Build self-confidence – If you don't have confidence in your skills, tasks may seem much harder than they actually are.Use strategies to improve your concentration so that you're more productive and focused during the day. Improve your concentration – Many things may distract you from your work, and achieving flow is more difficult when your focus is interrupted.Learning to set effective goals can help you achieve the focus you need. Set goals – Goal setting is important in experiencing flow.To improve your chances of experiencing flow, try the following: This can be feedback from other people, or the awareness that you're making progress with the task. Feedback – You must have clear, immediate feedback, so that you can make changes and improve your performance.If one of these weighs more heavily than the other, flow probably won't occur. Balance – There must be a good balance between your perceived skill and the perceived challenge of the task.Whether you're learning a new piece of music or creating a presentation, you must be working towards a goal to experience flow. Goals – Goals add motivation and structure to what you're doing.But you're likely to experience many of them when flow occurs.Ĭsíkszentmihályi also identified three things that must be present if you want to enter a state of flow: Remember that all of these factors and experiences don't necessarily have to be in place for flow to happen. Being completely absorbed in the activity itself.Feeling that the activity is intrinsically rewarding.Having a sense of personal control over the situation.Experiencing a balance between your ability levels, and the challenge.Losing the feeling of consciousness of one's self.Being able to concentrate for a sustained period of time.Having a clear understanding of what you want to achieve.How do you know when you're experiencing flow? Csíkszentmihályi identified 10 experiences that go with the state of being in flow: They make whatever they're doing look easy, and they're totally engaged with it. This state of flow is often observed in people who have mastered their business, art, sport, or hobby. This moves us to a position where we can experience "flow" (being totally involved and engaged in the activity). To find a balance, and to perform at our best, we need a challenge that is significant and interesting, and we need well-developed skills, so that we're confident that we can meet the challenge. But facing a challenging task without the required skills could easily result in worry and anxiety. The model shows the emotional states that we're likely to experience when trying to complete a task, depending on the perceived difficulty of the challenge, and our perceptions of our skill levels.įor example, if the task isn't challenging and doesn't require a lot of skill, we're likely to feel apathy towards it. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. He wrote about the process of flow in his book " Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience."įrom Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, copyright © 1997, 1998, 2007. The Flow Model (see figure 1) was first introduced by positive psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi. We'll also look at how you can use the ideas behind the Flow Model to experience flow more often, so that you can be more productive. We'll review how the model can help us understand why we find some tasks much easier than others. In this article, we'll examine flow in detail by looking into the Flow Model. Psychologists call this "flow." When it happens, we lose our sense of self, and move forward on instinct, completely devoted to the task before us. Most of us have had this experience at one time or another. You felt energized, even joyful, about what you were doing. Your attention was focused entirely on what you were doing, and you were so engaged that you might even have missed lunch. Have you ever been so involved in doing something that you lost track of time? Everything around you – from the ringing of phones to the people passing in the hallways – seemed to fade away. When tasks seem effortless, you're experiencing flow.
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