Tag Archives: Flow State

What’s Your Kryptonite?

1 Reply

Volume 3, Issue 26

Who among us does not sometimes hold himself/herself to an excessively high standard, like playing Iron Man or Superwoman? Believing one’s own press releases, as they say in showbiz?

A client recently said he wanted to be more like me — always smiling, always happy, able to leap tall challenges in a single bound. Fact is, recently I’ve started to take this press release too much for granted and discovered that bits of a kryptonite-like substance can still knock me out of the sky.

In my case it’s an absurd perfectionism that grouses if a conversation with a client goes by without a Big Idea and a client aha moment. Silly, right?

Always wanting to top oneself is an attachment like any other. All attachments are kryptonite, robbing you of your superpowers, even when they are supposedly idealistic and positive.

Okay, time to get back to basics. Getting enough sleep is one. Days of treating the body as if there’s another one hanging in the closet (Len Matthews once told me that’s what I tend to do) — sleep and dream deprivation takes its toll. The quest for infinitely extended Zone or Flow state performance requires attention to such mundane details.

What’s your kryptonite? I imagine that since you read this blog, you too are on the quest for Flow state day in and day out, getting there a lot of the time and not getting there too. Flow tends to happen in the thing that is your métier, the thing you do, whatever you do best, that which it makes sense to make your life’s work, the thing you love to do the most. A day is not made only of that activity — there’s always a lot of other stuff to do, and Flow might not come as easily in those peripheral activities. At those times, if you focus on staying in the Observer state, the jump back to Flow will be much easier.

It’s useful to assume that whatever is happening, if it’s happening, it might be good enough, so long as you’re not bringing anybody else down. If it feels like you’re coasting now and then, don’t assume you’re not hitting it out of the park, or that you have to do something so you’re always hitting it out of the park.

The Wilhelm/Baynes edition of the I Ching says somewhere “He hastens to that which supports him”, having to me essentially the same meaning as John Lennon’s line “whatever gets you through the night”. This would be your own personal anti-kryptonite — meditation, sleep, yoga, working out, running, solo car karaoke — erasing whatever is tumbling through the washing machine of your mind and emotionarium.  Use whatever trick you find works to back you out of your own self-imposed hell, whenever you find yourself imposing it. Maybe something as simple as asking yourself, “What’s the hidden assumption causing this irruption of displeasure?”

Best to all,

Bill 

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com. 

Making Major Strategic Moves Each Day

Leave a reply

By Prioritizing Mental State over the To-Do List

Volume 3, Issue 25

Seize the day! Why not make major strategic moves each day? Sometimes what serves as the day’s strategic move is an insight that is invisible externally, yet makes you feel good about the day. Imagine yourself throbbing with impulse to creatively leverage the insight in ways that are still continuing to bubble up in your mind.

Yes, those are well-used days too, not just the ones when you’ve set the world on fire figuratively. You actually do have the power to make every day count, to feel like one of those days. Achieving this is mostly remembering the intention to do so, thereby bringing your attention to the intention. Intention without attention goes nowhere. This is what is happening on a grand scale every day now that we are deep into the Acceleritis cloud.

Often the To-Do List supersedes all higher values present in the accumulated intentions sac 🙂  – that part of figurative mindspace where you keep your intentions like an Amazon Wish List. And perhaps look at them as often.

Each day is kept from being a day of great strategic insight or other accomplishment by the To-Do List gaining air supremacy over the Intentions.

We become slaves of the To-Do List.

Don’t you breathe more deeply now that you’ve merely entertained the notion of freeing the slave? Doesn’t that air feel good? Is a slight headache you take for granted strangely gone?

Pragmatically, the reason for giving highest priority to one’s own mental/emotional state over the To-Do List, is that without Observer state or Flow state, the quality of one’s work is not going to be world class, the day will not have been fully seized.

Optimization of the day includes not losing track of the key moment-to-moment tradeoff decision between the To-Do List and one’s mental/emotional state. The behavioral change you will note from this practice is that you take more frequent breaks and in them get sudden rushes of perfect insights and ideas.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com. 

What Is Mindfulness?

1 Reply

Volume 3, Issue 24

In the prior post we made the point that better decision-making and higher performance in the end reduce to two main drivers, Positive Thinking and Mindfulness. Positive Thinking, which we also call Solution Orientation, is easier said than done, and we pointed to our book Mind Magic as a compendium of proven operational techniques for actually achieving and maintaining both of these inner behaviors. We promised to investigate the nature of Mindfulness in this post.

Mindfulness is a form of attention control. Going back at least as far as written language and probably as far back as the cave paintings, the human race has discovered the importance of focusing attention in achieving its aims. The cave paintings are widely believed to be evidence of a method for rehearsing the hunt. Yogic mental/emotional methodologies are the essence of what is recommended in the Vedas, some of the earliest writings on the planet, and these include contemplation, concentration and meditation, all three related to the conscious and willful control of the attention.

The need to be master of one’s own attention has gotten progressively greater over the centuries as a result of information overload and its distractive effects. We have given this condition the name Acceleritis. Our relevant hypothesis is that written language, by making language visual — the dominant sense of not only homo sapiens but of all primates — brought the human race up to Piaget’s Formal Operational level of thinking, the highest known level of thinking until Systems Level thinking was discovered in the twentieth century. This so augmented the ability to invent that in only 3% of the time since the appearance of the species, the human race in the last 6000 years has invented more and more things and ideas each year than in the prior year, and at an increasing rate, driving a vast increase in the amount of information needing to be processed by our brains each day. ADD, ADHD, and a fairly obvious reduction in the general population’s ability to stay focused on one problem long enough to solve it, have been the result. Again, the need for Mindfulness has never been greater.

Concentration is the focus of the mind on a single object. Contemplation is the focus of the mind on a single subject. Meditation is the contemplation of the Self. What then is Mindfulness? We define Mindfulness as the optimal allocation of attention for maximum effectiveness. Now that we’ve defined the term, we’ll stop initial-capping it.

Attention optimally allocates both inwardly and outwardly at the same time. This is in sharp distinction from normative behavior, which is to allocate virtually all attention outwardly whenever the eyes are open. This normative attention strategy virtually eliminates the ability to understand one’s own motivations in the moment, causing actions to be controlled by ego drives that are counterproductive to efficacy. When one is mindful, there is a predictive feedback loop allowing one to suppress actions that are merely self-serving and do not consider the needs and probable responses of others.

Mindfulness also makes one more observant externally, improving what fighter pilots call situational awareness. Our theory of Holosentience postulates a shift into a higher state of consciousness as a result of persistent mindfulness. We call this the Observer state, and it is from this state that the mind-body can launch into Flow state or the Zone, the highest known state of consciousness in which right actions seem to do themselves effortlessly.

It takes “attentional” effort to be mindful and thus to reach the Observer state and the Zone.

Mindfulness and solution orientation (overleaping the focus on the problem once it is defined and going right to the focus on the solution, otherwise known as Positive Thinking) combine to form the core of the Human Effectiveness Institute’s psychotechnology — the recommended set of methodologies to achieve superior decisions, highest effectiveness, and creative innovation in all aspects of one’s life.

Best to all,

Bill 

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com. 

Positive Thinking + Mindfulness = Mind Magic

Leave a reply

Volume 3, Issue 23

People are always saying to me, “Bill, you’re one of the most positive people around.” While I take it as a high compliment, I am always thinking “How do I convey that positive thinking is not enough?”

Positive thinking is one of the cornerstones of success, Zone level performance, ability to withstand and meet challenges, ability to be happy… it is necessary but positive thinking alone is not sufficient to achieve all these things: there is more to psychotechnology.

The other cornerstone is mindfulness. The two main threads running through my book Mind Magic and through me might be summed up as combining those two mind techniques. That would be reductionism but it would not be way off base.

The thing about positive thinking is that it’s an idea all of us know by now, and it is not easy for most people to practice it. Many of the books on the subject exhort people to think positively and prove why it is important but they don’t tell the reader how to stay positive in the face of perceived threats, disappointments or other mood negators.

Actually achieving and maintaining a state of positive thinking as the natural equilibrium of the individual requires a number of component accomplishments including the toning down of excessive attachment to specific outcomes.

I didn’t set out to be a positive thinker. A philosopher by nature, like all children I wondered about everything, I just wondered more systematically, and in a bulldog fashion. I really wanted to figure things out. The positive thinking came along with a lot of other discoveries.

As a philosopher I am attracted to pragmatism. This moves the mind toward positive thinking as a side effect. From a pragmatic point of view, one does not start with positive thinking, but with questions as to what is our goal or purpose, and then what means will get us there. In the context of pragmatism, anything but positive thinking is an obvious waste of time and energy; negative handwringing for example is staying in the problem definition phase when it’s time to move on to the solution phase.

Having been led to positive thinking via pragmatism, I was then able to see the value of projecting positively, pre-visualizing positively, and communicating positively as simply more effective at achieving goals. I didn’t do those things out of a belief in thinking positively, but because I saw that they worked.

It might be more accurate (and less reductionist) to say that I took the best things I saw in all philosophies to bake my own philosophy. Pragmatism, operationalism, the stoicism of Epictetus, Hemingway’s fatalism, the Vedas, Kabbalah, Taoism, Buddhism, John Stuart Mill’s “greatest good for the greatest number”, and Zen (with apologies to all the others not mentioned for space/time reasons).

Still, pragmatism runs deep. What am I trying to accomplish? It sometimes can be simply to have fun — fun being conducive to the Flow state. Encourage the development of long-term goals to help people supervene short-term goals. What can I control and what must I accept? Non-attachment to outcome is key. Take the right action and let the chips fall as they may. Pre-visualize success.

Positive thinking is a corollary of pragmatism.

Mindfulness is something else again and another necessary component though insufficient without positive thinking. More on mindfulness in the next post.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.