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17 "Flow" Triggers That Will Increase Productivity - Tapping

into Peak Human Performance in Business

“Time slows down. Self vanishes. Action and Awareness merge. Welcome to Flow.”
-Steven Kotler, Co-founder of the Flow Genome Project

Business is all about productivity and human performance. As a business owner or


manager, you will want to know about flow states and triggers. A 10 year study by
McKinsey found that top executives performed 5x better when in a flow state. Creativity
was increased by 7x!
Understanding flow is vital to increasing productivity and watching your and dreams come
to life.

What is a “Flow state”?


“Flow state” is the technical term devised by scientists to describe what most people call,
“being in the zone.”
It is a complex neurochemical event involving norepinephrine, which enhances your
awareness and makes you more alert; dopamine, which is your brain saying, “You're onto
something, keep it up;” endorphines, which make you feel happy and invincible; and
anandamide, which prompts lateral thinking.
This is what happens when you are so focused on the task at hand that everything else just
melts away. This state of being allows you to easily make decisions. You feel good when
you are in the zone. Things happen, and progress is made.

How can I use Flow or peak performance in my


business?
There are 17 creative triggers that you can harness to help get you in the zone. These
triggers are separated into the following 4 categories:

1. Environmental Triggers
2. Psychological Triggers
3. Social Triggers
4. Creativity

By including some, or all, of these triggers in your daily life, and business environment,
you can push yourself into a state of peak performance.
If you can get into the zone, and help your colleagues and employees to do the same, your
performance will increases, and your creativity, innovation, learning, and memory will all
be enhanced. Everyone will be happier!

1. Environmental Flow Triggers


These triggers are all environmental, or external triggers. These three triggers surround you
physically, and drive you deeper into the zone.

High Consequences:

If your neck is on the line then you are driven into the zone. In a business environment, that
might look like deadlines, or advancements that are contingent on performance. Heck,
maybe this trigger is embodied in your desire to avoid bankruptcy, or to avoid making the
wrong decision about a retail display setup.
If you want to incorporate this trigger in your life, try upping the stakes. Set firmer
deadlines, make the consequence of not doing (fill in the blank) unappealing. There's
nothing like getting so far into a business challenge that there is nothing to do but deal with
it. With high consequences, it's really sink or swim.
You must be willing to take risks. It is that sense of adventure and potential for failure that
will drive you. Risk is relative. Find out what it is you are willing to risk for productivity,
and harness it.

Rich Environment:

A rich environment is one part novelty, one part unpredictability, and one part complexity.
Surrounding yourself with a rich environment involves finding things that will catch and
keep your attention (novelty), being able to step outside your comfort zone and face the
unknown (unpredictability), and increasing the depth and breadth of your knowledge by
seeking out information from many different sources or view points (complexity).
Attend a conference, take a class, develop a new product or service. When you create a rich
environment for yourself that presents challenges, opportunities, and new perspectives, you
can really harness flow.

Deep Embodiment:

This element is referring to a total physical awareness. When you can harness the power of
your whole body paying attention to the task at hand, you will feel unstoppable.
In business, your entire entity is the body. Being aware of all the different facets of it would
represent deep embodiment.
Take the owner of a cupcake shop for example. In order to harness the trigger of deep
embodiment, the owner would need to know each of his employees, their strengths and
weaknesses. He's got to know his inventory like the back of his hand. He has to know his
customers and their tells. He has got to know his cupcakes!
Delve into your business environment. Dive into your life. Become familiar with every
aspect of it and how each facet reacts in different situations. If you do this, you will truly
feel empowered.

2. Psychological Flow Triggers


The next set of triggers are purely in your mind. These psychological lynchpins will drive
your attention into the present, and keep you there.

Intensely Focused Attention

One of the primary functions of a flow state is to help you focus on a particular discreet
task, however, to get into the flow state in the first place, you must be in a position that
allows you to intensely focus your attention on your goals.

Clear Goals:

When you have clear goals, your mind doesn't have to wonder what to do next. It already
knows, and you can push forward towards success.
Unfortunately many folks skip right over the clear part, and focus on the goal. That can be a
really restrictive way to look at things. Don't focus on the finish, focus on running the race.
Too often you get distracted by your past, future, or self. Too many times you hear stories
about that innovative new upstart business whose owner got so focused on his goal for
being the next Steve Jobs that he overstretched himself and went belly up.
Focus on the clarity of your goals. Clarity gives you certainty and takes the guess work out
of who, what, when, where, why, and how. Keep your focus on the here and now.
One way to do this in your life would be to break huge tasks into bite-sized pieces. Take
things in stride and keep things challenging, but manageable. And for goodness' sake, be
clear about what you want from yourself and your business. There's no sense in tripping at
the finish line because you were distracted by thinking about your trophy!

Immediate Feedback:

This trigger involves a direct coupling of cause and effect. It is a partner to clear goals, in
that your clear goals will focus your attention on the task at hand, and immediate feedback
will tell you how to do it better.
In business there is nothing like a bad client review to change your policy or improve a
product. There is nothing like a good review to make you think, “How can I get more of
those!” Feedback from clients, employees, or colleagues is important when you are
evolving a business, but a lot of the time, it can come too late.
You need to cinch your feedback loops in tighter. Review progress daily, or at least more
often than once a quarter. Check in on yourself and your employees, and then move
forward!

Skill/Challenge Ratio:
There is
this concept of a stress curve that you may have heard about. At one end of the scale you
have a correlation between low stress and low performance. At the other end, you have a
correlation between high stress and low performance. Right in the middle, you have the
optimal level of stress correlating to peak performance.
The Skill/Challenge ratio is all about finding that sweet spot between boredom and anxiety
that scientists call the flow channel. As a manager of human beings you need to help your
employees to find that channel. If your employees are bored, morale will fall. They will
stop caring about your clients, the company, their jobs. They will be hitting their heads
against a proverbial wall. Over stress them and you will cause them to burn out quickly,
turnover rates will be high, and you will lose productivity.
You must constantly challenge yourself and push the envelope, but be careful not to over do
it. Flow studies claim that we should challenge ourselves to a point that is 4% past what our
current skillset allows. This will incur a steep learning curve that does not overwhelm or
cause burnout.

3. Social Triggers
Up till now we have mainly been focusing on triggers that affect an individual. Sure we've
talked about applying them to an office environment, but even then they are all triggers that
affect an individual. Now we will examine the triggers that a group might use in order to
get into the zone as a group.
Think tanks. Board meetings. Team situations. Anyone that has to work directly with other
people to achieve a goal should understand the social triggers involved in getting into a
good rhythm with each other.

Serious Concentration, Shared Clear Goals, and Good Communication:


These three social flow triggers go hand in hand and they are the collective versions of the
psychological triggers discussed about above. They are still vital spring boards for
increased action, and they apply to groups as well as individuals.

Equal Participation:

When you have a team of individuals who are working towards a common cause, the cause
becomes more important than their individual agendas. Team work kicks in, and everyone
is involved. Your team becomes a machine and the synergy will amaze you.
Micromanaging a department can take away that sense of equality. Without that thread of
equality, the stronger personalities on the team would pull away from the weaker ones, and
the results are lackluster.
Make sure your team is made up of people who care about the cause, who can pull their
weight, and trust the others to do the same.

Elements of Risk:

Risk applies to groups in the same way that it applies to individuals. When there is an
element of risk, people are more motivated to work hard, and make things happen. Without
that, your tasks become boring. Again, risks are relative.
Perhaps the risk of participating in this group is that you are afraid that you will give a bad
suggestion to a colleague. Perhaps it's that your team will lose a client if they don't put
together a strong enough pitch.
Whatever the risk, harnessing this element of flow will involve recognizing that risk,
making your team aware of it (if they aren't already) and encouraging them to burn the
midnight oil to make your project come to life.

Familiarity:

Whenever I think of familiarity I think of those spy shows you see on TV sometimes. No
matter how solitary the spy, he always has friends, contacts, or cohorts that pulled a job
with them in the past. Their past experience together is a game changer in whatever they
are experiencing in the present.
People who are familiar with one another have a set of acceptable phrases and actions that
evolve into a sort of language that facilitates faster communication and better team
dynamics.
If you get the option to choose a team, and you have the luxury of being able to work with
folks that you have already worked with before, make sure to take advantage of that!

Blended Egos:

This one goes hand in hand with Equal Participation. It is a sort of collective humility. No
one is hogging the spotlight, and everyone participates. This is something that will come
with time as a group works together and experiences success together.

Control:
There's nothing like finding yourself in a room of friends who haven't seen each other in a
while. Chaos ensues as everyone tries to talk at once, and no one can catch everything that
is said.
A structured meeting format is important to group dynamics. Especially if you are all
friends. Nothing will get done if you can't stop talking about the niceties of life and get
down to the nitty-gritty. In a structured meeting, the group stays focused, goals are clarified,
feedback is given, new goals are set, and progress is made.
Try coming up with an agenda before the meeting begins. Have one person in charge of
keeping the group focused on the agenda. The meeting will truly flow.

Close Listening:

This one is often confused with trying to figure out what attention-grabbing-thing to say
next, but really, when you are listening closely to the present conversation, your responses
will flow, and conversation will progress naturally.
One way to enhance close listening skills in a group environment is to have some sort of
speaking stick. I know that sounds a lot like a summer camp solution to manage children
who talk out of turn, but it is a viable solution in a business setting, too.
Imagine an advertising group who pass a bean bag around as they do free associations in
order to get their creative juices flowing. Once you have the bean bag, it's your turn to say
something. No one interrupts, everyone listens to the person talking, and it's fun.

Always Say Yes:

Now, don't mistake this for always saying yes to everything. Sometimes ideas that are
formulated in a group setting are genuinely bad ideas. However, this element is about being
open to trying new things, even if they sound like a bad idea. All input into the group
should be additive, not negative.
Steven Kotler shared a really great example in a guest post about Flow states:

“It’s a trigger based on the first rule of improv comedy. If I open a sketch with, 'Hey, there’s
a blue elephant in the bathroom,' then 'No, there’s not,' is the wrong response. With the
denial, the scene goes nowhere. But if the reply is affirmative, 'Yeah, sorry, there was no
more space in the cereal cupboard,' then that story goes someplace interesting.”

Instead of shooting down a bad idea like you're a fighter pilot in a dog fight, start your
response with, “Alright, that's not a bad idea. How about we change it this way to
incorporate this other idea.”
Don't be afraid of bad ideas. What was it that Thomas Edison said about the light bulb?
Something like,

“I didn't fail 999 times. I just found out 999 ways not to make a light bulb.”

It's all about the positive, additive responses to each individual and their ideas. It really
makes magic happen!
The Creativity Flow Trigger
Creativity in and of itself can trigger and is triggered by flow states. When broken down to
its core, creativity is comprised of a couple major components. Steven Kotler says:

"Creativity triggers flow; then flow enhances creativity"

Pattern Recognition

This is the brain's ability to break down existing patterns, colors, data, shapes, movements,
sounds, concepts, successes, risks, failures, praise, and other complex ideas and create new
ideas using those patterns by linking new elements together to create new patterns.

Risk-Taking

To be creative inherently includes an element of risk by virtue of presenting a new and


different idea to the world. Will the new concept be well received or will it be scorned? All
creativity requires an element of courage in order to undertake these associated risks.

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