Weekly Share: Go With the Flow

You are probably familiar with the term “flow”: A state of full immersion in an activity, also known as the optimal state of consciousness in which we perform and feel our best.

A few years ago I read the book “The Rise of Superman”, which tries to learn from action and adventure athletes - who have to be in flow to perform their impossible feats - how we can optimize our performance and get more flow in our lives. As someone who’s too afraid to dive into a pool and was concerned with purpose rather than performance, I started paying more attention to which activities already put me in a state of flow, as a clue to what I should do more of. That’s how I realized I don’t hate writing - the few times I had to write something I noticed that I lost track of time and then couldn’t figure how I even came up with what I wrote: A textbook case of flow.

It turns out that different people get into flow through different situations and activities - deep thinking vs. communing with the universe, isolation vs. group activities etc. The Flow Genome Project (founded by Jamie Wheal, one of the authors of the book) defines four types of flow profiles; if you like quizzes you can discover yours here.

To learn more about flow in less than 40 min, this is a pretty good overview by Steven Kotler, the other author.

When does flow happen in your life? When you garden? Rock-climb? Spend time with certain people? Are there any commonalities between the activities that get you into flow? What can you do to increase the frequency of flow in your life?

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