I’ve Got Flow!

Lucky you, you might be inclined to say……Let me explain:

There’s a movement that's been growing for about the last 20 years, harnessed to the concept that you need to spend more time stimulating the existing and potential upside in your life than endlessly worrying and replaying the not so good and the plain bad.

It’s called Positive Psychology and its chief mover has been Martin Seligman – you may have read some of his books and, if you haven’t, you might benefit by doing so.

Positive Psychology is sensible stuff. It doesn’t lapse over into the naïve boosterist codswallop that often goes under the banner of NLP and other “Motivational Technologies”; that “What you can conceive you can achieve!” and “See you at the top!” type of irritating nonsense.

What Positive Psychology does allow you to do is to take stock of your advantages and possibilities and constantly marshal them to your maximum advantage. It’s a way of keeping the inevitable stress, pain and tiredness of early stage business creation at bay – but not in a dangerously blinkered or myopic way.

Flow is a concept developed by another Positive Psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It refers to that state of relaxed but intense concentration in which we produce our most outstanding work or performances. It is a sense of almost effortless productivity and, as such, is nirvana for someone like myself who always feels like there is a fresh mountain to climb (and, when you are putting together and growing a business, there is indeed always a fresh mountain to climb!).

I’ve been doing a lot of work with smaller and start-up business recently, helping them to clarify and embed their own higher values as a springboard to accelerated and sustainable development through superior corporate culture.

And it’s rubbed off. I’ve had this enhanced sense the last few days that what we are doing is of significant value and that we are valued for this work.

Everything we do in our work is driven by a sense of developing what we call Community Contribution & Recognition (CCR), a recursive cycle of organisational involvement and reward.

Buoyed up with extra large helpings of CCR, I’ve completed 5 significant pieces of work over this weekend – and enjoyed every single sentence, every diagram and every minute.

I’ve got Flow this morning – if only I could bottle it I think we we’d make a million!