Cameron: [00:00:00] During a whole day at work our mental states vary greatly, but are you aware of what these states are when they change? And more importantly, are you proactively driving this change?
Welcome to Flow Unleashed. I'm Cameron Norsworthy and this is your podcast for human performance.
I am sure you're familiar with your own mind wandering, reminiscing, or projecting to a feature event. Or perhaps thinking about random things before you quickly refocus and drag your experience back towards the task at hand. [00:01:00] We do this all the time, every day, every hour. In fact, our mind is constantly fluctuating between different states of mind, and for the most part, we are unaware.
Sometimes this happens automatically. Our mind wants to clear its cash process, rising emotions, or have a well needed break, and sometimes, however this happens, even when we don't want it. But why is this important? Well, every time our mind goes into a different state or different meta state, our mental functioning changes.
The change is often temporary, but can significantly affect how we operate and our capacity to make decisions or be present. Fundamentally shifting how we think, feel, and behave. It changes our physiology, our neurochemistry, and our biology. [00:02:00] These mildly states of consciousness essentially underpin our day-to-day ability and performance.
Yet, rarely do we pick a certain state to embody before we do a particular task. We might actively seek to change our state when getting drunk or making love or fasting or going to the movies, but the subtle fluctuations of our state of mind's constantly fluctuating on autopilot unharnessed to empower our ability and quality of experience.
Someone who has extensively studied these maer, often unnoticed day-to-day fluctuations is our guest, Jared Troop. Jared is an adjunct professor at New York University and President Emeritus of the New York Metropolitan Association of Applied Psychology, the oldest and largest, largest industrial organizational psychology association in the United States.
His research explores the practical [00:03:00] applications of generative ai, workplace nudges mindfulness and flow theory
flow unleashed. Unleashed. Welcome to the show, Jared. Thanks, Cameron. Thank you so much for having me today. It's great to see you again. The last time I saw you was in Europe in a beautiful, uh, mountain town in, in Innsbrook. Seems, seems a long time ago now. I know it does. It feels like another lifetime ago, but really only a few months ago.
And yeah, I feel like we were living in, in another world. It was so nice. Yeah. Bit of paradise. Definitely. Your research explores different mental states that we experience throughout the day. Can you give us an overview of what are these states and why do they matter? Sure. Absolutely. So the way that I like to think about these states are the way that a researcher named [00:04:00] Dane lays them out.
So he thinks about these different states that have different levels of present moment focus, or whether you're focusing on the past or the future, and also how narrow or broad your attention is. So for example, flow is a state where you're really focused on the present moment. But you're also really focused on one thing.
Your attention is pretty narrow on the task at hand, whereas mindfulness is also a present moment state, but your attention is a little bit broader. Then we have other states like rumination, fantasizing, mind wandering, that are not focused on the present moment and are. In the case of mind wandering, your mind is everywhere and not really focused on one thing, but rumination and fantasizing, you're really thinking about one thing either in the future or in the past.
And we fluctuate throughout these states, throughout with [00:05:00] different states throughout the day, depending on what we're doing and how we're feeling and things like that. Identify with all those words you used there. Is there any data on how often we're in each of those states? Like what's the prominent one that we tend to all be in most of the time?
That's a great question. It depends on the person and your, and the frequency in what you're in. These different states tends to be correlated. With other things like depression, burnout, or the opposite, feeling really energized and engaged. And so it depends. But at work we often fluctuate through mindfulness and flow, but there's also a good amount.
Of mind wandering in these other states as well. So it really is dependent on the individual and also it's pretty [00:06:00] subconscious and we don't tend to think about these states. We just tend to experience them, which is what I'm sure we're gonna be diving a little bit deeper into for the rest of the conversation.
And just to double click on that, we so many people. I am not ordinarily aware that they have different experiential states, right? We go throughout the day and we are reactive to that external stimuli, and we often feel that how we feel on the inside is. A direct result of what's happening on the outside, as if the external world is controlling how we feel.
Uh, they made me feel like this or this is happening and I feel like this. How much control do we have over these inner states? So it ranges, again, just from your natural abilities to do these things. But we do have a decent amount of control if we train ourselves to recognize these state. Understand what they feel [00:07:00] like when we tend to feel them and how they make us feel afterwards and what the kind of outcomes associated with them are when we have the wherewithal to first recognize them, I.
Then we can start thinking about how we can, because the first thing you need to do is be like, oh, I'm feeling this right now. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? And what can I do about it? Which gets to a little bit of, of emotional intelligence as well, which is interrelated with all of these things.
So it varies is the answer. I think the default is not very much, but for most people, I would say if I was just hypothesizing. But through some of the research that I've done, we are finding some support for the idea that this is, these things are trainable and recognizable in the moment. From a practical perspective, when I work with individuals, I'm often talking about this idea of experiential intelligence.
Most of [00:08:00] us would've heard of emotional intelligence and emotional competence, and I like to think of. Experiential intelligence is more broader than that, including thoughts, volition, perspective, and so forth. The different aspects that make up a subjective experience are more, more than just emotions.
Mm-hmm. Certainly from that individual perspective, as you talked about, once our awareness gains, we can start to maybe curate these things. Mm-hmm. You are working a lot within organizations, um, and within industry, and how, how often do you feel that this experience or these fluctuating states are actually proactively managed by the organization?
Uh, I think it's becoming more prevalent, at least in the organizations that are large enough to, to think about these things and, and have some like learning. [00:09:00] Organizations within them. I think, uh, emotional intelligence especially is getting a lot of attention right now. I think the performance outcomes associated with these things and the differentiation between organizations is becoming more and more important.
And part of that is your ability to. Interact with others to understand how others are feeling and to try to control your own emotional states, or at least recognize them and understand why you're feeling them. All of these things that I feel like were more squishy or maybe even look down upon and. In corporate America over the last a hundred years or whatever, are becoming more front of mind because again, like we are seeing the benefits from these things in working with organizations, excuse me, going down the rabbit hole here.
Mm-hmm. But where do [00:10:00] organizations just getting a temperature test from your. Practice. Mm-hmm. Where does the buck lie? Do organizations tend to feel that the buck lies within the individual 'cause it's their state and they should be managing their state to be more optimal? Or do they feel that Actually no.
We have a responsibility here to curate these states to create as, uh, the most optimal state possible for work performance. Yeah, I've definitely seen the, the range of things in my consulting and in my coaching, in my consulting. I've tend to work with organizations who may are a little bit more progressive thinking in these ways, and they believe that they, they do have a responsibility to try to.
Put the architecture in place that helps their employees thrive and experience these states in different ways, which we can talk about at the individual level. I often hear horror stories about situations where their organization couldn't care less [00:11:00] about these things. They're overworked, they have too much stuff going on.
And it lies on the individual then to to deal with it if they're going to stay in their current work situation, which a lot of people need to and can't quickly switch if things are not ideal or optimal. So again, I do see the range of things in my own practice and in my research. I also. See that it is something that can happen at different levels, and ideally there's a shared responsibility, right amongst the different levels of the organization, not just at the the top down or the bottom up, but also at the team level and the managerial level at the department level.
There are things that each of these levels can do to help facilitate optimal experience and performance at work. Hmm. It's within everyone's interest at the, the end of the day, and the statistics are pretty, [00:12:00] pretty crazy when we have a look at these reports of how many people are disengaged and so forth.
An important part of this is really identifying these states and understanding them, and your work is, mm-hmm. I love your work. It's fascinating. You've taken a deep dive into the different states and trying to differentiate them and understand, and I know a lot of your. Work centralizes around mindfulness and flow in particular amongst other stuff.
But can you, can we just hone in for a little bit and get your take on the differences between mindfulness and flow and how they, these states, different states impact our day-to-day? Sure. Ab, absolutely. So first of all, I appreciate it. Your compliments on my research. It's really been a passion of mine for my whole life.
These two states, which I. Learned over time and became familiar with at an academic level later on in my life. But mindfulness is something that I've been practicing since [00:13:00] I was 12. And flow is something that I really identified with through I. Playing sports and by during my time as a professional musician until my mid twenties.
So it's, I'm really passionate about the, these areas and, uh, and excited that I'm able to do some research and help people in the workplace. So mindfulness is a broader state of. Experience or a state of mind where you are focused on the present state, but you're really aware of what's going on around you inside and outside as well.
So there's this. Feeling of being focused, um, internally and externally. Often mindfulness is associated with reduced stress, being able to self-regulate a little bit, and, and it's more of a being state, a processing state where you're really thinking about things and in some cases reflecting flow, on the other hand, is also a present moment [00:14:00] state, but you're.
Have clear goals, which sometimes with mindfulness, there's no goals involved on purpose, where you're focused on a specific task. There's this challenge skill, balance where if you have a high degree of challenge and low skill, then you feel really anxious or overwhelmed if you feel high skill, but low balance, sorry, high school, but low challenge and you feel really bored and apathetic.
So you want to aim for the The high degree of challenge, high degree of. Skill and really pushing yourself to the edge of your capabilities. And when these things are in place and you have some feedback, so you understand whether or not you're on the way to accomplishing your goals, you feel a loss of self-consciousness.
You feel in control of the situation. You feel absorbed in the moment you feel almost like you're part of. It just feels really good. There's this sense of in intrinsic reward. Time will often either move [00:15:00] faster or slower. So it's that state of being in the zone where sometimes you're doing work and you look up and it's been hours and you need to go to the bathroom because you were so focused and didn't even realize that you need to get up and do these things.
And so. Each of these states have been associated with performance and reduced stress, but they have differentiating pros and potential pros and cons, right? So because mindfulness is really broad, you and a more of a being state, you. It makes doing a little bit more difficult, right? So if you're focused on everything, it's hard to be focused on one thing and to get things done or to complete tasks flow.
You're super concentrated, you're focused on the thing that you're doing. I. But there's a couple of potential downsides. One is that you could get focused on the wrong thing and then spend hours of your time in the zone on a task that you shouldn't be doing. Um, another thing, [00:16:00] and probably the more important thing is that you might miss outside, like inputs that you should be thinking about.
So if you're a manager and you're working on a report, uh, and someone is trying to call you and give you more information, that's important for that report. But you're so focused that you. Block out that call and you're just doing the thing that you need to do, you might miss out on that information and potentially have a, a lower quality output.
So there's ups and downs to to, to all of these states. But what I think is really interesting about these two in particular is that they're almost like a yin and yang relationship where the downsides of one feel like the upsides of the other and vice versa, and they really hadn't been studied.
Together too frequently, especially at work, which is why I ended up diving into this area. Mm-hmm. I find the relationship between these two states fascinating. And there's a, [00:17:00] after people get confused between them mm-hmm. And. Yet, they're often so different. I think of flow as like fu like to really simplify it and oversimplify it, but mm-hmm.
I think of flow as fusion and mindfulness as diffusion. Mindfulness is detachment and flow is deep engagement. So in that mm-hmm. Scenario, they, they opposite ends of the spectrum, a bit like the yin and yang you're talking about. Mm-hmm. However. They also compliment each other so well. Mm-hmm. And mindfulness is often used as a preparation tool to help people get into flow.
How do you see that continuum of experience and where they lie on it and, and their relationship with each other? Yeah, so this is very much an open question, but this is the area that I've really focused on the most and the theory that I've come up with along with a lot of other researchers, but in particular my [00:18:00] advisor, Dr.
Kevin Nolan and I over the last several years, we came up with this idea of the cognitive control model of work-related flow. And the idea here is that the more that you're able to. Uh, control your cognition, the better able that you are to experience flow and its positive outcomes at work. And so what we theorize and then find support for over the course of a few different studies is that mindfulness helps you to condition and create.
The space for flow to exist. So, like I was saying about that challenge, skill, balance, um, mindfulness can help you reduce stress and try to reframe the challenge, um, that you're experiencing. So that challenge, skill, balance is more in balance, right? A lot of times challenge. Is a state of mind or something.
It's really your perspective and you think that you're not able to do something and so you feel [00:19:00] overwhelmed. But practicing mindfulness a little bit can help calm down and reframe that as well. Also, foot flow requires. Deep concentration and focus and mindfulness is practicing. Mindfulness, I should say, is a way to develop that skill as well.
So just the ability to recognize that, hey, I'm not on task. I'm not thinking about the thing that I wanna be thinking about is really important for flow and a lot of other things, and mindfulness can help facilitate that. So. That's sort of the direction that we see it in is mindfulness predicting flow.
But again, there's the jury's still out and I'm looking forward to continuing to find support for our theory that there, there's others out there as well. Hmm. And I guess that relationship, if we prioritize that relationship, it helps us [00:20:00] stay afloat of those other. States that might be more distracting, rumination, or mind wandering, or which are important in their own right.
They've got their advantages, but when we're trying to get a particular task done at work can be quite distracting. Yeah, it's funny because those states get a bad rap and they're actually even less studied than I. It kind of goes like, mindfulness is the most studied flow is probably next, and then the others are after that.
And even just the conceptualization of mind wandering and. Fantasizing and rumination is not as fully baked yet and has, it's often focused on the bad things and ruminating about bad things that have happened, or worrying about future things that are going to happen. But the reality is that there's also thinking about something great that happened and reflecting about how great that was, or.
Thinking back on how you did [00:21:00] something and how you can do it better in the future, right? Or thinking about a future. Me meeting or whatever that you're about to attend and maybe like planning that out a little bit and roleplaying it. And those are good things to do that could have positive outcomes.
But mostly we think about it in the literature is like negative, like I was saying before, of having negative feelings and those have really bad things associated with them, but I don't think there's been as much research on the positive end on those others. States either, but mindfulness and flow. Their present moment right now and I, so that's why I think.
There's a lot more research on those and their positive outcomes as well. The downsides of both of those are really understudied too. Mindfulness and, and flow and mindfulness in particular is starting to get more of a balanced approach against it, I would say. So there's been some research out there that it causes [00:22:00] anxiety and it can make you more stressed out depending on kind of your base state, which is really interesting and and controversial, I would say.
And flow has these potential downsides that really are not, I haven't seen any real empirical research on we tested these bad things about flow and found support for them. Um, there's been some correlational studies about taking more risks because you feel in complete control, so you can try. You know, whatever it is that you want and feels good at the time.
But then especially in extreme sports, people try to ride and find flow and then they get in trouble and could be a fatal situation in those situations. So it's kind of interesting and there's a lot more research to be done. Yeah. Yeah. There is. There is a stream of thought of the dark side of flow in the sense where flow.
Becomes an avoidance to other things in our [00:23:00] life. Mm-hmm. Or in some cases someone might become addicted to that feeling. And my take is that it's not actually flow itself, it's the void that the person's trying to fulfill. Mm-hmm. And that could quite, that could be happening with another preoccupation or so forth within the individual.
But with all those states you mentioned. You know, coming back to your model of having cognitive control in the first place mm-hmm. These states seem to be all helpful and all unhelpful. Mm-hmm. Right. Depending on the, the situation. And most importantly, we're not in control of what state we're using when.
And if we can dedicate time to mind wandering, if we can dedicate time to fantasizing, if we can dedicate time to mindfulness and to flow at times and in places where it can really help us, then that's quite a powerful place to be in. Mm-hmm. How do we go about [00:24:00] gaining back those reigns, gaining back that cognitive control?
Mm-hmm. So in this area, my work has really focused on flow. We've looked at mindfulness as one area, which we've talked about a bunch so far. The other thing is goal setting, and so this is, you know. Like, like we were talking about before we started the conversation, goal setting is old news, but the reason that it's old news is because it's had so much support found behind it, and it's something that really works.
And in, in my subfield of IO psychology, industrial organizational psychology, we talk about the research practitioner gap. And the reality is that goal setting is still something that. People need to think about doing and to actually practice. And when you do this, it lets you offload that mental load from your mind of keeping the things that you need to get done and [00:25:00] having them kind of set in stone, even though you should be a little bit flexible with them over time.
So you don't have to continuously think about what should I be doing? What should I be doing, what should I be doing? And that helps you to focus and have, so we've done some research on that and also leveraging technology to, to encourage people to practice some of these strategies like goal setting and mindfulness, which has been really helpful.
And that another area of focus is on this concept of flow metacognition, which is interesting because we talked a little bit about. Being like intentionally intuitive or I'm blanking on the phrase that you used that I love experiential intelligence. Yeah, experiential intelligence. And so maybe this is a subdomain of that, which is flow metacognition.
And so this is the idea that people find flow more or less useful in certain situations. And also that they feel like they have the ability to [00:26:00] control their state of their flow state. Like I can, I can get into flow when I need to, or I don't have control over those things. And so here what we're looking at is like.
If you believe these things, do you experience it more frequently? And we have found, yes, we, we have. And so there's this whole concept of just learning about flow, understanding the positive aspects of it, understanding some of the strategies that we've talked about already, and just being aware of it and feeling positive about it actually could help you to feel it more frequently as sort of initial findings that we, that we've been looking at.
Which is kind of interesting. All of these things help us to gain, um, the capabilities that, that help us to facilitate flow throughout the day more frequently, whether it's completely intentional or not.[00:27:00]
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We are on a mission to train a fellowship of expert practitioners and coaches to work with us and help make the world a better place. To find out more, go to flow coaching federation.org and check out the Flow Coach accreditation today. How have you been using goals to help cognitive control towards flow?
Yeah, so what we did was we developed an app and everybody got this app and downloaded it, and half the people were [00:28:00] assigned to the experimental group where they were given nudges. The nudges in the morning. Basically it was just like alert from the app on the phone and it said like, Hey, you're gonna set three smart goals today.
It didn't say, you know, a. Smart goals to experience flow is just smart goals. And then it gave an example of what smart goals are. So they're specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time oriented. And so we give the example of a sales person. A smart goal would be for me to make 10 sales by the end of the week versus for me to make a bunch of sales.
Period. And that's the whole goal, right? So you can see the difference there. We didn't direct people to set any type of goal. We didn't even tell them that they had to be for work. We just said, set these goals. And that's honestly like as much thought as we put into that when we were designing the [00:29:00] study.
But then through the peer review process, we realized, oh, we actually have everyone's goals in. Our data because the app asked people to set the goals and so we, we had that as an input we didn't really even think about, which was funny. And we went through, we found in a, a, a study that had like a different taxonomy of goals.
So we went through all of the different things and coded. Each response to see like, oh, this goal is related to gaining resources or to learning something new, or to getting something done in particular. And so there's all these different types of goals, and we did find that goals that were learning goals and goals that were oriented towards trying to.
Gain resources, which means like anything from trying to get another day off or trying to get your boss to sign off on [00:30:00] more money for a project that you're working on, that these types of goals were more effective at facilitating flow. Than just a random goal that you set. So in the future, it would be interesting to see if directing people towards particular types of goals is another way of enhancing this intervention even more.
And we also are looking at whether the time that people set goals is important. What we found too is that not only did people experience flow. Overall more frequently. Um, but they experienced it at a more stable rate across the week that we did the study than the people who were not in the experimental group.
So you'd see like a downward trend throughout the week of the amount of flow that people experienced. But that was mitigated in our study for the people who were setting those goals throughout the day. So that kind of makes us [00:31:00] feel like. You're able to save energy, save resources, or even build those resources over time when you use this strategy.
Interesting. Mm-hmm. Often talk about stags, creating short-term achievable goals. Mm-hmm. And in the sense of directing our attention towards something that's purposeful and relevant and achievable and breaking things up into small stags. And it, it sounds like that's really, I. Being really important in your research, and I think an area where that is ever increasingly more and more important is this idea of remote working.
Mm-hmm. Since remote working is becoming, well, I'm not sure if it is increasing anymore. Maybe it's decreasing now, but there's a lot of people remote working and I know you know, one of your articles. Labeled the benefits of being proactive while working remotely. Mm-hmm. Leveraging self-leadership and job crafting to achieve higher work.
Engagement and task [00:32:00] satisfaction kind of goes into the importance of self-leadership to allow higher engagement and task significance, all making the work more meaningful and therefore increased engagement, satisfaction, and so forth. What were some of the examples of the proactivity that enabled that, you know, with so many executives now working from home or remotely, what can someone take away from your work in that area?
I. So this research we looked at during the pandemic remote work, like as we all know, became much more popular at that time. And the research into this is, has really blown up since then because a lot of us are doing it now well, which is less true for. So we wanted to look at what can people do or what.
When people do something or choose to do something at home, what benefits does this have? And so we looked at work organization, which is basically like job crafting and [00:33:00] moving the type of work that you do around, or like the, the schedule, the type of schedule that you have or the order in which that you do your work.
We also looked at social expansion, which is basically trying to build relationships with. Other people at work and what effects these things had on work engagement and task significance. Uh, task significance is basically like how much you care about the, the thing, the work that you're doing. And we found that social expansion was really important.
An important thing to do that helped with those two work. Those two outcomes, engagement and significance, task significance work organization was less impactful. In this particular study, we also looked at goal setting here, here as well, and found that goal setting actually led to social expansion and to the outcomes that we were talking about.
Work engagement and, and task significance. So [00:34:00] here again, we find. Goal setting as a self-leadership strategy that is really important to do over time, which is pretty, pretty interesting. And what role might technology play in helping or hindering our ability to develop that self-leadership and the skills of proactively creating optimal states for us to work in?
So I think technology is a double-edged sword, which tends to be the theme of the night, it seems like. So in some, in some ways, technology is distracting. It's just overwhelming. It's in our faces all the time. And makes it really difficult to concentrate on one thing at one time. But I think that we're in the wild west of technology right now in that over time, all of these things have just popped up in a period and all these products have [00:35:00] come out without very much thought into how they affect us from a stress and attention point of view.
But now that seems to be something that technology companies are really focusing on and that I think. In the future, the increased personalization that is on the forefront of happening with large language models and generative AI and other technology is really gonna be helpful. So one example that's just really less personalized, but good for everyone is the ability to put your phone on do not disturb or your work, um, computer on do not disturb mode where you don't get any of those notifications for.
X period of time and you are able to focus on one thing and the adaptability of technology to ping you and say like, Hey, you know, it's been an hour since you've been doing this thing. You need to start focusing on this other [00:36:00] thing. Um, I think is gonna be powerful in the future. And. That we can really use technology as an assistant to help us be our optimal selves in, in many different ways.
Whether it's reminders, hey, like maybe you should start to wind down and go to sleep at a certain time. I. Hey, these are the goals that you've set for yourself today. Hey, you set these goals for today, but you didn't do them. Let's talk about why that happened. You know, hey, last time that you did this thing, this bad thing happened, or you felt really stressed out.
Do you want to think about a, a new way of approaching this problem? I think that these are going to be ways that technology can assist us to get into these states at the right time too. So, like we were talking about before, flow, you want to experience at certain times, mindfulness, you want [00:37:00] to experience at other times.
Maybe technology can help identify those situations by saying, Hey, you're about to be in a meeting with 10 people. That means that you're gonna have a discussion about something important. Make sure to, to really listen and think about what everybody is saying or what these people are saying before you say what you are, what you're thinking, or before you make a decision on this thing, or, Hey, you've been thinking about this for two hours.
It's time to make a decision and move forward with this strategy or that strategy. And based on. What you've been thinking about in our discussion, like, here's my recommendation for you to move forward. Right? So, um, again, these are half-baked ideas that I think are going to be more obvious as some of this technology becomes easier to use and integrated into our, our daily lives.
And we need to just [00:38:00] be intentional about how we use these things. Keep track of how we're feeling when we. Use different tools and then Act, act and use them in more thoughtful ways. Hmm. They've got so much scope to create such valuable feedback. Mm-hmm. Looking forward to the day when I haven't used a device yet that I feel has been competent enough to give me accurate biofeedback as to.
My state. It'd be nice if I got a little red light saying Your attentional psychic energy is low charger. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even like the muse headset, I don't know if you've used that before. Yeah. But I like that a lot for biofeedback during meditation and. Something like that you could potentially wear throughout the day, but there right now limitations on battery life and it's really big and kind of, I mean, it's pretty [00:39:00] comfortable, but it's still clunky in the grand scheme of thing.
You to wear a headband on your head all day. But I think like my aura ring and my Apple watch, like those things are much more and, and they're getting there. We'll be able to do more than just heart rate and some of those other things that we think might be indicators of our mental states, but not like EEG or more kind of direct line there.
So I think that technology will get easier to use and. The future is, is bright for that space as well. Yeah. Well, I've really enjoyed this conversation, but we are coming to an end and running outta time. Before we go on to our last questions, I'm really curious in your personal experience, you being, you've got such an eclectic background being a musician and researcher, and.
Working with [00:40:00] organizations from all shapes and sizes, how has your experience being a musician been helpful for you in your work? Hmm. Well, it led me to where I am to begin with. I think the feeling of flow was something that was just so entrenched in me from my time as a musician because. It was often an indicator of the quality of my performance, and not just externally, but internally for me to the point where before I knew the, the concept of flow from like a research perspective, I could know whether or not I felt it each time that I performed.
And it was something that I. I wouldn't say I tried to get flow, but it was sort of like a, a feedback tool for me where if I felt it, that was like a good performance in a way. So that's one thing and, and I think that [00:41:00] feedback about flow and performance and, and understanding, I. The feeling of when you're done performing, feeling exhausted, but awesome.
Right. This, this kind of like semi burnout, but more burnout in the like, I just worked out really hard and it felt great, but now I'm tired. Kind of a way like that translates to the workplace in a lot of ways. That was like unexpected and that I probably wouldn't have been able to think about. If I hadn't had that musician experience.
So that's definitely one thing. The other thing is understanding team flow and what that feels like is like totally a musician experience, like being in a band, playing with other people, being in such a complex, fast moving environment that's. Sh very structured in some ways, but also very ambiguous in other ways, and merging together and [00:42:00] coming out with a final product That's awesome and enjoying the experience of creating it.
At the same time, it really rooted me in this feeling of flow and team flow, and helped me understand. What that feels like at work and how we can, how we can translate some of the strategies that we use in music into the workplace as well. And just the fact that there are strategies and that it is something that you can experience intentionally was something that I totally learned through music and sports.
Because if you talk to anybody in those domains, it's like. Yeah, I get nervous before I get on stage. Yeah. I'm really nervous before I, I do whatever I'm doing in sports, but like when I get on that field, when I step on that stage, like I have to focus and I have to focus and do the thing that I'm gonna do and be confident and feel it.
And more often than not, you experience [00:43:00] flow in those moments. And so that's when I was like, this is something that we can help train people on, that we can bring in some strategies. And luckily there's been more research in the sports domain and in music than anywhere else, because otherwise there wasn't much of a theoretical foundation to, to work from.
As far as these states in the workplace, because like we talked about earlier, they really hadn't been paid attention to until fairly recently. Yeah. So that's some of the connecting tissue, I guess, between my life as a musician and why I'm so focused on it now in these states now was just because I know the ups and the downs related to these things and how powerful they can be.
All right. And then coming to the end, we ask, I guess a couple of questions. One, a film or a book [00:44:00] that has had a huge impact on you? I. So there's two books. All right. One, I'll go with Flo because Chickson, Mihai, and Flo, you've been talking about it. You know, obviously had a huge impact on my life and put really a name to the state and led me down the path.
That I'm on now as far as research and and practice is concerned, and the other is Siddhartha by Herman Hass. It is really my first foray into learning about mindfulness and a little bit about Buddhism as well. I was introduced to that. When I was about 12 from my camp counselor, who was a guy from Western Australia, from Perth, but his family was from Sri Lanka and he really is responsible for turning me on to the, the concept of mindfulness.
And obviously that's had a major influence on my life as well. Ooh, what specifically about that book got you hooked? Well, I [00:45:00] mean, the descriptions of meditation and Shar The's journey throughout his life, like he starts from a wealthy family and then goes through all these different life experiences of getting rid of material things and going into the woods and keeping himself from all like earthly.
Positive. You know, like devices, distractions and things like that. Yeah, distractions. But then he decides that's not for him, and then they go to a more progressive group, and then that's not for him. And just like these experiences that he. That he goes through and sort of phases in life that are really different from each other, but each step along the way he learns from his past and, uh, eventually reaches enlightenment at the end of the book.
Spoiler alert, it's really the story of the Buddha, but that's, you know, that's the story, but. I find that really compelling [00:46:00] and can relate in just that, like the phases of life that I've gone through seem really distinct from each other, but I've definitely, like we've talked about. Today taken things from, you know, life as a musician, life in startup, life coaching, and built on each of those points in my life to where I am now.
Not that I've reached enlightenment, but you know, hopefully I'm not at the end of my book quite. But I think that those are the things that really resonated with me about that book. It's time to flip the mic. So I feel like a lot of what we've talked about has come from like a research perspective and I've done, you know, I'm a practitioner as well, but we feel like we have sort of the opposite end of the research practitioner ratio going on at this moment in, in our lives.
So you could talk about research at all that you want, but I'd love to hear from your perspective, from your experience. [00:47:00] You know, in coaching, what are some of the strategies that you've found, if any, I guess, to be really effective in facilitating these states?
We need a whole podcast on that one. Sounds good to me. Let's do it. Uh, right. Okay. I'll try and keep this as short as possible. Uh, I wa and. Keeping it relevant. I wanna pick up on what you talked about earlier around metacognition. I think when there's metacognition around flow that flow's important, that flow helps me, that I believe I can find flow.
I have found flow yesterday. I have found flow in the past. I'm capable of curating flow unconsciously or consciously when that. Flag or signpost in the brain is embedded and strong. Then like anything in life, the more we. Want something, the more intentionality we have [00:48:00] around it, the more the subconscious decisions unfold towards it, and the more it appears in our life and the frequency occurs, not just by chance or random when it is a, an unconscious scenario.
So I think having that metacognition around flow and some of that's being educated on. That flow exists and what is it, and so forth. And some of that's an experiential wisdom of being able to identify with it and value it. And so I, I often talk about putting on a flow mindset, and that isn't to say.
Flow becomes an outcome goal when we do a task, like, I'm doing this Excel spreadsheet and I need to find flow here. It's not that, it's more putting on an intention, a notion that flow's possible and actually flow's potentially my richest experience here. So let's focus on what I need to and, and remove [00:49:00] distractions.
Find a place of inner harmony and, and so often that doesn't get a look in. We, when we think about a task or an important event or whatever it is, we project to the future, and we were talking about earlier that mind wandering and often that mind wandering is around an anxious experience or doing the experience.
Good. I. Or, and getting through it, but not necessarily of usin flow. Mm-hmm. And so when flow becomes a big priority for us in our life, when we put flow first, flow starts to seep into those mind wandering moments and starts to create that experiential blueprint for us to then. Naturally embody when the time comes.
'cause we've been training the brain to be in flow and it can see it and feel it. And it's more likely to be in it when the time comes. So if I put it back to one thing that I seems to help people across the board, 'cause everyone's different and people have different skills and different mm-hmm.
Contexts and they do different things, [00:50:00] but that having that flow mindset, that metacognition around flow seems to impact everyone positively. That's great. Yeah, I, I completely agree and I'm excited to hear that. 'cause that's the next area of investigation that my team will be doing. So we'll keep each other updated.
Maybe we can collaborate on something. Sounds great. Absolutely. All right. Well thank you very much for your time, Jared. It's been fantastic to talk to you and to cover all things daily, fluctuating states and the double-edged sword of it all. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. This was so much fun and I hope that, uh, we get a chance to do it again soon.
Flow Unleashed, unleashed, unleashed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation about state management and the opportunity we all have to gain back control of our experiential landscape. The chat reminded me of the double-edged sword, nature of every [00:51:00] mental state and that. All states have a purpose and place to be effective.
No matter of whether we have the cognitive control. To use the ideal state for the ideal task is an ever evolving challenge we all face every day. With more research such as that of Jared's, hopefully we will get closer to prioritizing our state management in our thinking. This chat also reminded me of the intricately complex relationship between mindfulness and flow, how they are very different in their approach.
Yet both meta states that lift us out of our normal automatic waking consciousness and whilst they are different states, the art of slipping into mindfulness to use when best suited for the moment will certainly increase our psychological flexibility. Uh, psychological selection and ultimately our experiential [00:52:00] competence.
Super important when it comes to being in flow, building the value around our own metacognition around mental states. In other words, the, the underlying belief that varying between different states is valuable and useful is an important message. If we are going to create our ideal realities and live the life we want to live.
So as you go about your day today, start actively choosing what states you want to embody before you begin a certain task. If you'd like to find out more about Jared's research, please see the show notes.
Thank you for listening to Flow Unleashed. If you enjoyed listening, please subscribe to get notified when our next episode drops. The more people that subscribe, the [00:53:00] better I can make the show for you. Equally, please leave a review. Your review will go a long way to helping others find this pot. Until the next time, thank you for listening to Flow Unleashed.
Welcome to Flow Unleashed. I'm Cameron Norsworthy and this is your podcast for human performance.
I am sure you're familiar with your own mind wandering, reminiscing, or projecting to a feature event. Or perhaps thinking about random things before you quickly refocus and drag your experience back towards the task at hand. [00:01:00] We do this all the time, every day, every hour. In fact, our mind is constantly fluctuating between different states of mind, and for the most part, we are unaware.
Sometimes this happens automatically. Our mind wants to clear its cash process, rising emotions, or have a well needed break, and sometimes, however this happens, even when we don't want it. But why is this important? Well, every time our mind goes into a different state or different meta state, our mental functioning changes.
The change is often temporary, but can significantly affect how we operate and our capacity to make decisions or be present. Fundamentally shifting how we think, feel, and behave. It changes our physiology, our neurochemistry, and our biology. [00:02:00] These mildly states of consciousness essentially underpin our day-to-day ability and performance.
Yet, rarely do we pick a certain state to embody before we do a particular task. We might actively seek to change our state when getting drunk or making love or fasting or going to the movies, but the subtle fluctuations of our state of mind's constantly fluctuating on autopilot unharnessed to empower our ability and quality of experience.
Someone who has extensively studied these maer, often unnoticed day-to-day fluctuations is our guest, Jared Troop. Jared is an adjunct professor at New York University and President Emeritus of the New York Metropolitan Association of Applied Psychology, the oldest and largest, largest industrial organizational psychology association in the United States.
His research explores the practical [00:03:00] applications of generative ai, workplace nudges mindfulness and flow theory
flow unleashed. Unleashed. Welcome to the show, Jared. Thanks, Cameron. Thank you so much for having me today. It's great to see you again. The last time I saw you was in Europe in a beautiful, uh, mountain town in, in Innsbrook. Seems, seems a long time ago now. I know it does. It feels like another lifetime ago, but really only a few months ago.
And yeah, I feel like we were living in, in another world. It was so nice. Yeah. Bit of paradise. Definitely. Your research explores different mental states that we experience throughout the day. Can you give us an overview of what are these states and why do they matter? Sure. Absolutely. So the way that I like to think about these states are the way that a researcher named [00:04:00] Dane lays them out.
So he thinks about these different states that have different levels of present moment focus, or whether you're focusing on the past or the future, and also how narrow or broad your attention is. So for example, flow is a state where you're really focused on the present moment. But you're also really focused on one thing.
Your attention is pretty narrow on the task at hand, whereas mindfulness is also a present moment state, but your attention is a little bit broader. Then we have other states like rumination, fantasizing, mind wandering, that are not focused on the present moment and are. In the case of mind wandering, your mind is everywhere and not really focused on one thing, but rumination and fantasizing, you're really thinking about one thing either in the future or in the past.
And we fluctuate throughout these states, throughout with [00:05:00] different states throughout the day, depending on what we're doing and how we're feeling and things like that. Identify with all those words you used there. Is there any data on how often we're in each of those states? Like what's the prominent one that we tend to all be in most of the time?
That's a great question. It depends on the person and your, and the frequency in what you're in. These different states tends to be correlated. With other things like depression, burnout, or the opposite, feeling really energized and engaged. And so it depends. But at work we often fluctuate through mindfulness and flow, but there's also a good amount.
Of mind wandering in these other states as well. So it really is dependent on the individual and also it's pretty [00:06:00] subconscious and we don't tend to think about these states. We just tend to experience them, which is what I'm sure we're gonna be diving a little bit deeper into for the rest of the conversation.
And just to double click on that, we so many people. I am not ordinarily aware that they have different experiential states, right? We go throughout the day and we are reactive to that external stimuli, and we often feel that how we feel on the inside is. A direct result of what's happening on the outside, as if the external world is controlling how we feel.
Uh, they made me feel like this or this is happening and I feel like this. How much control do we have over these inner states? So it ranges, again, just from your natural abilities to do these things. But we do have a decent amount of control if we train ourselves to recognize these state. Understand what they feel [00:07:00] like when we tend to feel them and how they make us feel afterwards and what the kind of outcomes associated with them are when we have the wherewithal to first recognize them, I.
Then we can start thinking about how we can, because the first thing you need to do is be like, oh, I'm feeling this right now. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? And what can I do about it? Which gets to a little bit of, of emotional intelligence as well, which is interrelated with all of these things.
So it varies is the answer. I think the default is not very much, but for most people, I would say if I was just hypothesizing. But through some of the research that I've done, we are finding some support for the idea that this is, these things are trainable and recognizable in the moment. From a practical perspective, when I work with individuals, I'm often talking about this idea of experiential intelligence.
Most of [00:08:00] us would've heard of emotional intelligence and emotional competence, and I like to think of. Experiential intelligence is more broader than that, including thoughts, volition, perspective, and so forth. The different aspects that make up a subjective experience are more, more than just emotions.
Mm-hmm. Certainly from that individual perspective, as you talked about, once our awareness gains, we can start to maybe curate these things. Mm-hmm. You are working a lot within organizations, um, and within industry, and how, how often do you feel that this experience or these fluctuating states are actually proactively managed by the organization?
Uh, I think it's becoming more prevalent, at least in the organizations that are large enough to, to think about these things and, and have some like learning. [00:09:00] Organizations within them. I think, uh, emotional intelligence especially is getting a lot of attention right now. I think the performance outcomes associated with these things and the differentiation between organizations is becoming more and more important.
And part of that is your ability to. Interact with others to understand how others are feeling and to try to control your own emotional states, or at least recognize them and understand why you're feeling them. All of these things that I feel like were more squishy or maybe even look down upon and. In corporate America over the last a hundred years or whatever, are becoming more front of mind because again, like we are seeing the benefits from these things in working with organizations, excuse me, going down the rabbit hole here.
Mm-hmm. But where do [00:10:00] organizations just getting a temperature test from your. Practice. Mm-hmm. Where does the buck lie? Do organizations tend to feel that the buck lies within the individual 'cause it's their state and they should be managing their state to be more optimal? Or do they feel that Actually no.
We have a responsibility here to curate these states to create as, uh, the most optimal state possible for work performance. Yeah, I've definitely seen the, the range of things in my consulting and in my coaching, in my consulting. I've tend to work with organizations who may are a little bit more progressive thinking in these ways, and they believe that they, they do have a responsibility to try to.
Put the architecture in place that helps their employees thrive and experience these states in different ways, which we can talk about at the individual level. I often hear horror stories about situations where their organization couldn't care less [00:11:00] about these things. They're overworked, they have too much stuff going on.
And it lies on the individual then to to deal with it if they're going to stay in their current work situation, which a lot of people need to and can't quickly switch if things are not ideal or optimal. So again, I do see the range of things in my own practice and in my research. I also. See that it is something that can happen at different levels, and ideally there's a shared responsibility, right amongst the different levels of the organization, not just at the the top down or the bottom up, but also at the team level and the managerial level at the department level.
There are things that each of these levels can do to help facilitate optimal experience and performance at work. Hmm. It's within everyone's interest at the, the end of the day, and the statistics are pretty, [00:12:00] pretty crazy when we have a look at these reports of how many people are disengaged and so forth.
An important part of this is really identifying these states and understanding them, and your work is, mm-hmm. I love your work. It's fascinating. You've taken a deep dive into the different states and trying to differentiate them and understand, and I know a lot of your. Work centralizes around mindfulness and flow in particular amongst other stuff.
But can you, can we just hone in for a little bit and get your take on the differences between mindfulness and flow and how they, these states, different states impact our day-to-day? Sure. Ab, absolutely. So first of all, I appreciate it. Your compliments on my research. It's really been a passion of mine for my whole life.
These two states, which I. Learned over time and became familiar with at an academic level later on in my life. But mindfulness is something that I've been practicing since [00:13:00] I was 12. And flow is something that I really identified with through I. Playing sports and by during my time as a professional musician until my mid twenties.
So it's, I'm really passionate about the, these areas and, uh, and excited that I'm able to do some research and help people in the workplace. So mindfulness is a broader state of. Experience or a state of mind where you are focused on the present state, but you're really aware of what's going on around you inside and outside as well.
So there's this. Feeling of being focused, um, internally and externally. Often mindfulness is associated with reduced stress, being able to self-regulate a little bit, and, and it's more of a being state, a processing state where you're really thinking about things and in some cases reflecting flow, on the other hand, is also a present moment [00:14:00] state, but you're.
Have clear goals, which sometimes with mindfulness, there's no goals involved on purpose, where you're focused on a specific task. There's this challenge skill, balance where if you have a high degree of challenge and low skill, then you feel really anxious or overwhelmed if you feel high skill, but low balance, sorry, high school, but low challenge and you feel really bored and apathetic.
So you want to aim for the The high degree of challenge, high degree of. Skill and really pushing yourself to the edge of your capabilities. And when these things are in place and you have some feedback, so you understand whether or not you're on the way to accomplishing your goals, you feel a loss of self-consciousness.
You feel in control of the situation. You feel absorbed in the moment you feel almost like you're part of. It just feels really good. There's this sense of in intrinsic reward. Time will often either move [00:15:00] faster or slower. So it's that state of being in the zone where sometimes you're doing work and you look up and it's been hours and you need to go to the bathroom because you were so focused and didn't even realize that you need to get up and do these things.
And so. Each of these states have been associated with performance and reduced stress, but they have differentiating pros and potential pros and cons, right? So because mindfulness is really broad, you and a more of a being state, you. It makes doing a little bit more difficult, right? So if you're focused on everything, it's hard to be focused on one thing and to get things done or to complete tasks flow.
You're super concentrated, you're focused on the thing that you're doing. I. But there's a couple of potential downsides. One is that you could get focused on the wrong thing and then spend hours of your time in the zone on a task that you shouldn't be doing. Um, another thing, [00:16:00] and probably the more important thing is that you might miss outside, like inputs that you should be thinking about.
So if you're a manager and you're working on a report, uh, and someone is trying to call you and give you more information, that's important for that report. But you're so focused that you. Block out that call and you're just doing the thing that you need to do, you might miss out on that information and potentially have a, a lower quality output.
So there's ups and downs to to, to all of these states. But what I think is really interesting about these two in particular is that they're almost like a yin and yang relationship where the downsides of one feel like the upsides of the other and vice versa, and they really hadn't been studied.
Together too frequently, especially at work, which is why I ended up diving into this area. Mm-hmm. I find the relationship between these two states fascinating. And there's a, [00:17:00] after people get confused between them mm-hmm. And. Yet, they're often so different. I think of flow as like fu like to really simplify it and oversimplify it, but mm-hmm.
I think of flow as fusion and mindfulness as diffusion. Mindfulness is detachment and flow is deep engagement. So in that mm-hmm. Scenario, they, they opposite ends of the spectrum, a bit like the yin and yang you're talking about. Mm-hmm. However. They also compliment each other so well. Mm-hmm. And mindfulness is often used as a preparation tool to help people get into flow.
How do you see that continuum of experience and where they lie on it and, and their relationship with each other? Yeah, so this is very much an open question, but this is the area that I've really focused on the most and the theory that I've come up with along with a lot of other researchers, but in particular my [00:18:00] advisor, Dr.
Kevin Nolan and I over the last several years, we came up with this idea of the cognitive control model of work-related flow. And the idea here is that the more that you're able to. Uh, control your cognition, the better able that you are to experience flow and its positive outcomes at work. And so what we theorize and then find support for over the course of a few different studies is that mindfulness helps you to condition and create.
The space for flow to exist. So, like I was saying about that challenge, skill, balance, um, mindfulness can help you reduce stress and try to reframe the challenge, um, that you're experiencing. So that challenge, skill, balance is more in balance, right? A lot of times challenge. Is a state of mind or something.
It's really your perspective and you think that you're not able to do something and so you feel [00:19:00] overwhelmed. But practicing mindfulness a little bit can help calm down and reframe that as well. Also, foot flow requires. Deep concentration and focus and mindfulness is practicing. Mindfulness, I should say, is a way to develop that skill as well.
So just the ability to recognize that, hey, I'm not on task. I'm not thinking about the thing that I wanna be thinking about is really important for flow and a lot of other things, and mindfulness can help facilitate that. So. That's sort of the direction that we see it in is mindfulness predicting flow.
But again, there's the jury's still out and I'm looking forward to continuing to find support for our theory that there, there's others out there as well. Hmm. And I guess that relationship, if we prioritize that relationship, it helps us [00:20:00] stay afloat of those other. States that might be more distracting, rumination, or mind wandering, or which are important in their own right.
They've got their advantages, but when we're trying to get a particular task done at work can be quite distracting. Yeah, it's funny because those states get a bad rap and they're actually even less studied than I. It kind of goes like, mindfulness is the most studied flow is probably next, and then the others are after that.
And even just the conceptualization of mind wandering and. Fantasizing and rumination is not as fully baked yet and has, it's often focused on the bad things and ruminating about bad things that have happened, or worrying about future things that are going to happen. But the reality is that there's also thinking about something great that happened and reflecting about how great that was, or.
Thinking back on how you did [00:21:00] something and how you can do it better in the future, right? Or thinking about a future. Me meeting or whatever that you're about to attend and maybe like planning that out a little bit and roleplaying it. And those are good things to do that could have positive outcomes.
But mostly we think about it in the literature is like negative, like I was saying before, of having negative feelings and those have really bad things associated with them, but I don't think there's been as much research on the positive end on those others. States either, but mindfulness and flow. Their present moment right now and I, so that's why I think.
There's a lot more research on those and their positive outcomes as well. The downsides of both of those are really understudied too. Mindfulness and, and flow and mindfulness in particular is starting to get more of a balanced approach against it, I would say. So there's been some research out there that it causes [00:22:00] anxiety and it can make you more stressed out depending on kind of your base state, which is really interesting and and controversial, I would say.
And flow has these potential downsides that really are not, I haven't seen any real empirical research on we tested these bad things about flow and found support for them. Um, there's been some correlational studies about taking more risks because you feel in complete control, so you can try. You know, whatever it is that you want and feels good at the time.
But then especially in extreme sports, people try to ride and find flow and then they get in trouble and could be a fatal situation in those situations. So it's kind of interesting and there's a lot more research to be done. Yeah. Yeah. There is. There is a stream of thought of the dark side of flow in the sense where flow.
Becomes an avoidance to other things in our [00:23:00] life. Mm-hmm. Or in some cases someone might become addicted to that feeling. And my take is that it's not actually flow itself, it's the void that the person's trying to fulfill. Mm-hmm. And that could quite, that could be happening with another preoccupation or so forth within the individual.
But with all those states you mentioned. You know, coming back to your model of having cognitive control in the first place mm-hmm. These states seem to be all helpful and all unhelpful. Mm-hmm. Right. Depending on the, the situation. And most importantly, we're not in control of what state we're using when.
And if we can dedicate time to mind wandering, if we can dedicate time to fantasizing, if we can dedicate time to mindfulness and to flow at times and in places where it can really help us, then that's quite a powerful place to be in. Mm-hmm. How do we go about [00:24:00] gaining back those reigns, gaining back that cognitive control?
Mm-hmm. So in this area, my work has really focused on flow. We've looked at mindfulness as one area, which we've talked about a bunch so far. The other thing is goal setting, and so this is, you know. Like, like we were talking about before we started the conversation, goal setting is old news, but the reason that it's old news is because it's had so much support found behind it, and it's something that really works.
And in, in my subfield of IO psychology, industrial organizational psychology, we talk about the research practitioner gap. And the reality is that goal setting is still something that. People need to think about doing and to actually practice. And when you do this, it lets you offload that mental load from your mind of keeping the things that you need to get done and [00:25:00] having them kind of set in stone, even though you should be a little bit flexible with them over time.
So you don't have to continuously think about what should I be doing? What should I be doing, what should I be doing? And that helps you to focus and have, so we've done some research on that and also leveraging technology to, to encourage people to practice some of these strategies like goal setting and mindfulness, which has been really helpful.
And that another area of focus is on this concept of flow metacognition, which is interesting because we talked a little bit about. Being like intentionally intuitive or I'm blanking on the phrase that you used that I love experiential intelligence. Yeah, experiential intelligence. And so maybe this is a subdomain of that, which is flow metacognition.
And so this is the idea that people find flow more or less useful in certain situations. And also that they feel like they have the ability to [00:26:00] control their state of their flow state. Like I can, I can get into flow when I need to, or I don't have control over those things. And so here what we're looking at is like.
If you believe these things, do you experience it more frequently? And we have found, yes, we, we have. And so there's this whole concept of just learning about flow, understanding the positive aspects of it, understanding some of the strategies that we've talked about already, and just being aware of it and feeling positive about it actually could help you to feel it more frequently as sort of initial findings that we, that we've been looking at.
Which is kind of interesting. All of these things help us to gain, um, the capabilities that, that help us to facilitate flow throughout the day more frequently, whether it's completely intentional or not.[00:27:00]
Do you want to help others unleash their performance? Do you want an internationally recognized accreditation to stand out amongst the crowd, or do you want the playbook I use every day when helping professionals to be their best and find their flow when it matters most? If this sounds interesting, join others who are training to become a high performance coach.
We are on a mission to train a fellowship of expert practitioners and coaches to work with us and help make the world a better place. To find out more, go to flow coaching federation.org and check out the Flow Coach accreditation today. How have you been using goals to help cognitive control towards flow?
Yeah, so what we did was we developed an app and everybody got this app and downloaded it, and half the people were [00:28:00] assigned to the experimental group where they were given nudges. The nudges in the morning. Basically it was just like alert from the app on the phone and it said like, Hey, you're gonna set three smart goals today.
It didn't say, you know, a. Smart goals to experience flow is just smart goals. And then it gave an example of what smart goals are. So they're specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time oriented. And so we give the example of a sales person. A smart goal would be for me to make 10 sales by the end of the week versus for me to make a bunch of sales.
Period. And that's the whole goal, right? So you can see the difference there. We didn't direct people to set any type of goal. We didn't even tell them that they had to be for work. We just said, set these goals. And that's honestly like as much thought as we put into that when we were designing the [00:29:00] study.
But then through the peer review process, we realized, oh, we actually have everyone's goals in. Our data because the app asked people to set the goals and so we, we had that as an input we didn't really even think about, which was funny. And we went through, we found in a, a, a study that had like a different taxonomy of goals.
So we went through all of the different things and coded. Each response to see like, oh, this goal is related to gaining resources or to learning something new, or to getting something done in particular. And so there's all these different types of goals, and we did find that goals that were learning goals and goals that were oriented towards trying to.
Gain resources, which means like anything from trying to get another day off or trying to get your boss to sign off on [00:30:00] more money for a project that you're working on, that these types of goals were more effective at facilitating flow. Than just a random goal that you set. So in the future, it would be interesting to see if directing people towards particular types of goals is another way of enhancing this intervention even more.
And we also are looking at whether the time that people set goals is important. What we found too is that not only did people experience flow. Overall more frequently. Um, but they experienced it at a more stable rate across the week that we did the study than the people who were not in the experimental group.
So you'd see like a downward trend throughout the week of the amount of flow that people experienced. But that was mitigated in our study for the people who were setting those goals throughout the day. So that kind of makes us [00:31:00] feel like. You're able to save energy, save resources, or even build those resources over time when you use this strategy.
Interesting. Mm-hmm. Often talk about stags, creating short-term achievable goals. Mm-hmm. And in the sense of directing our attention towards something that's purposeful and relevant and achievable and breaking things up into small stags. And it, it sounds like that's really, I. Being really important in your research, and I think an area where that is ever increasingly more and more important is this idea of remote working.
Mm-hmm. Since remote working is becoming, well, I'm not sure if it is increasing anymore. Maybe it's decreasing now, but there's a lot of people remote working and I know you know, one of your articles. Labeled the benefits of being proactive while working remotely. Mm-hmm. Leveraging self-leadership and job crafting to achieve higher work.
Engagement and task [00:32:00] satisfaction kind of goes into the importance of self-leadership to allow higher engagement and task significance, all making the work more meaningful and therefore increased engagement, satisfaction, and so forth. What were some of the examples of the proactivity that enabled that, you know, with so many executives now working from home or remotely, what can someone take away from your work in that area?
I. So this research we looked at during the pandemic remote work, like as we all know, became much more popular at that time. And the research into this is, has really blown up since then because a lot of us are doing it now well, which is less true for. So we wanted to look at what can people do or what.
When people do something or choose to do something at home, what benefits does this have? And so we looked at work organization, which is basically like job crafting and [00:33:00] moving the type of work that you do around, or like the, the schedule, the type of schedule that you have or the order in which that you do your work.
We also looked at social expansion, which is basically trying to build relationships with. Other people at work and what effects these things had on work engagement and task significance. Uh, task significance is basically like how much you care about the, the thing, the work that you're doing. And we found that social expansion was really important.
An important thing to do that helped with those two work. Those two outcomes, engagement and significance, task significance work organization was less impactful. In this particular study, we also looked at goal setting here, here as well, and found that goal setting actually led to social expansion and to the outcomes that we were talking about.
Work engagement and, and task significance. So [00:34:00] here again, we find. Goal setting as a self-leadership strategy that is really important to do over time, which is pretty, pretty interesting. And what role might technology play in helping or hindering our ability to develop that self-leadership and the skills of proactively creating optimal states for us to work in?
So I think technology is a double-edged sword, which tends to be the theme of the night, it seems like. So in some, in some ways, technology is distracting. It's just overwhelming. It's in our faces all the time. And makes it really difficult to concentrate on one thing at one time. But I think that we're in the wild west of technology right now in that over time, all of these things have just popped up in a period and all these products have [00:35:00] come out without very much thought into how they affect us from a stress and attention point of view.
But now that seems to be something that technology companies are really focusing on and that I think. In the future, the increased personalization that is on the forefront of happening with large language models and generative AI and other technology is really gonna be helpful. So one example that's just really less personalized, but good for everyone is the ability to put your phone on do not disturb or your work, um, computer on do not disturb mode where you don't get any of those notifications for.
X period of time and you are able to focus on one thing and the adaptability of technology to ping you and say like, Hey, you know, it's been an hour since you've been doing this thing. You need to start focusing on this other [00:36:00] thing. Um, I think is gonna be powerful in the future. And. That we can really use technology as an assistant to help us be our optimal selves in, in many different ways.
Whether it's reminders, hey, like maybe you should start to wind down and go to sleep at a certain time. I. Hey, these are the goals that you've set for yourself today. Hey, you set these goals for today, but you didn't do them. Let's talk about why that happened. You know, hey, last time that you did this thing, this bad thing happened, or you felt really stressed out.
Do you want to think about a, a new way of approaching this problem? I think that these are going to be ways that technology can assist us to get into these states at the right time too. So, like we were talking about before, flow, you want to experience at certain times, mindfulness, you want [00:37:00] to experience at other times.
Maybe technology can help identify those situations by saying, Hey, you're about to be in a meeting with 10 people. That means that you're gonna have a discussion about something important. Make sure to, to really listen and think about what everybody is saying or what these people are saying before you say what you are, what you're thinking, or before you make a decision on this thing, or, Hey, you've been thinking about this for two hours.
It's time to make a decision and move forward with this strategy or that strategy. And based on. What you've been thinking about in our discussion, like, here's my recommendation for you to move forward. Right? So, um, again, these are half-baked ideas that I think are going to be more obvious as some of this technology becomes easier to use and integrated into our, our daily lives.
And we need to just [00:38:00] be intentional about how we use these things. Keep track of how we're feeling when we. Use different tools and then Act, act and use them in more thoughtful ways. Hmm. They've got so much scope to create such valuable feedback. Mm-hmm. Looking forward to the day when I haven't used a device yet that I feel has been competent enough to give me accurate biofeedback as to.
My state. It'd be nice if I got a little red light saying Your attentional psychic energy is low charger. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even like the muse headset, I don't know if you've used that before. Yeah. But I like that a lot for biofeedback during meditation and. Something like that you could potentially wear throughout the day, but there right now limitations on battery life and it's really big and kind of, I mean, it's pretty [00:39:00] comfortable, but it's still clunky in the grand scheme of thing.
You to wear a headband on your head all day. But I think like my aura ring and my Apple watch, like those things are much more and, and they're getting there. We'll be able to do more than just heart rate and some of those other things that we think might be indicators of our mental states, but not like EEG or more kind of direct line there.
So I think that technology will get easier to use and. The future is, is bright for that space as well. Yeah. Well, I've really enjoyed this conversation, but we are coming to an end and running outta time. Before we go on to our last questions, I'm really curious in your personal experience, you being, you've got such an eclectic background being a musician and researcher, and.
Working with [00:40:00] organizations from all shapes and sizes, how has your experience being a musician been helpful for you in your work? Hmm. Well, it led me to where I am to begin with. I think the feeling of flow was something that was just so entrenched in me from my time as a musician because. It was often an indicator of the quality of my performance, and not just externally, but internally for me to the point where before I knew the, the concept of flow from like a research perspective, I could know whether or not I felt it each time that I performed.
And it was something that I. I wouldn't say I tried to get flow, but it was sort of like a, a feedback tool for me where if I felt it, that was like a good performance in a way. So that's one thing and, and I think that [00:41:00] feedback about flow and performance and, and understanding, I. The feeling of when you're done performing, feeling exhausted, but awesome.
Right. This, this kind of like semi burnout, but more burnout in the like, I just worked out really hard and it felt great, but now I'm tired. Kind of a way like that translates to the workplace in a lot of ways. That was like unexpected and that I probably wouldn't have been able to think about. If I hadn't had that musician experience.
So that's definitely one thing. The other thing is understanding team flow and what that feels like is like totally a musician experience, like being in a band, playing with other people, being in such a complex, fast moving environment that's. Sh very structured in some ways, but also very ambiguous in other ways, and merging together and [00:42:00] coming out with a final product That's awesome and enjoying the experience of creating it.
At the same time, it really rooted me in this feeling of flow and team flow, and helped me understand. What that feels like at work and how we can, how we can translate some of the strategies that we use in music into the workplace as well. And just the fact that there are strategies and that it is something that you can experience intentionally was something that I totally learned through music and sports.
Because if you talk to anybody in those domains, it's like. Yeah, I get nervous before I get on stage. Yeah. I'm really nervous before I, I do whatever I'm doing in sports, but like when I get on that field, when I step on that stage, like I have to focus and I have to focus and do the thing that I'm gonna do and be confident and feel it.
And more often than not, you experience [00:43:00] flow in those moments. And so that's when I was like, this is something that we can help train people on, that we can bring in some strategies. And luckily there's been more research in the sports domain and in music than anywhere else, because otherwise there wasn't much of a theoretical foundation to, to work from.
As far as these states in the workplace, because like we talked about earlier, they really hadn't been paid attention to until fairly recently. Yeah. So that's some of the connecting tissue, I guess, between my life as a musician and why I'm so focused on it now in these states now was just because I know the ups and the downs related to these things and how powerful they can be.
All right. And then coming to the end, we ask, I guess a couple of questions. One, a film or a book [00:44:00] that has had a huge impact on you? I. So there's two books. All right. One, I'll go with Flo because Chickson, Mihai, and Flo, you've been talking about it. You know, obviously had a huge impact on my life and put really a name to the state and led me down the path.
That I'm on now as far as research and and practice is concerned, and the other is Siddhartha by Herman Hass. It is really my first foray into learning about mindfulness and a little bit about Buddhism as well. I was introduced to that. When I was about 12 from my camp counselor, who was a guy from Western Australia, from Perth, but his family was from Sri Lanka and he really is responsible for turning me on to the, the concept of mindfulness.
And obviously that's had a major influence on my life as well. Ooh, what specifically about that book got you hooked? Well, I [00:45:00] mean, the descriptions of meditation and Shar The's journey throughout his life, like he starts from a wealthy family and then goes through all these different life experiences of getting rid of material things and going into the woods and keeping himself from all like earthly.
Positive. You know, like devices, distractions and things like that. Yeah, distractions. But then he decides that's not for him, and then they go to a more progressive group, and then that's not for him. And just like these experiences that he. That he goes through and sort of phases in life that are really different from each other, but each step along the way he learns from his past and, uh, eventually reaches enlightenment at the end of the book.
Spoiler alert, it's really the story of the Buddha, but that's, you know, that's the story, but. I find that really compelling [00:46:00] and can relate in just that, like the phases of life that I've gone through seem really distinct from each other, but I've definitely, like we've talked about. Today taken things from, you know, life as a musician, life in startup, life coaching, and built on each of those points in my life to where I am now.
Not that I've reached enlightenment, but you know, hopefully I'm not at the end of my book quite. But I think that those are the things that really resonated with me about that book. It's time to flip the mic. So I feel like a lot of what we've talked about has come from like a research perspective and I've done, you know, I'm a practitioner as well, but we feel like we have sort of the opposite end of the research practitioner ratio going on at this moment in, in our lives.
So you could talk about research at all that you want, but I'd love to hear from your perspective, from your experience. [00:47:00] You know, in coaching, what are some of the strategies that you've found, if any, I guess, to be really effective in facilitating these states?
We need a whole podcast on that one. Sounds good to me. Let's do it. Uh, right. Okay. I'll try and keep this as short as possible. Uh, I wa and. Keeping it relevant. I wanna pick up on what you talked about earlier around metacognition. I think when there's metacognition around flow that flow's important, that flow helps me, that I believe I can find flow.
I have found flow yesterday. I have found flow in the past. I'm capable of curating flow unconsciously or consciously when that. Flag or signpost in the brain is embedded and strong. Then like anything in life, the more we. Want something, the more intentionality we have [00:48:00] around it, the more the subconscious decisions unfold towards it, and the more it appears in our life and the frequency occurs, not just by chance or random when it is a, an unconscious scenario.
So I think having that metacognition around flow and some of that's being educated on. That flow exists and what is it, and so forth. And some of that's an experiential wisdom of being able to identify with it and value it. And so I, I often talk about putting on a flow mindset, and that isn't to say.
Flow becomes an outcome goal when we do a task, like, I'm doing this Excel spreadsheet and I need to find flow here. It's not that, it's more putting on an intention, a notion that flow's possible and actually flow's potentially my richest experience here. So let's focus on what I need to and, and remove [00:49:00] distractions.
Find a place of inner harmony and, and so often that doesn't get a look in. We, when we think about a task or an important event or whatever it is, we project to the future, and we were talking about earlier that mind wandering and often that mind wandering is around an anxious experience or doing the experience.
Good. I. Or, and getting through it, but not necessarily of usin flow. Mm-hmm. And so when flow becomes a big priority for us in our life, when we put flow first, flow starts to seep into those mind wandering moments and starts to create that experiential blueprint for us to then. Naturally embody when the time comes.
'cause we've been training the brain to be in flow and it can see it and feel it. And it's more likely to be in it when the time comes. So if I put it back to one thing that I seems to help people across the board, 'cause everyone's different and people have different skills and different mm-hmm.
Contexts and they do different things, [00:50:00] but that having that flow mindset, that metacognition around flow seems to impact everyone positively. That's great. Yeah, I, I completely agree and I'm excited to hear that. 'cause that's the next area of investigation that my team will be doing. So we'll keep each other updated.
Maybe we can collaborate on something. Sounds great. Absolutely. All right. Well thank you very much for your time, Jared. It's been fantastic to talk to you and to cover all things daily, fluctuating states and the double-edged sword of it all. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. This was so much fun and I hope that, uh, we get a chance to do it again soon.
Flow Unleashed, unleashed, unleashed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation about state management and the opportunity we all have to gain back control of our experiential landscape. The chat reminded me of the double-edged sword, nature of every [00:51:00] mental state and that. All states have a purpose and place to be effective.
No matter of whether we have the cognitive control. To use the ideal state for the ideal task is an ever evolving challenge we all face every day. With more research such as that of Jared's, hopefully we will get closer to prioritizing our state management in our thinking. This chat also reminded me of the intricately complex relationship between mindfulness and flow, how they are very different in their approach.
Yet both meta states that lift us out of our normal automatic waking consciousness and whilst they are different states, the art of slipping into mindfulness to use when best suited for the moment will certainly increase our psychological flexibility. Uh, psychological selection and ultimately our experiential [00:52:00] competence.
Super important when it comes to being in flow, building the value around our own metacognition around mental states. In other words, the, the underlying belief that varying between different states is valuable and useful is an important message. If we are going to create our ideal realities and live the life we want to live.
So as you go about your day today, start actively choosing what states you want to embody before you begin a certain task. If you'd like to find out more about Jared's research, please see the show notes.
Thank you for listening to Flow Unleashed. If you enjoyed listening, please subscribe to get notified when our next episode drops. The more people that subscribe, the [00:53:00] better I can make the show for you. Equally, please leave a review. Your review will go a long way to helping others find this pot. Until the next time, thank you for listening to Flow Unleashed.
