One Simple Tip for Accomplishing Anything
Do you ever feel hopeless towards a goal?
Do you ever feel that you won’t get there no matter how long you work at it?
Whether your goal is sight reading, perfecting a piece, or even calculus homework, there’s a simple solution to accomplishing anything.
I can’t sell it to you; you’ll have to find it yourself– what is it?
It’s Flow
Flow is complete focus, “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one… Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost“, says Csíkszentmihályi, the (positive) psychologist who coined the term.
Flow gives you further improvement, researchers have found, and improves your performance.
Simply put, you’re absorbed into an activity, whether it be practicing piano or studying for exams, so much that you’ve lost track of time– and everything else falls away except for what you’re doing.
When you’re in flow, you’re using reaching your potential because all your energy is directed at one single activity.
You’ve experienced flow before; humans have been ‘flowing’ long before Csíkszentmihályi came along and named it ‘flow’.
Finding Flow
How, exactly, can you find flow, if it’s so great?
You’ve experienced it one time or other already; the question is how you can find it when you need it.
To be more exact, these are the ten facters that, according to Csíkszentmihályi, accompany flow.
While lots of these factors may be present when you’re in flow, you don’t need all ten factors to be in flow.
- Clear goals that, while challenging, are still attainable.
- Strong concentration and focused attention.
- The activity is intrinsically rewarding.
- Feelings of serenity; a loss of feelings of self-consciousness.
- Timelessness; a distorted sense of time; feeling so focused on the present that you lose track of time passing.
- Immediate feedback.
- Knowing that the task is doable; a balance between skill level and the challenge presented.
- Feelings of personal control over the situation and the outcome.
- Lack of awareness of physical needs.
- Complete focus on the activity itself.
Flow is easy to find– you just need to know where to look. The key to finding flow is balancing challenge.
Balancing Challenge
“Flow also happens when a person’s skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable, so it acts as a magnet for learning new skills and increasing challenges… If challenges are too low, one gets back to flow by increasing them. If challenges are too great, one can return to the flow state by learning new skills.”
–Csíkszentmihályi (Finding Flow)
All you need to do is make sure that you have a challenge that takes up all of your focus.
You need a task that’s challenging enough so that you’re entirely focused, but easy enough so that you feel like you’re improving and so you don’t get frustrated.
A challenge that’s too easy won’t need your undiverted attention, so you won’t go into flow.
- For example, if you can’t get past the first octave of a scale (playing at a certain tempo) without your hands splitting up, yet you’ve been trying again and again with the metronome for the past hour, you’re not going into flow and you’re not improving much, if at all.
The challenge is too great and you know that you’re not improving.
The fix: to find flow, you need to decrease the challenge slightly.
You can decrease the level of difficulty in the challenge in many ways, as long as it makes you feel that the goal is doable.
- For the example above, you would first decrease the tempo and correct any fingering errors.
- When that becomes too easy, you would then aim for evenness; you would play them with alternating accents at the same tempo.
- And when that becomes too easy, then you would increase the tempo again– in the end, your goal would be achieved.
When you increase the level of difficulty in small steps like that, you would be in a state of flow the entire time, as opposed to hours upon hours of frustration.
Concentration
You find flow when you’re completely concentrated on a challenge, so concentration is really important.
Eliminate any distractions; finding concentration might involve silence, neatness, or even white noise– create conditions where you concentrate best, then you will flow.
Even something simple like closing the door might help your concentration.
I personally concentrate best when it’s quiet; that’s when I work best– I find noise distracting.
Final Notes
- You’ll improve at anything much quicker when you’re in flow because all your energy is concentrated on one challenge and you’re “using your skills to the utmost”.
- When you’re in flow, you’re getting more product for your effort than you would get if you weren’t in flow.
- Being in a state of flow is ultimately enjoyment, even for the most mundane tasks, as long as there’s a doable challenge– time literally flies because you’re so concentrated on it.
- Flow really pushes your potentials because you need to keep adjusting your challenges to achieve even greater challenges.
Over to You
Share how you find flow and your thoughts on flow in your comment!
Loading ...