Get in the Flow and Crush Your Goals
It’s midway through January and that means in less then half a month 80% of the people who set New Year’s goals will have given up. Sadly, it’s not just a New Year’s phenomenon. Most people find it difficult to achieve the long-term goals they set for themselves regardless of the time of the year. The good news is that there are a few things you can do to ensure a more favorable outcome when it comes to following through with your goals.
In the 1970s a chap by the name of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (pronunciation here) observed several situations where certain high performers would become so immersed in their tasks that they would forget to eat or sleep. Based on these initial observations, Mihalyi spent the next twenty years investigating this phenomenon which he called Flow.
Throughout the years the principles supporting Flow Theory have maintained high face-validity and have proven to be one of the more thorough and practical frameworks to use when setting goals and creating physical or mental training activities. You may not have heard of Flow Theory before, but chances are you have seen people in the Flow, and more than likely, you probably have experienced it yourself.
Think back to a time where you felt like you were in an optimal experience with feelings of exhilaration, deep enjoyment, and complete focused concentration. In this state, you may have even lost track of time and felt a sense of a loss of awareness of yourself and the outside world. It could have been whilst playing a video game, or perhaps when you were working hard on a mental or physical challenge.
Though Flow can occur in a variety of situations, it doesn’t just happen by chance. In order to experience Flow, a few things must occur. The activity must provide clear goals. If you do not know what your end state is, then you have no way of measuring success. Along the way to your goal you will also need timely and unambiguous feedback. You must be able to track your progress and clearly understand your current performance and the steps required to continue to improve. This leads to the requirement of having a sense of control over the outcome. If you do not feel like your actions can affect the outcome then you will most likely feel powerless and unable to continue. Finally, and in my opinion of the utmost importance, is the need for balance between your perceived skill and the difficulty or challenge of the activity. The model below visually represents this balance:
In this model, Flow can occur whenever a balance between skill and challenge is achieved. A person can fall into the Frustration Area if their skill level is much less than the current level of challenge. In this case, the person may stop trying because they do think they will ever achieve their goal. Similarly, a person may fall into the Effortlessness Area if their skill far outweighs the difficulty of the task. In this case, the person may continue to engage with the activity, but they are not truly gaining experience or increasing their performance.
So when setting a goal, either for yourself, or for your athletes, consider using the Flow model to design the optimal set of activities to create a pathway to achieve the goal. Keep in mind that, as a person progresses through an activity, their flow will more likely be maintained if the difficulty of their activity is manageably increased over time in proportion to their (hopefully) increasing skill. This means you’ll have to provide feedback during the process and continue to tweak the activities as needed. It may require some extra effort to begin with, but once you get into the flow, it’s all smooth sailing from there!
