Flow

How to Achieve a State of Flow

by Daniel Goleman, LinkedIn

Many people recently asked me to talk more about the flow state - a topic I touched on in last week's post.

“Flow”, the state where we feel in command of what we do, do it effortlessly, and perform at our best, was discovered by researchers at the University of Chicago. They asked a wide range of people, “Tell us about a time you outdid yourself – you performed at your peak.” No matter who answered – ballerinas, chess champs, surgeons – they all described the flow state. One of flow’s best features: it feels great.

Today we all realize that we do our best work in those special moments when we are in flow.And for leaders helping people get into flow and stay there means they will work at their peak abilities.

But how do you get into flow in the first place? I can think of three main pathways.

The first matches a person’s tasks to his or her skill set. In the Chicago study, this was put in terms of the ratio of a person’s abilities to the demand of the task. The more a challenge requires us to deploy our best skills, the more likely we will become absorbed in flow.

If we are under-challenged – it’s too easy – our performance suffers and we end up bored or disengaged. That’s the plight of a large portion of knowledge workers, some statistics suggest. Upping the challenge would engage more of these people, and for a lucky few perhaps get them into flow.

Another path to flow lies in finding work we love. Doing what we’re passionate about is one sign of “good work,” the topic of research by Howard Gardner at Harvard, Bill Damon at Stanford, and Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, the discoverer of flow. In good work we align what we’re best at doing with what engages us and also what fits our sense of meaning and purpose. Good work puts us in a frame of mind where, again, flow can arise spontaneously.

The final common pathway of any approach to flow is fully absorbed focus. The stronger the concentration we bring to a task, the more likely we are to drop into flow while doing it. While the other paths to flow depend on getting the externals right – the challenge/demand ratio, or finding work that aligns ethics, excellence and engagement – full focus is an inner dimension. The better our ability to pay attention to what we choose and ignore distractions, the stronger our concentration.

Strong focus can bring us into flow no matter the task at hand. This is an inner strength we develop and strengthen. Mindfulness, for instance, is one way to bulk up the muscle of attention, particularly if we use mindfulness to notice when we have wandered away from a chosen point of focus and bring our attention back. That, in fact, is the basic repetition fortoning up concentration in the mental gym, according to research done at Emory University.

We can strengthen this ability on our own time, just as we would go to the gym after work. A daily mental workout where you use your breath as the point of concentration, and continually bring your wandering mind back to your breath, will bulk up your power to focus. Regular brain strengthening should help you find your way to flow no matter what you do.

This Thursday I’ll be at UC Berkeley to discuss lessons such as these from my new bookFocus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. And on Friday, November 22, I’m speaking at Spirit Rock in Marin County, a center where you can go for retreats on mindfulness – an industrial strength dose of the attention training you’d get at work. There I’m eager to hear from any coaches who are using mindfulness with their clients, or anyone who has learnedmindfulness at work, to see what they have to say.

Pay Your Taxes! It's What Made America a Superpower

OMG the idiocy! The incredible lack of historical perspective on how this country built the greatest domestic economy the world has ever known! The shocking dearth of

Perhaps it's amnesia. Perhaps its senility. But the tea partiers are spreading crap like this via email. And it's depressing. How the rant in this "poem" was not only proven wrong by 50 years of history, but also spits in the face of the space program, the national interstate highway system, and the social security system that salvaged these idiot's families in the 1940s from the depths of the Depression. OMG, it's beyond me how stupid the "greatest generation that ever lived" has become.

ReplaceFace

“I’m not from these parts. I’m from a little place called England– 

we used to run the world before you."

—Ricky Gervais, accepting his Golden Globe award

A fun little buzzfeed.com link provided me hours of fun this week. It's some strange time-waster that puts celebrity heads on paintings of famous generals.

According to the link, Artist Steve Payne created a unique collection of digital paintings of male actors and singers for his “replaceface” collection. Handily, a quick search in google resulted in this Tumblr page.

At this ReplaceFace Tumblr, you can see what the idle are doing with their time.There you can find a ton of other ReplaceFace generals. Some are better than others. Obama is boring. Sylvester Stallone is appealingly ugly. But there's little gems like Dave Grohl and Ricky Gervais that made this sojourn into timewasting just delightful.

“All my life I’ve been searching for something, something never comes never leads to nothing, nothing satisfies,

 but I’m getting close, closer to the prize at the end of the rope"

—Dave Grohl, The Foo Fighters, "All My Life"

It's Neither America's Students nor the Teachers That are the Problem

The Conundrum Facing American Education

Is it possible that the problem when comparing American students to Asian students that Asian kids' teachers are pulled from the cream of the crop in societies where women and other cultural minorities do not have professional options that bring them prestige the way teaching does? 

In Asia, teachers are revered, but women's cultural status is devalued. Today, if you were an Asian Madeleine Albright, you'd be teaching kids; not leading the country. I guess if I were taught by Asia's Madeleine Albright, I'd be acing my history exams too. (An interesting examination of K12 teacher preparedness by Friedman...read on).

I attended JebFest (National Summit on Education Reform) in Boston last month, and a pair of conversations, two articles, and the results of Massachusetts' students on a cross-national test got me thinking. 

Turns out Massachusetts has students competitive with Asian students:

Average math scores, 8th grade (57 countries and education systems)

• Korea, Republic of 613
• Singapore 611
• Chinese Taipei 609
• Hong Kong 586
• Japan 570
• Massachusetts 561

But ultimately, it remained unclear why. Is it that Massachusetts kids have better teachers? Better parents? There's zero doubt in my mind that its the parents and the teachers that are the problem that can solve the conundrum.

But there may be an insurmountable challenge too. America's business profession landscape has changed, specifically for women. At JebFest, I heard from Kate Walsh from the National Center for Teacher Quality. She was convincing. Exceptional people in American school systems were teaching us kids in the 1970s. That's because according to Walsh, American women (and most minorities) didn't have excellent professional options in the 1930s, '40s, '50s, and even '60s when they were in college. By the time they graduated college, it was back to K12 for them, because full-tenured professorships and high-paying jobs in the private sector were culturally off limits and/or really, really hard to come by without connections.

Now women of all backgrounds are fighting for high-paid corporate jobs, and bypassing a life in the K12 teaching profession. So whereas I was taught be brilliant minds like Ms. Haggerty, Ms. Beebe, Ms. Meysenberg, my niece has been taught by some who got degrees from junior colleges, some who were tenured after only 18 months according to an agreement the unions made with the state and put into the state code, and those who are not graduates from the most prestigious institutions in the country.

Then Clayton

These ideas were gelling, when out came two key articles that got me thinking about how to create success in students: 

Correa and Student

First was Wired magazine's article on "How a Radical new Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of geniuses." In this piece, the author profiles Sergio Juárez Correa, 31, who comes from a hopeless place and has few options. But teaching gives him a way to use the brain god gave him. And he develops brains in the children he teaches. He lives in a culture that makes it impossible, both financially and social-mobility-wise, to achieve at a "higher" level outside the classroom. Teaching is his only viable path, given the poverty of his community.

Next came Thomas Friedman's article on "The Shanghai Secret" about teaching and learning in China. What's compelling isn't Friedman's take on the Chinese school system's focus on the basics. That's neither here nor there. By coalescing the "learnings" from JebFest and then reading this article, I feel that I'm seeing a problem that others aren't:

Exceptional people who live in societies that do not enable them to succeed (rural Mexico, anti-feminist societies of all stripes) make teaching the go-to profession for its intellectual elite.
One of Friedman's highlights showing how the teachers can see through the cultural morass that might otherwise limit children's ability to learn and succeed:

Christina Bao, 29, who also teaches English, said she tries to chat either by phone or online with the parents of each student two or three times a week to keep them abreast of their child’s progress. 

“I will talk to them about what the students are doing at school.” She then alluded matter-of-factly to a big cultural difference here, “I tell them not to beat them if they are not doing well.”

I find it illuminating that the state licensure program in California makes it possible for tenure after only 18 months. What on earth has anyone learned on the job in 18 months out of college? Sheesh, these students go directly into the teaching profession, and are nearly immediately protected in their jobs, even though they could be disasters for teachers. At Stanford, a professor can only get tenure after 7 years, and tons of peer review. In California K12 schools, it's 18 months. 

Someone's protecting someone, but no one's helping California kids in the process.

Ultimately, what's worse is that it's a challenge that our universities and colleges of education refuse to confront or help alleviate. A review by Walsh's group shows as few as 95 schools in the entire country meeting her organization's standards for preparing teachers to enter the workforce. 

If you exit ed school unprepared to teach, that is simply not the schools problem. That's the teacher's problem, and ultimately, the students.

It's a sorry story that's all too real across the country.