Tag Archives: Flow State

Shifting the Focus of Emotional Intensity

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Volume 3, Issue 29

We are emotional beings. We are hardwired to have some emotional drama going on in the background at all times. Getting into the Zone aka Flow state requires awareness and management of that background emotional mood. If we are not proactively programming it, it will program itself.

After a long series of successes, the background state is often one of confidence, a can-do, can-win attitude. However, this can also set one up to crash in the case of a setback. “What is happening?” we will wonder. “This can’t be happening to me. I never fail.”

To prepare oneself for a challenging game ahead, one uses mental rehearsal including all the things that the other players might do, and the contingency plans of one’s own best actions in each scenario. At the end of such rehearsals, one pre-envisions as vividly as possible, with all emotions engaged, winning the game. At the very end of the preparation one gives up all care about winning or losing. Attachment to outcome blocks the Zone. You have to be playing the game for the sheer enjoyment of it, for its own sake, to shift into the Zone.

With the emotions as a wrapper around our whole psychic experience, the thoughts flit along the surface of the mind. Emotions program thoughts and vice versa. Everything affects everything else in there.

In the complex accelerated culture in which we live, self-mastery of our inner space, or even awareness of what is going on in there, is extremely complicated. Neuroses arise of certain types, like biocomputer viruses, and the viral infection spreads through society by intercommunication of memes and moods upon which neuroses depend.

Two recurring neurotic themes involve money and frustration. The culture is set up to cause most human inhabitants of Earth not living in a tribal setting to need to think like slaves or indentured servants, always worrying about money. Some conspiracy theory was involved but mostly it was natural forces. At first money was just a marker to help memory remember trades and symbolize real “property” such as animals and grain. Then it became what it is today, the leading indicator of our feelings of self-worth, belonging, achievement, status, freedom, security, wellness and potency. I’m probably leaving some things out.

Frustration is a natural effect when society does not encourage (or recognize) one’s inborn skills in certain directions that would channel one into a career he/she loves. Instead one takes a job one can tolerate but that may do little to bring out those inborn skills. Frustration mounts when co-workers and bosses don’t go along with the inspiring ideas one has about how to do one’s job better. The mix of money fear and frustration turns to rage, often bottled up inside where it is one of the causes of illnesses of the mind and body. One is blocked from getting into the Zone, which if achieved would provide ideas for action solutions that in turn would bring more money, security, and clever ways to break through the frustrating resistance to one’s best ideas.

The start of a new cycle can be effected by seizing the control point where the avalanche starts — the surrounding emotional mood. Control of the emotive space around the psyche is the key. Detachment from outcome is the core of heroism. A sense of humor gives perspective. Willingness to face the worst with confidence in oneself (and for some, confidence in God/the Universe) confers a courageous fatalism that has been rediscovered by all of the heroes in history.

In order to program the emotional wrapper, detachment is not enough. Our psychospheres thrive on emotion. Replace negative emotion, the doom of the Zone, with positive emotion — which means remembering what you have to be grateful for and what you have to look forward to and to be excited about. There may be challenging (even heartbreaking) trials but you need to be able to see them as opportunities to show what you’re really made of.

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’s Your Kryptonite?

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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

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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?

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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.