6 Steps to Enter the Flow

You’ve heard about how a musician loses herself in her music, or how a painter becomes one with his painting. Time stops, and only total focus on the activity remains.

This is called *being in the flow,* an experience that is both demanding and rewarding… and perhaps the most enjoyable and valuable experience you can have.

Hungarian-born psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, the father of the flow concept, describes the experience as being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

He determined that flow occurs when we are totally absorbed in some activity that is neither too easy nor too difficult for us. If the activity is too easy, we fall into boredom — while if it’s too difficult, we become anxious or stressed.

But it the activity is just right we find ourselves in the state of flow, just like children at play.

Build Flow Mind Power
Learning how to enter into the flow has the potential to immediately improve the quality of your life and build your mind power. Csikszentmihalyi found that being in the flow actually increases your brain power, and that the longer you remain in flow, the more complex your mind power becomes.

The easiest way to understand how flow increases mind power is this: When you perform a task that is too easy, your mind wanders from your work, and you have low mental focus. When something is overwhelmingly too difficult, on the other hand, anxiety and frustration set in.

Neither boredom nor anxiety lead to good mental focus.

Most often we move in and out of flow without realizing it. Any stimulating activity that completely fills your conscious attention can put you there. But the minute you feel worry, boredom or insecurity creeping in, you are out of the flow.

Here’s a reliable step-by-step method to create a state of flow in your life:

Step 1. View your task as a game. Like any serious game, you need feedback to keep yourself challenged, and the most basic form of feedback is keeping score. Establish the objective of your selected task as an actual goal, recognize the challenges to be overcome, and decide on any rules and rewards.

Step 2. Decide on and focus on your purpose. As you play your game, constantly remind yourself of the underlying purpose that is driving you. This goes beyond the goal, it is the reason for the goal.

Step 3. Strengthen your focus. Become aware of your thoughts. If you find your mind drifting or filled with anxiety, you have moved away from the zone. Refocus on the task at hand, and adjust the difficulty until you become fully engaged in the details of the task.

Step 4. Surrender to the process. This is perhaps the greatest mystery of the flow process. As you practice Step 3, you will find yourself enjoying the process of simply focusing completely on the task without straining or undue efforting. As you do, you will begin to experience periods of timelessness.

Step 5. Embrace ecstasy. The most interesting part of this process is the natural result of the previous four steps. You are going to be suddenly hit by surprise with a feeling of ecstasy. You’ll recognize it. When it happens, you are solidly in the flow.

Step 6. Enjoy peak productivity. The state of ecstasy is actually a whole brain phenomenon in which your entire cortex vibrates at one coherent frequency. It is unmistakable. You will have the sensation of creating without thinking, and your productivity will attain unheard of heights.

Flow and The Zone
The state of flow has direct ties to the state of being athletes call *the zone,* and also to the desired end state of Zen Buddhism. But the experience applies equally well to any endeavor, however simple or complex. Think of the minute complexity of the Japanese Tea Ceremony, and the intense mental focus required to perform it correctly.

Increase Your Probabuility of Entering Flow
An excellent way to increase your probability of entering into the flow is to train your brain to release stress — since only then can you achieve the required clear focus.

Regular visits to the Quantum Brain Gym for brainwave training will get you into the FLOW painlessly. Join and spend 10 to 15-minutes a day with brainwave training. Try it! You’ll be amazed at the differences in your mental clarity and focus. Click here!

posted by Jill Ammon-Wexler
Amazing Success

Don’t Invite Memory Loss

At one time or another nearly everyone over the age of 30 has received a birthday card joking about their declining memory or other common ailments of old age.

Now a study suggest that such negative portrayals of old age actually help bring about the  problems they joke about, such as  memory loss in old age.

In one part of the study Harvard University researcher Bacca Levy, Ph.D., asked volunteers aged 60 or over to press either the up or down arrow on a keyboard each time a word was flashed on a computer monitor. Some participants were shown words with negative connotations about aging, such as senile and incompetent, while other folks saw terms with more positive associations, such as wise or alert

Each word was visible for such a brief period of time–anywhere from a tenth to a twentieth of a second–that the participants couldn’t actually read them. Even so, subjects shown words that reinforced negative views of the erderly later performed more poorly on memory loss tests than folks who saw the positive words, Levy reports in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

So negative stereotypes may become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially if we’re not conscious that we’ve been exposed to them. This shows how insidious our views of aging are, Levy says. Maybe it’s no coincidence that in an earlier cross-cultural study Levy found that views of aging are particularly positive in China–where elders far outperform their American counterparts on memory tests designed to measure memory loss in old age.

The Zen of Taking Action

You’ve probably had the experience at one time or another of feeling stuck in your life. Of just sitting in one place — unclear of how to make a decision.

How can you move forward in life when you cannot decide about the next step you need to take? Admittedly, such a lack of clarity can cause some pretty extreme stress!

It’s difficult to move forward if you don’t have clarity, since clarity of purpose often controls your ability to make a decision. Knowing what you want generates the energy to pursue it. While not knowing drains your energy.

So what can you do if you lack clarity? What are your options?

If you’re afraid of making the wrong choice, you can wait and hope for clarity. Or you can try to think your options through in your own mind.

But the truth is, you’ll never really figure life out.”In terms of life-questions”– life has a way of just resolving itself, with or without our conscious intervention or so-called decision-making! And even when we think we’ve got everything all figured out– life will seldom deliver a perfect replica of our mental picture.

One good way to conquer uncomfortable indecision is to simply make a choice from among your unknowns.

Whether or not you feel certain your choice is the “right” choice — just take a small step in what seems to be the best direction, in spite of your doubt or confusion.

There is great power in action. Movement in any direction will break you free from the cement”of indecision — and provide new information and experiences. So just make a decision and move on it.

Action sends ripples of energy and change out into the world. And since life is so totally unpredictable, who knows how your situation will change once you get some action energy”behind your decision.

You may even want to think of your life as a novel you’re reading. You’re only part of the way into the book — and you really don’t know what’s going to happen next. How could you know? The book is still being written.

The challenge you face is this: Dare you move forward in the face of uncertainty? Can you handle”taking action without knowing whether it’s the rightaction? Here’s what I’ve learned in my own roller coaster version of life: If you find you’ve stepped onto the wrong path, you can always adjust your direction.

And any so-called mistakes simply add to your personal wisdom about what doesn’t work — thus taking you closer to discovering what does work.. There is great power in action.

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