How to Find Flow

April 5th, 2009 § 0

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

My first introduction to the concept of flow came in Aric Rindfleisch’s New Product Development seminar during my final year as a Marketing undergrad at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Intrigued, I recently felt compelled to revisit the topic. Positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow. Flow is a mental state in which a person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and success in the process of the activity during which all sense of time and place is forgotten. Colloquially we might say, he or she is “in the groove” or “in the zone”. This idea becomes increasingly relevant in today’s time of career upheaval and professional dissatisfaction/disillusionment felt by much of Generation-Y. Shouldn’t we be partaking in careers in which we experience flow?

I began reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s national best-seller, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, in hopes to uncover the steps to finding my flow. Stay tuned for my discoveries!

Are You Experiencing Flow? Look for the following 9 factors (Not all are needed for flow to be experienced)

  1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities).
  2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
  3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
  4. Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
  5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
  6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
  7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
  8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
  9. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

The idea of doing what keeps you in a state of flow goes back to the notion of making your passion your career - Here’s an interesting essay on the topic How to do What you Love.