When was the last time you were in flow? Likely, you know what I mean by that question, but if asked, could you define flow?
Ask 100 people, and you’ll likely hear 100 interpretations. But I’d bet that most would include something about time, specifically losing track of it.
Yet flow cannot be found in time.
Because flow cannot tell time. It reads no clocks. It doesn’t keep a calendar. It doesn’t care about the day of the week. It doesn’t magically show up on January 1st, the start of the month, or on Monday morning.
In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s 1990 seminal work on the subject, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he defines it as:
The state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.
His definition includes the concepts of enjoyment, immersion, and interestingly, effort, but not time. Csikszentmihalyi does get into time in relation to flow, but less as a defining characteristic and more on how flow exists outside of its normal conventions.
The safest generalization to make about this phenomenon is to say that during the flow experience, the sense of time bears little relation to the passage of time as measured by the absolute convention of the clock.
Because time is an absolute, while flow is a feeling. And feelings can have varying degrees of intensity that do not fit within the finite confines of time.
Csikszentmihalyi didn’t spend decades researching time, or what one can do with it; he spent them studying one particular feeling: enjoyment.
Flow is often associated with the movement of water. In fact, the term comes from how many in Csikszentmihalyi’s study referred to their state of enjoyment: “It was like I was floating,” and “I was carried away by flow.”
And they themselves were in motion of some sort. They were describing feelings reached while engaged in physical or mental activities that brought them to this blissful state.
Yes, it is possible to find joy in quiet moments where you are simply an observer, a passive participant. In watching a beautiful sunset or hearing a baby’s laughter. But what Csikszentmihalyi was studying was joy in action. In how we are capable of bringing that sense of joy to life through the activities we engage in.
Okay, there’s a little more to it than just the activities.
Over more than two decades, Csikszentmihalyi studied hundreds of individuals engaged in all types of activities. He interviewed rock climbers, factory and clerical workers, doctors, writers, artists, musicians, and chess players. He studied people in all types of occupations, participating in different hobbies, playing different roles.
There were similarities in how they described their flow experience even though the activities themselves were very different. A doctor and rock climber might share the experience of being in flow, but unless both have a medical degree and enjoy scaling mountains, they likely wouldn’t find flow in both activities.
And if, like me, you are neither a doctor nor a rock climber (and the thought of blood, whether as a part of your day-to-day occupation or an occupational hazard, makes you queasy), you’ll be happy to know you can find your own way into flow.
Depending on how you look at it, that can be good news or bad news. Good news in that it is possible for all of us, but bad news in that there is no foolproof formula to achieve it.
…a joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.
But maybe that in itself is good news, because if everyone could find it in the exact same way, in the exact same activity, then wouldn’t it cease to be enjoyable?
So back to the question I asked at the start. When was the last time you found yourself in flow?
Now that you know what flow is, and even more importantly what it isn’t, it’s time to look at how to find your way back to that feeling. That’s what we’ll get to in the next part of this series.
Bring Flow to Your Business This Fall
Our next cohort of Find Your Business Flow starts October 5th. This cohort-based program is for solo- and micropreneurs wearing every hat and spending more time on busywork than on the work they started their business for. Instead of borrowing someone else’s system, we’ll help you build one that fits how you actually work, and set the conditions that create flow in your business. Want to find out more? Check out all the details here, and fill out the short interest form to set up a call.
