FLOW: How to Find Enjoyment in Everything With 6 Simple Truths
Posted on April 24, 2020 by Mathew Riley, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Flow is the enjoyment you feel from experiencing something in the moment; not doing it for future pleasure or to avoid pain. The enjoyment is the now.
So much of what we do, we do because we “have to” or because we expect a future benefit. The value for what we do is often found in pleasing others, fulfilling a responsibility or in the anticipation.
Finding your flow lifts life to a different level. Enjoyment replaces boredom. Alienation turns into involvement. Helplessness turns into a feeling of control. New-found energy works to reinforce your sense of self instead of being lost serving your ego or other people’s needs.
All of us have moments of flow in our life. We don’t always s recognize that we are in them. Being able to identify those moments of flow we will enable us to stay in them longer and reap the full benefit. We can even create moments of flow during activities we may not see as enjoyable. When were able to enact the state of flow in everything we do, everything we do will become enjoyable.
Flow can be achieved by recognizing 6 simple realities:
1. Break you bigger and sometimes overwhelming goals into smaller more accomplishable goals that give you Immediate feedback when accomplished:
- When you play tennis or ping-pong you hit the ball and immediately know if it goes where you want. The goal of winning the volley is broken down to the immediate next step, hit the ball not win the game.
- If your cleaning a toilet the goal, an often unpleasant goal, you can break it down into wiping the top, wiping the sides, cleaning the lid… verses “get the toilet clean and done.”
2. Make the challenges of the activity match the skills of the person doing the activity.
When what must be done is balanced with can be done, flow and enjoyment will emerge. If the task is too easy it can be boring. If it is too difficult it can be too hard and easily put off or avoided.
- When playing tennis or ping-pong, if your opponent is a first timer and you don’t adjust your style of play to match her skill level you most likely will get bored fast. If your opponent is a professional player and they don’t adjust their style to match yours you won’t want to continue, and the match won’t be enjoyable.
- If you are a runner and decide to run as fast as possible and give maximum effort, enjoyment will be high, but the duration will be short-lived. But if you run at a beginner’s pace when you head out for that run, you will soon find yourself bored and maybe start thinking about doing something else.
3. Increase your focus and concentration on what you are doing to remove everyday frustration. Experience what you are doing with each of your senses. Don’t only use your eyes or sense of touch but notice what you are hearing and what you can smell.
- when riding a bike outside you soak in the movement of your body, the wind against your face, the noises you here, the path that is in front of you. Fully taken every aspect of what’s happening inside of you and around you.
4. Acknowledge that you rarely have total control and accept it. Even when you may feel that you have complete control, you rarely do. You’re just on the edge.
- When you are fishing you can control where you go, how you get there and the tools and gadgets you fish with, but you can’t control if the fish bites.
- When playing tennis, you have control of how you hit the ball, where you’re standing, what you’re wearing, what you’re thinking about. You feel like you are in control, but you can’t control how the ball comes back to you. You can only control how you respond to it within the limits of your skill.
- When you’re running you can control where you run, how fast you go, how slow you go, how you breathe, what shoes you wear, what direction you’re going. You may feel in control…but you can’t control what is on the path in front of you, only how you respond to it
5. Let go of what you think others may think about you. When you can be who you are and who you want to be, you can let go of letting others’ opinions and perceptions influence and sometimes control you.
- Gardening at your house you’re not worried about being dirty or the style of your clothes matching or the large hat blocking the sun from your face.
- on a hike with friends you let go of the worry of what you look like with this large backpack on and cargo pants that possibly zip off into shorts with big clunky boots on.
6. Understand that your sense of time may be as unrealistic as it is for the rest of us. Your sense of time can seem to transform reality. 10 minutes can feel like 1 second or what we think 5 minutes is actually 5 hours. Your sense of time changes when you’re doing something just to do it vs doing it because you have to or for a future benefit. When you can enact your state of flow it doesn’t matter what you are doing. The sense of now it’s so strong the time gets lost and what matters most is the present, the now.
- Sit at your laptop for a minute to look up something of interest. You said you were only going to spend a minute. How could almost an hour have passed already?
- You know that you have to do remove the weeds from the flowers, so they don’t choke them out. You start the chore and look at your watch thinking it must have been at least a half hour, only to realize that only 10 minutes has passed.
