Get in flow!

The flow state is more powerful than we think

Where knowledge is the counter to ignorance, wisdom is the counter to self-deception. 

As humans we have developed powerful cognitive tools for adapting to our environment, such as our ability to look at a situation and determine what is most important (known as ‘relevance realisation’).  Our ability for insight is another, allowing us to re-frame a situation to make meaning of it.  Our ability to recognise complex patterns is a third.

These powerful capacities that allow for greater adaptation also make us prone to self-deception.  We might not quite get the relevant issues; we might have a false insight; we might mistake a correlation for a pattern of causality.

When we deceive ourselves, we misapply our time and energy into wasteful activity.

Flow is another powerful psychotechnology, the key conditions for being in this state are:

• the activity we engage in must have a clear goal and progress must be visible

• there must be clear and immediate feedback

• the task itself must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task and the person’s own perceived skills

these conditions allow us to develop a cascade of insights that strengthens our ability to discover true insights, and they also make our implicit learning more reliable by reducing the amount of self-deception that is possible.

Being in the flow state we are not just more effective in our work we are also training ourselves to be more reliable – less self-deceiving - in how we make sense of the world.

The flow state is a powerful way to develop wisdom.

My new book Why We Teach describes how teachers can help their students to operate more in the flow state.  

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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