from surviving to thriving: hack your flow state

Only once she’s set up these essential environmental factors can she sensibly start to focus on the husbandry needs of each individual plant. This level focuses on long term physical, mental and environmental factors that need to be fostered and maintained daily to provide a fertile breeding ground for those intense and highly productive flow events to emerge.Ī gardener has a responsibility to ensure the whole garden is well watered, free from pollutants and pests, whilst maintaining a good balance in the acidity and nutrition levels of the soil.

The second set-up relates to the hard core, moments of focused action where we’re pushing our limits and in the zone, creating magic.īut it’s the less glamorous of the two set-ups needs to be considered first. Here, our usual sense of time seems to change, our sense of self vanishes as we become one with the activity and environment and things seem to come to us without effort.įocusing for a moment on solo activities - rather than team activities that introduce a wider range of dynamics - the ‘set up’ is key to a productive, protracted period of perfect performance. Your day job may not involve sky-diving, surfing or skiing painting, singing or writing novels but it’s possible for even bricklayers and mechanics, nurses and childcarers, trainers and truck-drivers to find themselves in an extraordinarily altered state of mind when certain conditions are met. However, practically any task can be improved by ‘setting up’ the conditions so that flow comes more readily, more naturally. Activities that take you to the very edge of your capabilities, that propel you into a rich, sensory environment and alter the usual ground-hugging effect of gravity will quickly take you there. There are degrees of flow, of course, and some activities lend themselves to a deeper flow state than others.

Now time to explore how, specifically, we can start to tap into this exceptional state each and every day. In Part 1: Discovering the Flow State, we became familiar with the essentials of this extraordinary condition.

From surviving to thriving: hack your flow state