one” with the activity.
More importantly, however, the goal you’re aiming to achieve must be slightly beyond your skills and capabilities. That’s where all of your cognitive resources are preoccupied with helping you “dominate” the task. But a mismatch between your skills and the challenge you’re facing will put in different, and to a certain extent, undesirable states. For example, if the task that you’re working on is within your abilities, then you will be in control, but not in “flow.” If it is significantly beyond your abilities, then you will experience apathy and you will eventually stop and give up. On the other hand, if the task is below your skill level, then you will experience boredom and quickly lose interest. In essence, you don’t experience “flow” when there is a mismatch because they don’t allow you to “grow” from being in the process. And when there’s no growth, there’s no flow.
2. Focused Concentration
Entering the “flow” state requires gradual involvement in your activity. You have to gather up some momentum before you enter the “zone”. As such, it’s wrong to think that you can enter the “flow” state as soon as you start working on a given task. You simply can’t switch mental states by re-directing your attention from one task to another. For example, you can’t go from washing the dishes to writing an article and expect to enter a flow state right away. You also can’t start playing the piano and expect to become meaningfully absorbed in the activity just from playing your first note.
To that effect, you must be engrossed enough until you reach a certain threshold. I like to think of that threshold as the moment when I start “losing sense of time.” To further quantify this, based on my experience with writing, it starts between 20 – 40 minutes of writing. That’s where I lose sense of time and enter my “flow” state. Other writers, and even friends in other professional fields like runners and musicians, agree with me that it takes about 20 – 40 minutes to get in the “zone.”
In this sense, there is a necessary phase of “mental preparation” that you have to have before your mind starts working more efficiently. It’s the necessary precursor to unleashing more of its potential.
As I’ve been working on the 90,000 words in 90 days challenge, I’ve found that I enter a flow state very early in the process. As soon as I “receive” a topic that I intuitively feel right about, I sit down and I start writing. My writing tends to be in the form of discovery. I rarely know what the next thought is going to be, but the more my fingers type, as in now, the more thoughts want to make themselves known, and I find them melt on the screen in front of me as I chase my thoughts. It’s an exhilarating experience. And I’ve been fortunate enough to experience “flow” every single day since I’ve started this challenge. Sorry, I digress.
In summary, three key ingredient must be present before you can enter the “flow” state:
- Having a clear and meaningful goal
- The challenge has to be slightly above your abilities
- You have to establish momentum
Sadly, however, most people stop working on their tasks well before they enter the “flow” state, and that’s why many people quit working on their tasks and fail to be productive. Moreover, many prevent themselves from entering into that state because they allow distractions to pull them out from ever “getting in the zone.” They let themselves get distracted with texts, or a facebook message, or a phone call, or other meaningless distractions that can rob them from the opportunity to experience the beauty and power of their potential. If you’re interested in the link between “flow” and productivity, see my article here.