208.Why Hard Work Isn't Working (Flow State Revolution)

Unlocking Flow State: Boost Your Team's Productivity

In this episode of Kathie's coaching podcast, host Kathie Owen discusses the concept of flow state and its importance for both individual and team productivity.

Kathie explains that a significant 87% of employees have never experienced true flow state, which is integral to peak performance. She uses the analogy of athletes and sports to convey the essence of flow state, emphasizing the balance between challenge and skill.

Kathie covers three main areas for benefiting from flow—focus, adaptability, and resilience—using metaphors and practical techniques like the five-minute pivot technique. She also talks about building good habits through task chunking and learning sprints, along with the importance of tracking small wins.

Lastly, Kathie offers implementation steps and encourages listeners to identify and react positively to flow breakers, aiming to nurture a productive team environment.

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction to Flow State 
00:30 Understanding Flow State Through Athletes 
01:45 The Benefits of Flow State for Teams 
01:55 The Concept of Flow State 
02:30 Three Key Areas: Focus, Adaptability, and Resilience 
03:36 Focus: Building a Distraction-Free Zone 
04:09 Adaptability: The Five Minute Pivot Technique 
05:35 Resilience: Learning from Setbacks 
06:59 Building Habits for Flow State 
07:49 Individual and Team Habits 
09:14 Leadership Habits and Feedback Loops 
11:25 Implementation Steps for Achieving Flow 
14:23 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

🔗🔗Links for today’s episode:

Kathie Owen Links: https://www.kathieowen.com/links

Blog Post for today which includes bonus resources: https://www.kathieowen.com/blog/flow-in-the-workplace

Transcript

0:00

Hello and welcome. Today, we're going to talk about flow state and how it can help your team's productivity and yourself as well. What if I told you that 87% of employees never experienced, true flow state. Man, I feel sorry for them. They're actually missing out on their peak performance. Welcome to Kathie's coaching podcast. I'm your host Kathie Owen I want you to picture your favorite athlete, you know, the one that always makes those shots despite being booed or despite all of the stress that's on them. Or even the ones that miss it. But they still find flow state. They happen to understand flow state. They epitomize flow state. They're actually someone I look to when I'm trying to understand flow in my life or understand flow when I'm teaching somebody, how to. I get into the zone, which is flow by the way. They have managed to enter flow state, which is where challenge meets skill. They know they have the skill and they also can find the challenge. And when the challenge meets the skill they are in flow state, this is why. That great basketball player can make that free-throw despite being booed incessantly, despite all of those little things in the background, cheering and trying to distract them. They still hit it. And even when they don't, they don't beat themselves up about it. So. Flow can help your team. Become more productive at work. And that's what we're going to talk about today. And that includes you as well. Flow state is a wonderful, wonderful state. It was coined by the term. By the psychologist, Mihai cheek semi high. He wrote the book flow. I'll have a picture of it right here. And then I'll also have a link to it. In the blog post that I include in every video I do in the show notes and description below. That has a bonus resources for today. Flow state is that perfect balance between challenge and skill. And there's three areas we're going to cover today that your team could benefit from, or you yourself could benefit from. And those three areas are focus, adaptability and resilience. I want you to think of a river for a moment. You know, the river flows, it's got the banks, it's got current, it comes over rocks. It, it is the greatest metaphor you can think of for flow state. The current that goes on inside the river can represent your skills. The banks on the sides of the river can represent your structure or your boundaries. And then imagine the river being blocked. You know, they call it a damn. And when it is blocked, what happens? Things spill out on this side. And things become overwhelming. It goes over the dam. That's been blocked the river. And we're going to talk about how all of this relates to your team's productivity or your productivity as well. First of all, we have focus. You want to build a distraction free zone where you can actually get focused. In today's world distractions are coming everywhere. We always have things that are distracting us. But when you set a boundary. You know, the banks of the river. When you set a boundary for your distractions, you're able to focus and focus is a key component of flow. Then we have adaptability. There's something I called the five minute pivot technique. And this technique is helpful because you're going to have to pivot and move between the currents and that takes your skill as well. But we want to use our skill to our advantage. And we could do that by taking this five minute pivot technique and that technique. Just entails sitting down and go, okay. I've hit a block in my skill or something has happened. I'm going to do five minutes to go brainstorm a new idea. Take five minutes to step away for a minute. For example, I used to have a lot of struggles with recording my videos, my computer was messed up and so my videos would get stuck and things were messed up. And that to me was a sign that I needed to step away because I had met a challenge that didn't meet my skill. So I adapted by pivoting and I would just step away. Maybe for a day and that timeframe would help me. Pivot back into flow state instead of becoming a flow breaker a distraction it helped me readjust and adjust my skills accordingly to meet the challenge. And then there's resilience. We want to learn from setbacks. We want to learn from those instances where we lost the game. But if we look at it like this, we can celebrate the small wins and still have flow in our life. I'll go back to the example of the teams. You have so many teams in a league and only one of them is going to win the whole championship. And that means there's a lot of losers. No. That means there's a lot of small wins along the way for everyone across the board. When my son was in little league baseball, I would get so frustrated because parents would cheer for somebody who messed up. And these are just little kids. And I know that builds resilience, but at the same time, I couldn't cheer for the kid who was messing up because I'm like, I'm a mom. That kid has a mom. And I can only imagine how she feels right now. And I'm not going to cheer for that mistake, even though my son may have made that hit, it was still a mistake on somebody else's part. You celebrate your small wins that go along the way. So that, that doesn't seem so bad. You hear me talk about habits a lot habits are really, really helpful in building a flow state. And here's why habits become unconscious behaviors. Think about it. When you drive your car, do you think about every little step you took? No. It, because if you did, it would take too much energy from your brain. So when you start to create habits, do tiny habits. I do the power of habit. Those are books by the way that I will link in the blog post that goes with this episode. But when you think about building habits, when you build them slowly, but surely you unconsciously start to build the habit of finding flow. Let's talk about that. So individual habits can look like this. You do task chunking. For example, right now I am recording videos in chunks so that I can do all of the video recording tasks at one time, then I'll go into. Editing tasks that is task chunking. When you think of a project, if you break it down into different tasks, it makes it easier and it makes flow come naturally. That becomes a habit. Another great individual habit is called learning sprints. What is that? That means you are learning different things, and then you go practice that skill. And learning that could be as simple as listening to a book while you're in the gym. And then you think, oh, I'm going to go practice those tasks because success doesn't just happen overnight. It's built on these task chunks and learning sprints. Team habits can look like this, you know, working in a collaboration on something, or even sharing some skills that you've learned along the way that you can help others to develop on and even get better all the time. It works like magic. And leadership habits. I'm going to be talking about professional football and some of my favorite coaches coming up in some future episodes about how they built a culture that you could practice the same habits that they have, that they work on, that they do inside your business, that will help build the culture that is a successful team. What do I mean by that? This. Is a leadership habit. You constantly want to be learning how to improve your leadership skills. This should never end. It's an infinite game. We're constantly improving or constantly getting better. We're constantly hitting. Opportunities, which are setbacks. But we still see the opportunities where we can help get better over time where we can help find flow state. And that could be a challenge calibration. And then we also want to have the feedback loops. One of the most important things that I do as a corporate wellness consultant. Is assess a team. You constantly want to understand where you have opportunities, which could be looked as, as setbacks, but you have opportunities for improvement for helping your team find more flow to help your leadership skills get better. Um, there we go again. There's that word? Skill. Challenge meets skill. And when we find that sweet spot, we start to find flow and we start to get better and better and better. That is a feedback loop that you get from your assessment. So you have that loop that just keeps going on and on and on, and it's never ending. And I invite you to look at places where you could give yourself feedback and that loop and continue to improve on a regular basis. Again, it's an infinite game So here's some implementation steps that you could start taking today. Number one start assessing the challenge and skill balance. Where's the challenge and where is the skill? This can go with yourself as well. So for example, I was talking about how I would have trouble with my video editing. It was my computer, but I wasn't at the skill level. I needed to edit my videos. So I needed to balance that out. How did I do that? I stepped away for a little while. I stepped away for a couple of days. I start studying it and learned to improve my skills on editing and getting better at recording the content. And. Next thing. I know I'm in flow. It was a balance. And it started with assessing my skills. Another thing you can do is just choose one area to focus on. What is that area, maybe you need to improve on your leadership skills and study that, and slowly but surely build that skill, just like the athlete. They have to study where their skill is not meeting their level. A free throw shooter in basketball. Maybe he sees in this game. I did not hit the shots that I usually hit. So he started practicing it. And when he practiced it, he got better and better with time. Another way you could start implementing it is implement micro habits. Tiny habits. I love the book tiny habits, because what he does is he teaches you how to start building healthy habits. On top of the habits that you already have going on. So, if you're already brushing your teeth in the morning, you could add, listen to my affirmations at the same time. Repeat my affirmations in my mind at the same time as I'm brushing my teeth. And then it becomes a habit. That's a micro habit stacked on top of another micro habit, which becomes a healthy habit. And remember habits are unconscious behaviors that we do automatically. So they are already a wonderful way to improve your skills. And then we'll finally, we want to track. And celebrate those wins. Celebrate small wins. I can't tell you how impactful this is. So a small win. I could be just getting up there and doing something you've been trying to do, even if it's just a hobby you've been trying to build on that habit, or you actually did the habit of. Whatever it was when you were brushing your teeth, celebrate that small win. Yay. Go Team! So. After listening to this, I want you to start to think of flow breakers in your life. And how you react to them. And remember we all get up. Are you very, very reactive and very angry, or do you look at it as an opportunity to get better? That goes the same for your team. And as a leader, if you can teach this and coach this, just imagine how much better your team is going to get when you start to help them find flow because remember I started this with 87% of employees are not practicing this simple process that could help them become more productive and more successful. As always. And every episode I do, I include a blog post. It will be in the show notes and description below. And this. Article we'll have bonus resources that go along with this episode. Like the books I talked about today. Or just simple tips that I didn't even happen to mention in here that may really trigger you into finding your flow state. And I also invite you to share the comments below, maybe your win for finding flow or something that you found was helpful to finding flow state. All right. That's my video for today. I trust that you found it helpful. If you know somebody who could benefit from this, please share it with them. And until next time I will see you next time. Peace out and Namaste