In The Flow Coaching

Often, what keeps us from getting in the flow is a mismatch between the challenge of an activity and our ability. Either the challenge is too great and we feel anxious; or not stimulating enough, and we are bored. The trick is to find a way to raise or decrease the challenge to better correspond to our ability.

Watch how Tony Lepore, the “Dancing Cop,” does it.

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When Shannon Bahrke won bronze in women’s moguls at the 2010 Winter Olympics, in her excitement she “hugged first-place winner Hannah Kearney so tightly that she almost knocked her U.S. teammate over.” Next to them on the podium, however, Canadian skier Jennifer Heil looked crestfallen after taking silver.

From our vantage point as a spectator, it might be hard to imagine feeling disappointed at “only” winning a silver medal. On the other hand, we can kind of understand how, after years of training and sacrifice, being so close to the gold — and falling seconds short — could feel like failure.

That crucial difference in perspective is why “on average, bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists,” says Victoria Medvec, a psychologist and professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Illinois. Research shows a disconnect between performance and satisfaction, she says. “Those who perform objectively better can actually feel worse than those who they outperformed.”

Of course, there are high-performers in all arenas – business, medicine, performing arts – who are never quite satisfied with their impressive achievements. They zone in on the flaws, lament their missteps and don’t really seem to savor and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Makes you wonder, what’s the point of achievement again?

The secret to happy goal attainment comes down to focus. Here are five ways Happy High-Achievers – let’s call them HaHAs – play hard and stay content:

1. HaHAs keep their balance. Come on, there’s no glory in pushing to the edge, sacrificing proper nutrition, sufficient sleep and movie night, if it means you’re going to collapse, be out of commission and have disgruntled friends and family. HaHAs keep an ongoing cost-benefit analysis and remember their core values (that trophy isn’t going to come visit you in the hospital!) to make sure they don’t sacrifice what’s really important.

2. HaHAs enjoy the process. Yep, that ol’ chestnut. But isn’t most of the time we spend in pursuing a goal considered “process?” To focus on the fleeting moments on the podium (the stage, the finish line) and expect them to feel like sufficient reward for your hard work is a recipe for dissatisfaction. For HaHAs, the purpose of a goal is for what they’ll learn and the joy in striving for it – actually achieving the goal is just icing on the cake.

3. HaHAs pursue excellence, not perfection. Can we just agree already that perfection does not exist? And if it does, it’s subjective and a constantly moving target? HaHAs know this and refuse to hold themselves up to some impossible standard. They don’t compare themselves relentlessly to others or pay attention to the inner critic. Instead, they prefer to focus on the more satisfying challenge of simply doing better than they did the day before.

4. HaHAs focus on what they can control. And they spend minimal time focusing on what they can’t. When results fall short, HaHAs don’t blame the weather, their neighbor’s barking dog or the dry-cleaners. They don’t constantly look in the rear-view mirror and beat themselves up for a result that is past and done. Whatever happens, HaHAs forgive (themselves and others), show gratitude and find a way to reframe the situation so they can feel good and move forward.

5. HaHAs are doin’ it for themselves. That’s because working toward a goal solely to satisfy someone else’s expectations – whether your parents, fans or society – is destined to create a feeling of gnawing emptiness and “is this all there is?” Conversely, no matter how “unimpressive” or inadvisable a choice of action might seem to an outsider (“What do you mean you don’t want the promotion?!”), HaHAs have figured out which accomplishments give them the greatest satisfaction in practice – not just theory – and they stay true to themselves.

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Here we stand, on the threshold of a new decade: it’s a fresh start, a new beginning. This is it, your chance to really make a change, once and for all – it’s now or never. Yikes, talk about pressure.

Sure, the beginning of a new year provides fresh inspiration and impetus for your goals. The question is, how do you sustain your motivation and stay on the continuous improvement track when daily life and familiar temptations rear their head (did you really think chocolate or “Lost” reruns were just going to lose their allure?). The “all or nothing” approach – i.e. giving up when you get off track – doesn’t work. Here’s the checklist I return to (over and over) to bolster my resolve and keep moving forward.

1. Figure out your why. That’s what the human brain instinctively responds to. As Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why, points out, however, most people start with the “what.” Whether it’s at the macro level — living a life of purpose – or micro level – losing 10 pounds — sheer willpower only goes so far. Without a driving “why,” motivation falters, inspiration fades and change fails to take hold.

Let’s take a typical New Year’s resolution — losing weight — as an example. At a seminar on change by Martha Beck, the Harvard-trained sociologist and resident life coach at Oprah magazine, there was an older Indian woman in the audience who was very insistent that she wanted to lose weight but simply couldn’t. “Are you sure you really want to lose weight?” asked Martha. “Oh yes,” said the woman, “Since I came to America to live with my daughter and her family, I have gained so much weight and I want to get rid of it.”

Martha called the woman up to the stage to demonstrate an exercise where the body acts like a lie detector. She asked the woman to hold out her arm and say, “I like chocolate.” Her arm stayed firm when Martha pressed down on it. But when she said, “I want to lose weight,” her arm immediately gave way when pressed. “Hmmm,” said Martha, “I don’t think you really want to lose weight.” “But I do,” said the woman, “I want to be able to play with my grandchildren.” Ahhh,” said Martha. “So it’s not that you want to lose weight, you want to be healthy and have energy so you can keep up with your grandchildren. Now that you’ve identified what you really want, see if the weight doesn’t start to come off.” The woman walked back to her seat looking stunned but enlightened: she had replaced her what with a why.

2. Fast-forward past the excuses. Too old, too young, not enough time, not enough space, not enough energy, too early, too late…we’re so resourceful in coming up with excuses. And they’re always valid, of course. Except, as Nike pointed out in a recent ad, there’s someone out there who has a good excuse and they’re doing it anyway. So here’s a thought: You know how you can skip commercials when you TiVo a show? You’ve seen them all before, know exactly where they’re going and the featured program is what you really want to see anyway. Hmmm, kind of like your excuses – why not do the same and fast-forward past them right to the action?

3. Create positive rituals. We are creatures of habit. In fact, research suggests that as little as five percent – five! – of our behaviors are consciously self-directed. That means as much as 95 percent of what we do happens automatically. We use this principle to perpetuate our “bad” habits (having a cigarette when drinking with friends, for example), why not create positive rituals as well?

The key, say Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz in their book, The Power of Full Engagement, is to make the behavior precise and the time specific: meditating for 10 minutes before work, say, reading a novel for 20 minutes at lunchtime, or stretching during The Daily Show.

4. Ask a small question. Once we’ve asked the big question – what is my why? -  it’s time to ask a smaller one. Daniel Pink, who goes beyond carrots and sticks in his latest book, Drive: The  Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, suggests that at the end of each day, you ask yourself: “Was I better today than yesterday?” It’s not about critical judgment or self-flagellation: “Instead, look for small measures of improvement such as how long you practiced your saxophone or whether you held off on checking email until you finished that report.” There are days, says Pink, where his answer is, “No, I wasn’t better than the day before.” But, he says, it’s rare that he’ll answer “no” two days in a row. Asking the small question — and a healthy sense of competition with yourself – is subtly motivating and will help you raise the bar an inch at a time.

5. Measure and track. News flash: memory and conjecture are not an objective way to determine whether you’re sticking to the plan or making progress. Instead, come up with concrete, quantitative ways to measure your goals — e.g. how often you went to the gym, how many Spanish verbs you learned to conjugate, the number of sales calls you made – and keep track on a piece of paper or Excel spreadsheet. (Check out http://www.joesgoals.com for a simple online habits tracking system.)

Or you can use the technique that Jerry Seinfeld used to discipline himself to write jokes everyday. Get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page, and a red magic marker. For every day that you finish your goal task, put a big red X over that day. “After a few days,” says Seinfeld, “you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

If you can embrace the idea that change is a daily, iterative process — with reviewing and tweaking to be expected — you’ll find that, even if you’re taking two steps forward and one step back, you’re moving faster and forward.

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With all the books and magazines urging you to “follow your bliss,” it’s tempting to believe life would be a piece of cake — if only you had your “dream” job.

Mornings, you’d wake up bursting with energy, raring to go. Your work would be endlessly fascinating, your interactions with colleagues and clients energizing and, of course, you’d find yourself continuously and effortless in flow.

The truth is, no type of work inherently induces passion — and its natural companion, flow — or boredom. There are surgeons who are bored with their operating duties and machine operators who are enthralled with theirs.

As Alina Tugend points out in the New York Times, “If Not Passion for the Job, at Least Warm Feelings,” perhaps it is more important to be able to find flow — and a measure of passion — in whatever work you happen to be doing. Something that is wholly possible if you can achieve two of the major factors needed to feel good about a job according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the principal arbiter on flow; 1) a sense of personal control over a situation or activity and 2) a balance between one’s ability and potential so the endeavor is neither too easy nor too hard.

Ultimately, suggests Peter Warr, an emeritus professor at the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield in England, “it would be better to think less in terms of passion, and the inflated sense of drama that can go with that, and more in terms of job satisfaction or finding meaning in your work.”

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