Finding Flow: Intense work but without the struggle.

There’s so much reported angst in today’s workplaces. People are working hard, running hard and balancing increasing loads on their work-life plate. But does hard or ‘intense’ work have to equate with struggle? Absatively not! Before we get too far ahead in this blogging journey I wanted to set one thing straight: A TGIM work-life is not about making work easy per se – but it is about having more ‘ease’ in doing your work….ease as in ‘the wind is at your back…..working with you and not against you.” Most people — particularly leaders (of all levels), high performers and high potentials – want to be challenged, tested, stretched so that they learn, grow and shine at work! That’s part of what makes work meaningful for many people.

Sure – there are a lot of work-life issues that contribute to wear and tear on us and that sense of ‘struggle’. I’ll be dealing with them – you can count on that. But for today, I want to focus on just one question: What does hard work look like without struggle?

Think of those times when you worked hard – really hard — and yet at the end, felt a sense of achievement, energy and even inspiration. Those are what we call “Flow” experiences. Flow, according to experts, is an essential ingredient to an engaged life and work experience. Without it, you’d be bored, uninspired, flat. I call that ‘Fizzle” (an Eileenism:)

Renouned psychologist and author of “Finding Flow“, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “chick sent me high”) says ‘flow’ is essential if we are to be engaged in life and at work.

The problem, however, is that we tend to walk through our lives not paying attention to our internal states (emotions). We are attached to our ‘busy-ness” and float between two extremes: during the work day we live filled with anxiety and pressure of work and competing obligations. Then during leisure we tend to live in passive boredom. The key is to be more mindful of what activities engage us and to participate to the point of flow.

Flow activitie are best experienced when the activitiy has the following ingredients, according to Csikszentmihalyi:

• Has our full attention
• Challenges us and requires skill
• Has clear goals
• Provides immediate feedback
• Might be hard work but feels like deep, effortless involvement
• Gives sense of control

So going back to your examples of those moments you came up with (hard work but energized and inspired after), can you see how this criteria played out?

Now think about your current work-life. Do you engage in enough activities that…

• Challenge you and call upon use of actual skills — or are they ‘mindless’ activities?
• Engage your full attention?
• Have specific goals attached and if not, can you create some for yourself?
• Provide immediate feedback (e.g. a sales call) — and if not, can you create a criteria for feedback that you can look for?

Now if you are sitting there and say: “nah….my work has none of that,” I encourage you to stop pressing that snooze button and wake up! Get creative and see if you can make small changes in your work on your own to try to incorporate more flow. You don’t necessarily need a whole new job. You just need to pay attention to what inspires you; what skills you want to incorporate; and a few other things. It’s worth the effort.

To help you with that, here’s an article I wrote that goes into a bit more detail and offers more tips.

I’ve got a ton more to say about “hard work without the struggle” and will be writing much more about this. But for now, I would love to hear from you on anything related to that theme. Please write, ask, comment, share…..it’s all good.

Wishing you FLOW as you start your work-week tomorrow (It’s Monday!)

Eileen

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