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How to strengthen your willpower
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Flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness, a state where you feel your best and perform your best. More specifically, the term refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption, when you get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Action and awareness merge. Your sense of self vanishes. Your sense of time distorts (either, typically, speeds up; or, occasionally, slows down). And throughout, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof.
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MORE IDEAS ON THIS
9. Clear Goals. These are not big goals (like winning the Olympics in downhill skiing), rather they are much smaller chunks (like getting out of the starting gate fast). What’s critical is we know what we’re doing now and we know what we’re doing next so attention can stay focuse...
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6. Blending Egos (each person can submerge their ego needs into the group’s)
7. Equal Participation (skills levels are roughly equal everyone is involved)
8. Familiarity (people know one another and understand their tics and tendencie...
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The synonyms for flow are endless: peak experiences, being in the zone, runner’s high, being unconscious, the forever box, etc. Flow is something of a technical term. It emerged from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s early research into the state, where interview subjects—in...
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The research of Csikszentmihalyi and a few other scientists uncovered 10 core characteristics that underpin the state. While each of these phenomena can be experienced independently, when they all show up together—that’s flow. Or, at least, that’s the original idea. The researche...
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Yes. Flow comes in two kinds—individual and group. When someone uses the term “flow” they’re describing an individual performing at their very peak. The term “group flow” refers to the shared, collective experience of the state: a group performing at their peak. For a great look ...
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Csikszentmihalyi identified 4 of these triggers (though he argued they’re characteristics of flow and not triggers of flow). Research by the Flow Genome Project shows that when skillfully deployed (see The Rise of Superman for details), these “characteristics” consistently generate more ...
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1. Action and Awareness Merge. The doer and the doing become one. From the perspective of consciousness, we become the action. In other words, actions feel automatic and require little or no additional resources.
2. Selflessness. Our sense of self disappear...
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Research with both artists and action and adventure sports athletes have fingered four more triggers (see Rise of Superman for a more detailed breakdown).
1. High consequences (that is, some kind of risk: physical, mental, social, emotional, etc.)
2. ...
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Flow states have triggers, or pre-conditions that lead to more flow. Essentially, flow can only arise when all of our attention is focused in the present moment, so that’s what these triggers do—they drive attention into the here and now. Put differently, these triggers are the very thing...
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University of North Carolina psychologist Keith Sawyer extended this original list, identifying ten triggers that produce “group flow.”
1. Shared Goals (everyone in the group is working towards the same end)
2. Close Listening (you’re paying complete ...
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7. Intense Concentration. More specifically, intense concentration on a limited field of information. Total focus on the right here, right now. Complete absorption in the present moment.
8. Challenge/Skills Balance. The challenge of the task at hand slightl...
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4. Effortlessness. Our sense of struggle and strife vanishes. The experience becomes intrinsically-rewarding or—in technical parlance—“autotelic.”
5. Paradox of Control. We have a powerful sense of control over the situation. We are captain of our own ship;...
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Yes. Flow is a spectrum experience. It’s like anger. You can be a little mad or homicidally murderous: same emotion, different degrees. Csikszentmihalyi and Susan Jackson discovered that the same thing is true of flow. You can be in a state of micro-flow—like what happens when yo...
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CURATED FROM
IDEAS CURATED BY
The process of flow was discovered and coined by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In the 1960s, Csikszentmihalyi studied the creative process and found that, when an artist was in the course of flow, they would persist at their task relentlessly, regardless of hunger or fatigue. He also found that the artist would lose interest after the project was completed, highlighting the importance of the process and not the end result.
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Other curated ideas on this topic:
Flow is an optimal state of consciousness, when you feel and perform your best. It’s the moment of total absorption.
Time speeds up or slows down like a freeze-frame effect. Mental and physical ability go through the roof, and the brain takes in more information per second, processin...
Is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel and perform our best. It happens when we are completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.
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