18 February 2022
The Importance of Being Mindful of Your Flow Triggers
Tips for finding your flow triggers at work.
by Jason Haller
When I was playing college football, getting into flow was relatively easy. The high consequences, rich environment of the game, and deep embodiment involved were enough to drive complete absorption in the moment. Almost every play was a blur as my instinct took over and my body was in a heightened state ready to react to any variable. The play call alerted me to my task and I had a complete focus on executing that task, down to where each of my first few steps needed to land and which specific players on the opposing team I would need to read and react to. After every possession, our offensive group gathered on the sideline with a few coaches to review the plays we’d just run and discuss how we could make a few adjustments and run them better during the next possession. Every player on the team was constantly being challenged to do slightly more, slightly faster, and slightly better than they had previously done. Anything less potentially meant poor outcomes would soon follow, not just for our physical health, but for our team as well. These variables that drove this level of alertness and concentration are known as flow triggers.
All flow triggers either reduce cognitive load or increase neurochemicals like dopamine and norepinephrine. This combination optimizes focus, engagement, and motivation as they help to heighten and tighten attention. It’s that simple. Flow is a state of prolonged focus and focus is prolonged attention. Any tool that helps us minimize distractions and drives attention is a flow trigger.
In football and many other sports, the environmental flow triggers are much more visceral and easy to use. However, there are not nearly as many of those in my current work-from-home environment. I’m not risking a concussion or a broken clavicle as I open my laptop and begin work for the day, so I can’t rely on high consequences. Nor can I rely on an environment loaded with the same novelty, unpredictability, and complexity of a football game against a conference rival. And, I’m certainly not wrestling my way through a tackle enough to tap into the flow trigger of deep embodiment which serves to heighten proprioception and increase focus and awareness.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t a plethora of flow triggers left to use, but they may be more subtle than the ones I’m used to and take a bit more intentionality to access. “Psychological, or internal triggers, are conditions in our inner environment that create more flow. They’re psychological strategies for driving attention into the now.” - Steven Kotler
As I have transitioned from athletics to the business world, I felt it would be important to address psychological flow triggers that are impactful in the workplace: clear goals, the challenge-skills balance, and immediate feedback. If we know what it is we want to accomplish, the challenge is enough to require our skillset to stretch ever so slightly out of our comfort zone, and we have access to feedback along the way to make course corrections, we can really improve performance and our chances of reaching a flow state.
Clear Goals
First, a clear goal is a must. The long-term goal is important and must be aligned to your values and purpose, much like my college football team's goal to go undefeated and make the playoffs. But, what really drives flow is breaking that longer-term goal into smaller chunks that can be accomplished weekly, daily, or even minute by minute. I wasn’t in flow during a football game because my goal was to make the playoffs. I was driven to focus on that moment in time because I learned to take each play one at a time and think of nothing else but perfect execution of my duty.
Now that I work from a computer and a desk, setting clear goals for the day and each work block are crucial for me to be able to exert my energy and focus on one task at a time and complete it to the best of my ability. Without this practice I find I am more prone to straying into thoughts of what I could (or maybe should) be doing, which sows uncertainty and distraction, making everything I do take longer and usually result in lower quality work.
Clear goals work as flow triggers by reducing cognitive load. By giving yourself a clear task now and knowing what clear task comes next, we eliminate distracting thoughts and unproductive decision-making, and we eliminate the use of our brain as a way to store information. Our brains are excellent at problem-solving, but terrible by comparison at holding thoughts in our conscious memory.
Knowing what your goals are for the day has other beneficial effects as well. Once you start blowing through your “to-do” list and checking off boxes, you feel good about it. You get little dopamine hits for accomplishing your tasks which, over time, motivates you to keep this habit up, effectively making you enjoy and look forward to being productive.
Lastly, having a clear goals list allows you to recognize when you’ve won the day, when you’ve accomplished enough, and when you can switch over to non-work activities. Without any specific idea of what you should accomplish in a day, you risk being “always-on” and having the feeling that you haven’t done enough. That is not the mental reward we’re looking for to stimulate long-term motivation and performance, let alone a satisfying and enjoyable life.
Challenge-Skills Balance
The challenge-skills balance is one of flow’s most potent triggers. As flow researcher Steven Kotler often says, “flow follows focus,” and we tend to pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge slightly exceeds our skillset. The slight stretch of our skillset is the sweet spot for high performance. I’ve always told people that of all the sports I played, football was by far the least enjoyable, partially because of this flow trigger.
There was rarely ever a time when we weren’t under constant pressure to perform some task at a higher level. The challenge was always set slightly above what we thought we could achieve. In hindsight, knowing what I know now, this is also why football was one of the most rewarding sports I played. Those moments, where it all came together, and the ladder of escalating challenges ended in victory, were some of the proudest and lasting moments of my life.
By comparison, it has been a tough transition into the business consulting world to correctly dial in the challenges to stimulate my best effort. At first, the entire idea felt new, unfamiliar, and insurmountable. What helped me from feeling overwhelmed was to break down what exactly I would be responsible for, figure out what skills I needed to meet those responsibilities, and begin the slow process of acquiring those skills one at a time, layer by layer until the big picture began to take shape.
This wasn’t a solo mission that I undertook all by myself. It was crucial to have external support in this endeavor, and many people will find that reaching out to a mentor or someone with a thorough understanding of the task you’re facing will be invaluable for correctly breaking a problem down into components that are attainable.
If the challenge is too easy, we are prone to boredom, procrastination, and negative feelings. If the challenge is too big, we invite overwhelm, anxiety, and reduced performance. The art of breaking a project into bite-size pieces that stretch but don’t snap our abilities is the art of dialing in peak performance, as well as an incredibly effective path to achieving mastery.
How much is enough to get us to stretch and find this sweet spot? The most recent research has suggested this is anywhere from five to fifteen percent outside our comfort zone. For example, one of my fitness and nutrition clients may need a complete lifestyle overhaul to accomplish their goal, but attempting to make all those changes at once would be highly overwhelming and typically results in the client feeling like a failure and believing their efforts are pointless against this massive challenge.
Instead, what I do is have them take on one challenge at a time, something outside of their comfort zone designed to give maximum gains for minimum effort. Then, after they’ve met that challenge and tasted some success, we build on it with the next challenge and start layering in improvements. Over time, we make all the necessary adjustments to accomplish the goal, and the client usually remarks on how easy it felt. This is because they never had to perceive anything beyond this five to fifteen percent challenge, which is manageable and motivating without ever being stressful.
Immediate Feedback
Once we have established clear goals and accurately dialed in the level of challenge, the third psychological flow trigger of “immediate feedback” plays an integral role in the process of continual improvement and generating flow. We need ways to confirm success or course-correct if necessary. Clear goals can help dial in the challenge-skills balance, but we need ways to assess the outcome of our efforts and ensure we are still covering ground toward the overarching goal.
In a fitness setting, this can be as simple as a weigh-in or a strength test of an exercise on a weekly or monthly schedule. This helps the client, and me, make any adjustments needed to keep our efforts productive. I don’t think many clients would want to work hard for six months before finding out they’ve not made any progress.
Feedback can be boiled down to information about a system that can be used for its improvement. The more feedback cycles, and the tighter the feedback loops, the more iterations, and eventual improvements possible. Feedback is one of the best performance boosting tools as it can both help drive us into flow by giving us the confidence that we are on the right track, as well as help us progress and master new skills which drive long-term performance.
Luckily in business, we always had those super useful quarterly reviews to help provide feedback and drive better performance. Okay, that wasn’t fair. It doesn’t seem to me that the quarterly reviews have anything to do with providing useful feedback aimed at improving performance. They seem to mainly be a means of gathering data to potentially justify future actions. If feedback were meant to actually improve skills and performance it should happen more often, be about specific tasks, and be the minimum amount necessary to get that employee motivated and working at a higher level. Unfortunately, many business cultures see feedback and coaching as a negative event or the obligatory preparation for performance improvement plans (PIP) designed to tee up a termination or demotion. Healthier business cultures understand that the true purpose of feedback is to help people realize their potential, take risks, learn from their failures or mistakes, and do better next time.
“Firing people for failing is giving your competition that lesson learned.”
Let’s pivot back to my experience playing football. If the coaches never showed us how to improve, and only sought to arrange us by performance level or replace starters with backups after a poor performance, would the team have achieved the high level of success it did? During the four years I played in college, we extended the overwhelming culture of winning, so routine as to be described as boring by the school newspaper because we rarely lost. I can almost guarantee there is no way we would have performed at that level without the constant feedback from coaches, and each other, driving us to make incremental improvements and, over time, become players worthy of replacing those that achieved at a high level before us.
“Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops—stock analysis, psychiatry, medicine—even the best get worse over time. Surgeons, by contrast, are the only class of physicians that improve the longer they’re out of medical school. Why? Mess up on the table and someone dies. That’s immediate feedback.”
Feedback, whether in an athletic setting, a business setting, or with respect to flow is a powerful psychological trigger that helps us to continually improve and regain motivation and focus on our task.
In all of these concepts, it should be noted that ego can play a dangerous role, which is why we’ve already talked at length in a previous blog about growth mindset and other mental factors that are helpful when pursuing flow. Ego can lead us to believe we can bite off more than we can chew, that we don’t need or want other people’s feedback, that we can multi-task and still be productive, or that we don’t need anything as pedestrian as a “to do” list. Of course, you can operate without flow triggers and grind your way through life, but if you want it to feel easier than expected while steadily improving and achieving your highest levels of performance and enjoyment, consider using some of these tools when they seem helpful or appropriate.
Four Tips for Finding Your Flow Triggers:
- Mindfully test a few flow triggers. The triggers that elicit the biggest response will vary from person to person, so try things out and use some judgment as to what makes sense for you and your situation.
- Create a goal-setting cadence. Ending your day by writing out clear goals for the next day gives you a huge advantage to hit the ground running the next morning. Start with the most difficult and rewarding tasks first or aim to have those align to the time of day you typically feel most productive. It can also be helpful to schedule meals, workouts, breaks, and other helpful self-care activities when making your list.
- Pay attention to how you feel during specific tasks. To dial in the challenge-skills balance, the most effective tool is self-awareness. How do you feel? Are you bored, are you procrastinating? Maybe that's a sign that your body is trying to tune itself to peak performance. Why spend all week on this if you know deep down you can get it done Friday morning? Perhaps a bit more challenge is needed there. What if you feel overwhelmed, anxious and scattered? Perhaps you don’t know where to start. In this case, breaking this bigger project down into bite-size pieces is what’s needed to dial in peak performance. Now that you know where these feelings fall on the spectrum, you can use them to more appropriately adjust the challenge to meet the skills or vice versa.
- Remember, this is not about your ego. When seeking feedback, be ready to embrace and apply that feedback. Keep the context in mind that this feedback is in the interest of the greater goal. Also, make sure you’re seeking feedback, not reassurance. Seeking reassurance as a leader disempowers you and reduces confidence, whereas genuinely seeking feedback makes employees feel empowered, engaged, and positive about your leadership. When giving feedback, the most effective feedback will be specific to the task and be the minimum amount necessary to improve motivation and performance.
For more flow information, please visit the Flow Genome Project. You can also follow this topic on our social channels using the hashtag #flowcabularyfriday. Each week, we focus on one term within the flow framework and how it can improve your performance at work. Please contact us about Five to Flow's solutions that will help identify your flow triggers and improve organizational health.