Three Simple Questions to Unlock Your Best Work (part 2)
By Ben Fuller
I asked Katie to marry me while we were paddleboarding. Paddleboarding was a fun way we connected when we were dating. I had bought paddleboards for us, so on one paddleboard outing at Core Creek, before she even knew I had bought the ring, I got down on one knee and proposed. Later, we dressed up and recreated the scene for our engagement photos.
We love paddleboarding on a calm lake while gazing out at the treeline, or gliding along the still waters of a marina where we can slowly float by admiring the docked boats.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could describe work like this? In a way, we can. It’s called flow.
Flow
The idea of flow was introduced by Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi. For Mihaly, flow was his way of describing the act of being so absorbed in something that you lose track of time. Being in the zone, locked in, dialed in, and in the groove are other ways you may hear people try to name this feeling. When Mihaly interviewed people for his research in the 1970s, they described their experiences of losing track of time as floating or being carried along by the water- hence the term flow.
Flow. That sounds nice, right? I’m sure we would all love to describe the feeling we get at work as “being carried along by the water”, but the reality is that for many, our work can feel more like “a drag” or “a burden.” Instead of “floating”, people say, “I’m drowning.”
This topic of flow has been the center of some fascinating research and can be a key to unlocking our best work. Why? Why is the idea of flow connected to unlocking our best work? Research shows that people who experience flow at work enjoy their jobs more than those who do not. So we want to find work that allows us to experience flow. And this leads us to our second question that can unlock our best work:
What is an activity or topic that you find so engaging that it makes you lose track of time?
Not everyone is familiar with the psychological term flow, but everyone can relate to one of the main characteristics of flow– losing track of time. And we know that no job is going to feel like floating down the river while we lose all track of time, but finding a job where you can often experience flow can, according to Mihaly’s research, be a key to unlocking our best work.
Two Ways To Experience Flow at work
Finding the right mix of skill and challenge.
We tend to enjoy activities that match our natural abilities and skills. This is a correct instinct- we should lean into work that fits our strengths. I wrote about this in the newsletter about the CliftonStrengths assessment. At the same time, we should not assume that experiencing flow means the work we are completing is easy. In fact, if the work becomes too effortless, we get bored or apathetic, and time begins to drag. Mihaly explained this phenomenon with this chart. One way people enter into flow is by finding the right mix of skill and challenge.
Find work you would do for no pay
Another aspect of flow, for Mihaly, was intrinsic motivation. He found that people who engage in activities for the enjoyment of the activity itself are typically more goal-oriented and enjoy a better sense of well-being. Finding work where we can explore topics with genuine curiosity and complete activities that bring us a true sense of accomplishment is, to be cliche, priceless. Money, for most, needs to be part of the equation in our career decisions, but enjoying certain aspects of our job that we would engage in for no money is another way we can experience flow at work.
