by Brian Solis
In other words, flow involves becoming so mindful of our activity of the moment that we lose all conscious attention to anything else. People who have been in flow have recounted finishing a session of work they had a sense was a couple of hours and discovering that much more time had gone by.
Csikszentmihalyi explains that the defining features of flow are:14
Intense focus and creative engagement.
A sensation of “ecstasy—of being outside everyday reality.”
Great mental clarity.
A sense of serenity—no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego.
Timelessness—we're thoroughly focused on the present.
Intrinsic motivation—whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.
Carve out some time to throw yourself into a creative activity you deeply enjoy. It should be something you find challenging but that you can do quite well. That's because one of the conditions for getting into flow is that our skill level is adequate for performing well but that doing so requires intense focus. If the task is too easy, we don't get deeply immersed.
You can start small, though, and work up to more challenging tasks. Csikszentmihalyi notes that engaging in acts of everyday creativity—coloring would be one, and maybe for you, singing or dancing—can give us good hits of what he calls “microflow.” This, he says, is “a flow hack, a way of achieving a simulation of rapture but in a relaxed state.” Doesn't that sound worth making time for?
Now, let me suggest the mindfulness practice you've probably been expecting. It's the most often promoted practice, and I've saved it for last because I know that many people think it's been hyped, or will think it's old news. I did, too, until I finally tried it and fell in love with it.
A Simple and Brief Meditation
I will be honest. I did not consider meditation as a solution to distraction because I had the wrong idea about what it is and why it is important. I saw the practice as a spiritual endeavor that I didn't need. I also thought it was just the latest flavor of wellness fad, and I was turned off by all the endorsements of celebrities and athletes who promote its benefit in their work, the apps crowding the app stores, and the ubiquitous ads for mindfulness retreats and festivals.
We remain strangers to ourselves.
But for this book, I researched it, and I now understand that we can all benefit from practicing some form of meditation. One explanation of why particularly struck me. In an article entitled The Real Meaning of Meditation,15 Swami Rama conveyed the importance of meditation in learning about who we are outside and inside. “From childhood onward, we have been educated only to examine and verify things in the external world. No one has taught us how to look within, to find within, and to verify within. Therefore, we remain strangers to ourselves.” Meditation is a way of beginning our journey to look within. In his words,
The mind has a mind of its own. Meditation is a practical means for calming yourself, for letting go of your biases and seeing what is, openly and clearly. It is a way of training the mind so that you are not distracted and caught up in its endless churning. You are committing to yourself, to your path, and to the goal of knowing yourself. But at the same time, learning to be calm and still should not become a ceremony or religious ritual; it is a universal requirement of the human body.
There are many resources to help you find a process that works for you. Rama offers the following simple approach,16 which I am finding is a great help in improving my focus and learning not to indulge in distractions.
He advises:
In the yoga tradition, you are guided by a competent teacher to keep your head, neck, and trunk straight while sitting in a meditative posture (asana). When you have learned to be comfortable in this posture, you should form a regular habit of practicing in the same posture at the same time and at the same place every day.
Find a simple, uncluttered, quiet place where you will not be disturbed.
Sit on the floor with a cushion under you or in a firm chair, with your back straight and your eyes closed.
Then bring your awareness slowly down through your body, allowing all of the muscles to relax except those that are supporting your head, neck, and back.
Take your time and enjoy the process of letting go of the tension in your body. Meditation is the art and science of letting go, and this letting go begins with the body and then progresses to thoughts.
Once the body is relaxed and at peace, bring your awareness to your breath. Notice which part of your body is doing your breathing. If you are breathing primarily with your chest you will not be able to relax. Let your breathing come primarily through the movement of your diaphragm.
Continue to observe your breath without trying to control it. At first the breath may be irregular, but gradually it will become smooth.
Allow yourself to experience your breathing in an open and accepting way. Do not judge or attempt to control or change it. Open yourself so fully that eventually there is no distinction between you and the breathing.
In this process many thoughts will arise in your mind: Am I doing this right? When will this be over? Perhaps I should have closed the window. I forgot to make an important call. My neck hurts. Hundreds of thoughts may come before you and each thought will call forth some further response: a judgment, an action, an interest in pursuing the thought further, an attempt to get rid of the thought.
Bring your attention to these thoughts without reacting to them. You will become aware of how restless your mind is. It tosses and turns like you do on a night when you cannot fall asleep. But if you simply attend to those thoughts when they arise, without reacting, they cannot really disturb you.
Remember—it is not the thoughts that disturb you, but your reaction to them.
Have patience and do your practice systematically. Every action has a reaction. It is not possible for you to meditate and not receive benefits. You may not notice those benefits now, but slowly and gradually you are storing the samskaras (impressions) in the unconscious mind that will help you later.
Be honest with yourself. Keep your mind focused on your goal. It is your own mind that does not allow you to meditate. To work with your mind, you'll have to be patient; you'll have to work with yourself gradually.
You gain clarity, inner balance, and stability by becoming aware of your inner complexes, biases, immaturities, unproductive reflexes, and habits, according to Swami Rama. “Instead of living in these complexes and habits and acting them out … you can give them your full attention,” he says. “Only then will they clear.”
By genuinely embracing mindfulness, we open up the world both within and around us. We see the world with fresh eyes.
“By acquiring the habit of noticing new things, we recognize that the world is actually changing constantly,” says Ellen Jane Langer, professor of psychology at Harvard. The more we understand that, the more we'll appreciate that we have the power within us to change, as well.
Having learned to clear and focus our minds, to tune out all the distraction and reconnect with our authentic values, we're now ready for the next steps of the lifescaling journey—looking deeply within ourselves to discover what we really want to accomplish in our lives and envisioning the path forward.
Notes
1https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/04/never-happened/
2https://www.successconsciousness.com/mental-noise.htm
3https://steptohealth.com/5-keys-calming-restless-mind-finding-internal-peace/
4https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/11/wandering-mind-not-a-happy-mind/
5“Science of Happiness” page 14, Time Magazine 2015
6https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/trauma-and-hope/201801/mindfulness-and-being-present-in-the-moment
7https://www.mindful.org/what-is-mindfulness/
8https://beherenownetwork.com/seize-the-day-laurie-j-cameron/
9https://ideas.ted.com/why-grown-ups-love-coloring-books-too/
&
nbsp; 10https://www.webmd.com/balance/guide/what-is-mindfulness#1
11https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200811/the-art-now-six-steps-living-in-the-moment
12https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200811/the-art-now-six-steps-living-in-the-moment
13https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow#t-330771
14https://lateralaction.com/articles/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi/
15https://yogainternational.com/article/view/the-real-meaning-of-meditation
16ibid
Chapter 10
Liberate
Define Success on Your Trms
“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.”
– Steve Jobs
How do you define success? Is it by job title? Income?
Assets? Status?
I wrestled mightily with this question and wondered how I should measure success. A mentor long ago asked me, “If you had a choice, would you want to be rich or famous?” The young me quipped, “Why can't I have both?”
I now realize that she was guiding me to think beyond both, to my own definition of success. Being rich and famous are crude standards of success that society conditions us to believe will make us happy. She understood that chasing them, seeing them as the purpose of one's work, lures us away from true Happiness.
The understanding of success I learned as a child, which was reinforced throughout my growth into adulthood, was based on the goals and standards taught by my parents, grandparents, teachers, managers, and basically, all other authority figures in my life. It focused too much on a familiar formula:
Go to church.
Go to college.
Work hard and make a good living.
Make friends.
Get married.
Buy a house.
Buy cars.
Have children.
Save money for a rainy day and for retirement.
Be happy.
It's such a generic prescription, which is so ironic. Many of us are also taught, “You can do anything you set your mind to,” encouraged to believe we can achieve almost anything in life. So why has the list of things we should achieve been so preordained by all the generations that came before us?
I've been unlearning this wisdom of the ages in order to redefine what success means to me, this time with intent and the understanding that a more mindful, empathetic, loving, and present life is the foundation of success as a process of living rather than as a plateau of achievement.
A more mindful, empathetic, loving, and present life is the foundation of success as a process of living rather than as a plateau of achievement.
Success and happiness are mutually exclusive if they're not fundamentally entwined. If we elect to sacrifice happiness for the sake of achieving success, thinking we can focus on being happy later, and that our material success will make us happy, we'll be dearly disappointed.
I learned the hard way that success doesn't intrinsically beget happiness. But I also learned that, with mindful attention to what we truly value, our pursuit of happiness can lead to success, which can, in turn, kindle further happiness. They can be powerfully reinforcing, as long as you're defining success on your terms.
Ask yourself right now, How do I define success?
I spent most of my life chasing someone else's definition of success, checking off accomplishments and pursuing material wealth. Looking in the rearview mirror as I surveyed my life, I realized that I measured my success by how confidently I exuded the message, “Look at me! Look what I've achieved.” Maybe that would have made me happy if I hadn't kept raising the bar. But each time I attained a level of achievement I defined as success, it became the new normal, and normal wasn't good enough. I'd find myself pushing for more. The more I had, the more I needed.
It was an exhausting chase because I was seeking satisfaction with my life based on other people's views of me. I was racking up what I thought were trophies of success, which were actually psychological props. I found the most beautiful quotation on the subject. In the words of Nomi Bachar,1
The effort to overcome one's sense of worthlessness by achieving ‘success' is an entirely defensive mindset birthed from the feeling that one is not ‘good enough.
The effort to overcome one's sense of worthlessness by achieving ‘success' is an entirely defensive mindset birthed from the feeling that one is not ‘good enough.' To compensate for that, one must prove their worth through success and notoriety, ‘prove it' to doubters of the past, but actually one is trying to ‘prove it' to oneself.
I did feel semblances of happiness along the way, in fact, quite often. But, I didn't feel joy or satisfaction. My work on my values and development of a more mindful focus on the potential of the present moment, day after day, allowed me to see that the semblances of happiness I experienced weren't actually fleeting moments of contentment. They were moments of pride, or I should say vanity. I didn't feel gratitude about my achievements because they didn't matter to me intrinsically; their value rested entirely too much in their social currency.
Meanwhile all of the stuff I accumulated, mostly so that I could show I had it, started to weigh on me. I learned that with stuff comes pressure to maintain and use it. Otherwise, stuff sits there and becomes a taunting reminder of all the work we've done to get it, and how little time we have to enjoy it. So much of our stuff becomes emotional baggage. Not only does it fail to give us joy, it constantly pulls at our subconscious because we know it is coming at such a cost. We look at it and calculate the opportunity costs in lost family and friend time, lost restorative leisure time, and lost sense of what would actually fulfill us.
Not all of our stuff is burdensome. There's nothing wrong with wanting stuff if we authentically want it, because having it is meaningful to us. Buying an expensive painting is great to do if the work feeds your soul, or you want to foster an artist's career, or assure the painting is well cared for. If you don't stop to look at it sometimes, and feel the meaning to you of its presence, then it has lost its true value.
Some of the stuff we chase reminds us of good times we've had, of steps achieved, of passions we've cherished, like my old guitars. They were good baggage, and I'm so glad I didn't get rid of them because they're now giving me so much joy again. Some of our stuff embodies aspects of who we are.
In order to release yourself from your burdensome baggage, you've got to unpack all of your baggage and take a good look at what you're really carrying around with you.
This is a pivotal moment in lifescaling. We need to decide what we are taking with us, what we need for the journey forward, and what we should leave behind.
I'll never forget the deep emotional impact of reading a quote by Thich Nhat Hanh,2 Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, which has stayed with me: “Letting go gives us freedom and freedom is the only condition for happiness.” It was one of those right time, right place messages, and it immediately changed my outlook on stuff. Suddenly, I could see that I was tethered to lots of stuff that was nothing but emotional clutter. It didn't mean anything to me, and I don't think it really impressed anyone else, either.
“Letting go gives us freedom and freedom is the only condition for happiness.”
Learning how to shed the weight of tokens of success is the next step of lifescaling. Here's what to do:
Step 1: Take an inventory of your baggage and assess it by thinking about why you wanted it, what it meant to you when you got it, and what it means to you now. This goes not only for material possessions, but for all the indicators of your success—the good grades you strived for, the promotions you gunned for and new jobs secured, the trips taken, concerts attended, dinners with friends, and holidays with family. You get the drill.
Step 2: Mentally gather up the stuff that's become emotional baggage. Keep in mind as you do this that not all of the emotional weight we feel is negative. Some of it is the product of the healthy pursuit of dreams. For example, if you have a
n extensive to-do list of ambitious goals, you're probably feeling some guilt or frustration that you're not getting to them quickly enough.
In my case, I have so many things I want to create—a musical album, three different books, several research reports on topics I would love to cover, and a touring pop-up shop for my photography and art. These are all projects that are truly meaningful to me. But I've learned that I need to set some of them aside for a while in order to maintain my creative focus. I just can't get to everything, and taking my desire to start working on all of them with me everywhere was limiting my ability to create any of them.
Other elements of my exhausting baggage were the stuff I thought attested to my success from which I took no true satisfaction. I had to sort through everything carefully, really challenging myself to admit what it meant to me, in order to see which was which clearly.
Step 3: Give yourself permission to let go of the things that are holding you back, not only those you don't really want but also your aspirations that are positive and worthy of creation. Plan to revisit them later. Put them away for safekeeping.
With those material things you've decided are just weighing on you, think about giving them away. You could take them to Goodwill. Or maybe sell them on eBay. Consider all new purchases you're planning carefully to be honest with yourself about why you want those things. Do you really need the newest iPhone? Could you happily get a few more good years out of your current car?