Plan for Flow - or you’ll have a Tough Swim.
Imagine you’re fully and joyfully immersed in an activity—time flies, distractions fade away, and you don't feel depleted despite the intellectual or physical demands.
That's FLOW. It's that state where everything clicks, and you're energized rather than drained. We could all use more of that in our lives!
A flow state comes to most of us when we do things we both enjoy and are good at. It’s the product of playing to our strengths. We accomplish more and at a higher quality. Simply put, we’re at our best.
Why wouldn’t you want to spend more time in the “Flow State,” reaping the benefits?
This hit home recently when a project outside the “things I enjoy” category needed to be done. In the absence of a dream team of people I have had most of my career, I found myself doing more things that on a performance review might be noted as a “development opportunity.” In the end - when the task was complete, the thought echoed in my brain for days, “Let’s not do that again!”
Leaders begin their careers by applying the skills required for their role – this is often what we’ve trained to do and are likely good at. As we progress and gain experience, we acquire a broader set of skills: the HR leader runs a P&L, and the accountant learns to manage a team. You become proficient and may excel at some of these new responsibilities even if you don’t like to do them.
As this happens, many of us can find ourselves spending more time away from the work we love most. Reporting, meeting, overseeing, managing—none of these create flow for most of us, and we run the risk with most of our time being focused here.
When you’re not in Flow, you’re swimming upstream and feeling painfully close to being pulled under by a rip tide—it’s exhausting. And when you’re done (assuming you don’t give up), your confidence is shaken.
People who have worked with me know I’m passionate about setting priorities, creating wildly important goals, and identifying the lag and lead measurements to achieve them. While these priorities often focus on a strategy or project that someone is leading, what if your priority was to spend more time working in the Flow, proactively planning to spend as much time as possible doing the work with the greatest impact?
If you know what makes you flow…Ask yourself what would change if you prioritized working in Flow and what the impact would be. (Yes, impact is different than change.)
While I’ve framed this around business, it was a lesson I learned first and best from my grandmother. How could I have forgotten?
“Find what you love, you’ll be good at it, and make enough money to pay people to do the things you don’t love,” said Milly often. She would be OK with me sharing that on the home front, someone else cleaned our house, the laundry was picked up in a bag and delivered clean and folded, and the less time she spent in the kitchen, the better. She hired a bookkeeper at the shop early and trained others to do all administrative tasks that weren’t outsourced.
She was in the Flow state before it had the label - I saw it daily.
She built a business doing something she loved. Her strengths were her creativity, curiosity and EQ. She would admit she spent a lot of time “working,” but it never felt like work. She marvelled that she could get paid for doing what she loved. “The Shop” was my best and favourite classroom.
I was back in the Flow this week—doing what I love with a plan to stay here more. I outsourced one more service to someone who loves numbers more than words! And I moved a memento from my Gram to my office as a reminder to stay in the Flow: a clock presented to her in 1990 for her service to an industry she loved. I use it to remind me to track the time I spend doing the “rip tide work”, so I don’t get pulled in for too long and get back to the FLOW.
