'FLOW' IS YOUR KEY TO JOYFUL PRODUCTIVITY

HOW TO ENJOY YOUR WORK AND BE BETTER TOO!

Positive Psychology is the branch of science that is all about maximizing joy and worthiness of the human life. The Flow Theory is one of the most influential breakthroughs of positive psychology and the ideas were first presented by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Ukrainian Immigrant to the United States who after pursuing Ph.D. in Psychology worked with Martin Seligman as one of the founding fathers of Positive Psychology. The Flow Theory has revolutionized how people perceive work, make career-related decisions, and stay engaged in their jobs.

THE FLOW THEORY

Flow can be described as a mental state of complete concentration and engagement of the brain when an individual is doing a task that is able to stimulate and challenge his skills. When a person is doing something for which they are skilled and have an emotional connection to, they tend to get so fully immersed and absorbed into their experience that they become almost oblivious to the passage of time or to their own physical and mental limitations. In fact, it is seen that people are able to outperform and excel even beyond their expectations since they become immune to physical exhaustion or emotional drain. They seem to be transfixed by an immovable, unshakeable spell of productivity, optimization, efficiency while also feeling gratified and happy from what they are involved in.

When Mihaly originally conducted his social experiment, observing people from different careers performing work, he noticed that everyone who really seemed involved in their jobs were those doing a work that was challenging but also very suited to the skills of each person. Thus he discovered that this was something called Flow that made people such ideal workers.

Sounds dreamy right? It can be! Flow is the reason why people are sometimes able to surprise everyone and including themselves so well by how well they can perform. It makes people invincible and ready to steam on towards their milestones like a puffy, vigorous engine of a train all set to blast through to its final station.

WHEN DOES FLOW STRIKES THE HUMAN MIND

Now, as you may be right now looking at the pile of folders you have to sort through, you may wonder how does one taps into the magic of flow? Can normal people, like you and I discover this too? Or does one have to have some superhuman strength to unleash the power of Flow?

I have got good news and bad news. The good news is that any human being, including you, can discover the Force of Flow use it to make your whole life a lot more easier, successful, and happier! However, the slightly offsetting news is that you cannot summon your mental state of flow for every job and task! Rather, only once you are performing something that has just the right combination of properties to tingle and tantalize your personal skillset, only then can you experience flow.

Career counseling often ignores the roles played by character strengths in making work choices and transitions so it is understandable if you like many others, do not really know what your character strengths are.

HOW TO KNOW YOUR CHARACTER SKILLS

 Now that you know how important it is that you are taking up a career that is best suited for your unique personality and skillsets, your first step towards having a fulfilling professional life should be knowing your strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies. Obviously, for many of us, finding all this can seem confusing, not knowing where to start and what questions to ask ourselves. But, thanks to Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, who wrote the transformational book Character Strengths and Virtues, you don’t have to look any further on discovering yourself. After intensive social research, they founded the VIA Classification, stating that 24 personality strengths can be found universally in varying degrees in human beings all across the world. Thus, if you know the combination of personality strengths most dominant in you, you can then match careers with your personalities very easily.

TAKE THE VIA CLASSIFICATION TEXT TO KNOW YOUR CHARACTER STRENGTHS HERE!

Great, now that you’re back with your personal profile, let’s explore the next phase.

HOW TO SIMULATE FLOW WHILE WORKING

Now that you know more about yourself, let’s see the ways of invoking the state of flow. The following nine suggestions are what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi himself identified in his first edition of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience Book. Let’s delve into each one of them:

·      Working Up The Human Body

 Certain activities that can cause physical arousal, excitement like exercise, singing can be one for the triggers for flow. You can do these activities ideally before delving into your actual work and they can work as your starter pack to quickly jump into the flow zone. 

·      Challenging The Human Mind

 Remember the skills we identified in phase one? Well, now is the time we use them. According to Mihaly, our jobs should ideally be just the right combination of ease and difficulty, such that we are capable and skillful enough for the task to feel confident and comfortable yet it shouldn’t be so easy that there is no room to grow and learn. Our work should always be a little ahead of our current reach because only when humans face a challenge, do they actually feel mentally motivated to push through the obstacle. This is because our brains are addicts to the pleasure we feel when we are able to defy and exceed our expectations boosting our ego, mood, and confidence. Memories: Recalling enjoyable events allows us to relive our experience.

·      Recalling Your Memories

 When we are doing a task, such as making an office presentation, it can actually serve us well if we go back to recall our last successful meeting pitch for a previous successful project. Going back in time to rethink over happy moments, when you did something that invoked positivity and self-esteem can be a quick way to stay motivated on your current task. By remembering how great you felt the last time you aced something, your brain will stay hooked and energized for the current work so that it can again feel rewarded and satisfied just like before.

·      Intense Mental Contemplation

Deep thinking can be incredibly powerful when we want to get rid of all our surrounding distractions. If you are able to focus well and think deeply about an idea that pops in your head, you can streamline your brain, uncover layers of thoughts that wrap around a single idea till you lose track of time and eventually have your EUREKA! moment. So, in order to really let loose your creative juices, it’s important to start with a solid question. Something even as simple as “ Why do I really Want To Sell This Product I am Marketing?” You should then solely focus on the question in mind and the deeper you can go, the more simulated and absorbed you become.

·      Effectively Communicating With Others

Effectively conveying our ideas to others can be extremely insightful and simulating especially when the audience is engaging and can respond with their candid, thoughtful feedback. It’s true how a popular idiom in English says “ That One Thing Led To Another”. Often when you are having intense, interactive conversations with people who are as invested in the topic as you are, the series of questions, ideas, appreciation, and contradictions cause an intense flow state of the brain, leading you to build the most fool-proof outcome beyond the initial scope!

·      Writing Your Thoughts Down

Writing things down is an act of organizing, prioritizing, and streamlining your thoughts. It helps you to be concise, build clarity, and understand the context better. It also sparks creativity, so the more you write, the more engrossed you become in the topic, likely to set of flow state.

·      Ability To Learn and Remember

If you go into work with the mindset that it is okay to make mistakes and even if you succeed, you always have a lesson to learn and take away for life from that experience, then you will be much more optimistic and engaged in your work. It helps us put away our reluctance due to fear of failing since we emotionally equip ourselves to make the process fruitful by keeping an eye for learning something new.

·      Gamify Your Job

Set up daily challenges and test yourself out! Many jobs can become monotonous with the same nature of work and usual deadlines which deters you from feeling challenged enough to enter into the flow zone. So, by being more daring, try to go the extra mile and make the process fun. Maybe you can test yourself to see how many emails you can reply to in one hour or you could set up a game where the first one to go through all the files gets a treat between your coworkers. As long as there is a reward at the line and something that pushes you a little to test your skills, you can feel flow at work.

·      A Moment of Solitude:

Last but not the least, sometimes a few minutes of mindfulness alone in your favorite place can be incredibly relaxing stimulating for the brain. It can help you freely explore whatever thoughts are present inside your head and help you go the very roots of problems as well as sometimes can inspire the most unique, original ideas.

Feeling all set for your work? Let us know in the comments section below if you found the idea of flow worth trying and if you did practice any of the tips above, what was your experience really like? Remember that feeling stuck at work is normal and you may not be able to tap into flow overnight. However, by staying patient yet motivated, try to shake your lifestyle up and working through the process by seeing what suits your personality the best.

THANKYOU for reading it!

Don’t forget to share so others who may be suffering would get some help :)

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Lubaba Afzal is an Organizational Psychologist and the Founder of PsychedBrain, an online platform providing mental wellness solutions to its valued users. PsychedBrain offers self-help books and journals as well as virtual mentoring sessions to make mental health tools smart and accessible for all.