The state of flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly

How Does It Feel to Be in the Flow?

Thousands of people from every wake of like were interviewed by Dr. Csikszentmihalyi and his team in order to identify the key components of the flow state. These seven points summarize how those interviewed responded that they felt when in the flow state:

1. You’re completely involved in what you’re doing: you’re completely focused and concentrated.
2. There’s a sense of ecstasy–of being outside of everyday reality.
3. There’s a great inner clarity: you know what needs to be done and you get immediate feedback on how well you’re doing.
4. You know that the activity is doable, that you have the necessary skills to complete the task successfully.
5. You lose your sense of self and all of your worries and concerns drift away.
6. You lose track of time and you’re completely focused on the present moment.
7. There’s an intrinsic motivation—whatever produces flow becomes it’s own reward.

Interestingly enough, the idea of flow came into being as result of research on happiness. Researchers began asking themselves: “What makes us happy?” and “When are we most happy”? As a result of this research psychologists realized that being able to enter the flow state–which is a very enjoyable experience–is a key component of happiness.

How to Achieve the Flow State

From everything stated above it can be seen that in order to achieve the flow state you need to do the following:

• Find a challenge. Choose something that you enjoy doing. It can be anything, whether it’s playing the piano, working on your novel, skiing, horseback riding, playing golf, and so on.

• Develop your skills in order to be able to meet the challenge. Remember that if something is too easy you’ll be bored–and your mind is likely to wander so you won’t achieve the flow state–, and if something is too hard you’ll be overwhelmed and you won’t be able to achieve that subconscious competence that is necessary for the flow state.

• Set clear goals. You want to be very clear on what you want to achieve and how you’ll know whether you’re succeeding. Here’s an example: “I’m going to write a blog post on how to achieve the flow state.  I’ll know that I’m succeeding if I can clearly set forth what the flow state is, what it’s major components are, why it’s beneficial, and how to achieve it.”

• Focus completely on the task at hand. Eliminate all other distractions. You don’t want anything to take your attention away from the task that you’re performing; if your concentration is broken you’re going to exit the state of flow.

• Make sure that you’ve set aside sufficient time. It’s very likely that it’s going to take you at least fifteen minutes to start to get into the flow state, and a while longer after that until you’re fully immersed. Once you enter the flow state you want to make sure that you make the most of it, instead of having to stop prematurely because you have to go do something else.

• Monitor your emotional state. If you meet all of the requirements above, but you’re having trouble entering the flow state, monitor your emotional state. If you’re in an aroused state–angry, anxious, worried, and so on–, try doing something that will calm you down. Do you feel that your energy level is low and you’re feeling sluggish? Do something to pick up your energy levels, whether it’s doing jumping jacks, having a healthy snack, reading something motivational, or calling a friend who makes you laugh.

Conclusion

To conclude, here’s a quote from a poet on the flow state:

“It’s like opening a door that’s floating in the middle of nowhere and all you have to do is go and turn the handle and open it and let yourself sink into it. You can’t particularly force yourself through it. You just have to float. If there’s any gravitational pull, it’s from the outside world trying to keep you back from the door.”

This is Why You Don't SUCCEED - One of the Best Motivational Speeches Ever

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Knight. My story. Quotes XVII

-Pete Newell always used to tell me you should not stay any place very long.
-Constantly trying to get back to a level that very few have ever reached weighs on you.
-I have never felt my job was to win basketball games, rather that the essence of my job as a coach was to do everything I could to give my players the background necessary to succeed in life. To the absolute best of my ability, I have tried to provide them with a work ethic, and ability to excel at crucial times, and a determination to be as good as they could be at whatever they do.
-Not everyone you think is a friend is a friend. No one could possibly have more good friends in more walks of life that I have had. Those people, like me, don't confer friendship easily.
-When the one great scorer comes to mark against your name, it matters not that you won or lost, but how you played the game. Grantland Rice.
-Caring for and being honest with people is a pretty meaningful way to 'play the game'.
-Where I have been most fortunate is something I had nothing to do with. It occurred the moment I was born, to great parents, in America.
-A part of that grace is a responsibility I believe each of us has: to make sure we provide those who follow us with the same opportunities you and I were given by those who preceded us. That's uppermost among all that I have tried to do as a coach. I and thousands of other coaches and teachers that kids across this country have been fortunate enough to have at some point in their lives.

Knight. My story. Quotes XVI

-What I missed most was spending every little idle moment with ideas going through my mind of what I could try tomorrow with the kids or the team I had, and then seen how those ideas worked. As long as I was coaching, I always kept a notepad next to the bed, in case I thought of something during the night that I wanted to write down, so I would not forget it.
-Our defense was offense without the ball.
-Winning is basically eliminating why you lose.
-You have to be single-minded. drive only for one thing on which you have decided... And if it looks as if you might be getting there, all kinds of people, including some you thought were your loyal friends, will suddenly show up doing their hypocritical God damnedest to trip you, blacken you, and break your spirit. General Patton.
-Only a few people understand the meaning of the word friend, and those people are special. An awful lot more have no idea of what the world entails.
-I've always felt time should be used well, and thinking is a great way to use it. All those years in coaching, I spent countless hours thinking about, working on, deciding what improvements could be made, how our team could be better, or I could  get more out of a kid, or something that would enable us to be a better basketball team.
-I believe so strongly in some of the premises of my approach to coaching basketball that, as I have always hoped they will be for the kids I have coached, I find them valuable and applicable in my own real life.
-You have got to be back in coaching. Basketball needs you. Sports needs you. You are the last of a dying breed.
-I don't think you can survive an intense occupation without diversions that you love, things that take you away from work or get your mind on other things, or in a relaxed atmosphere, allow you to continue thinking about your job and what all is necessary with it.
-How much she could see in what she watched.

Knight. My story. Quotes XV

-When I see in print something that has happened where I've been involved that is so different from what actually happened, how can I ever believe what's on the front page, either?
-They see the right to criticize as a one way street. The press can attack managers, coaches, players, teams, or presidents, but boy, if any of those people who are under attack dare to fire back, the whole profession is offended.
-Smitty's was a down-home place. No money was wasted on decor. Joe Kleine of our Olympic team reminded me just last fall of the time I told the team to get dressed up, I was taking them to a very nice restaurant and I didn't want them to be embarrassed. 'We entered this little diner through the kitchen with everyone laughing at us'. Joe said, 'and we proceeded to have a great time with the bunch of locals there'. that of course, was Smitty's.
-New Yorkers like David Halbersam or Dick Schaap would come into town and want to go to lunch, guys used to going to someplace expensive and elegant. With me they would get Smitty's, Rosie's, or the Marsh grocery deli. They would always want to pick up the tab, but that sometimes got complicated. Halberstam picked up the bill once, looked at it, and said: 'I can't turn this in. They would laugh at me'. The two of us had eaten for something like 5.45$.
But those places were perfect for me: cooks and employees and daily customers who kept me up on what was going on in their lives and otherwise left me and anyone with me pretty much alone, just part of their crown. I have already found some of the same kind of places in Lubbock.
-From a basketball standpoint, he was very average player with one outstanding quality, passing , understanding where people were.
-I used to ask players who they played with who understood the game best.
-Patrick Knight is my all time favorite Indiana player.

Knight. My story. Quotes XIV

-I love to coach and I love its human involvements.
-The last thing I expected was an orchestrated attempt to keep me from getting any job.
-If presidents anywhere truly want to clean up academics, they could do it with one simple rule: you tie the number of scholarships you can give to the number of graduates you have.
-I am Coach Knight or Mr. Knight to you. You should remember that the next time you are talking to an older person.
-The tactics each time were exactly the same: they fired, they fell back, they went to Plan B, character assassination. They did me a favor. They did what I could not bring myself to do. They got me out of there.
-When that meeting ended, I met with my coaches and told them I had no idea what Indiana would do with their contracts, but if they wound up out of a job without a settlement, not to worry, I would pay their salaries out of my own pocket and take all of them with me whenever and wherever I got a new job.
-I thought what a shame it was to be fired by people who were totally out of touch with what those kids, the heart of the university, represented.
-I read the affection of that turnout as an indication that they knew our players were always students, just like they were... that our players had to work like hell, we demanded a lot of them, but they also went to class, just like each of them did... and that they enjoyed going to basketball games, watching our kids play and rooting from them. If that was my last view and my last memory of Indiana University, it was one that will stay in my mind as long as I live.
-Brand limited full professors to two percent increases at the time athletic department personnel were getting a three and a half percent increase and key figures in my firing, Clapacs and Frapwell for two, were getting twenty five percent raises, about forty thousand dollars each. I have a feeling he did not mention any of those things in his Washington speech.
-He doesn't think he is ever wrong. I know I have been wrong many times, dozens of times. We are talking about twenty nine years. And I have acknowledged a temper problem that I have to work harder to corral. Balance those off against the things I have done right. It's not even close.
-I used to test myself:
How well do I get along with kids who player for me?
How well do I get along with coaches who have coached form me?
How well do I get along with opposing coaches?
How well do I get along with high school coaches?
How well did I get along with IU fans?
How well have I gotten along really with basketball officials?
With all of those groups, I would say I have gotten along good to great. Who have not I gotten along with? The press.

Knight. My story. Quotes XIII

-People are inclined to believed the written word. So am I, like these from Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. 

And from Vince Lombardi:

It's a reality of life that men are competitive and the most competitive games draw the most competitive men... There is something in good men that really years for, needs, discipline and the harsh reality of head to head combat. I don't say these things because I believe in the 'brute' nature of man or that men must be brutalized to be combative. I believe in God, and I believe in human decency. But I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, his greatest fulfillment to all he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle, victorious. 

I love those images. I've had the privilege of watching kids I've coached do all those things. Now, blend in there the opportunity I had as a coach to point kids toward a college degree and a lifetime of competing fairly, squarely, decently, by the rules, but to win, in whatever career they choose, and you have the reason why not just I but lots of career coaches in both high school and college keep coaching when, as coaches, they have nothing left to prove.

Knight. My story. By Bobby Knight. Quotes XII

-Each one of us told them the same thing: he was doing a great job, under uniquely difficult conditions, in a state that didn't produce many Big Ten football players. I was particularly impressed when he took Colorado to the Orange Bowl and then was fired two years later after telling some big donors where to stick their money when they started suggesting things he could do to compete better with Oklahoma and Nebraska. On Bill Mallory firing.
-Coaching, kind of like the military, has a promotion system and has had it for ever. In coaching, it usually involves moving. You win somewhere, you get an invitation to go to a better job. And if you win some more, you move up again.
-Coaches are hired or fired, promoted or dismissed, based on how many games and championships they have won and, to a great extent, how many tickets were sold.
-They showed a lot more interest in developing that elitist golf course than in improving the salaries of professors, or retaining any of the outstanding professors that they had inherited from past administrations but had lost to other schools in the last five years.
-Never complain, never explain.
-They were an amazingly free-spending group on their own behalf for an outfit that could find only two percent raises for its best professors.
-When you were contacted, we got an immediate response, and a check. I'll never forget that. They couldn't find $1000 for a tribute to a man who had done so much for IU in so many ways as Isiah Thomas had.
-I continued to coach at Indiana for many reasons. A major one was how much I enjoyed  the whole process of coaching. And that process starts with the kids involved: what I can do with them in basketball, what I can do to help shape their lives.

Knight. My story. By Bobby Knight. Quotes XI

-A lot of times over the years I have walked back to the hotel after a game-day shooting practice and let the team ride the bus back without me. I've always enjoyed walking.
-Of all the coaches I met from foreign countries, Antonio Diaz Miguel and Kondrashin were my favorites.
-I coach basketball. That's no stress. What a brain surgeon or a heart surgeon does everyday is stress.
-The score of the game has never meant a whole lot to me where carelessness was concerned.
-If you decide to go, you are not coming back here.
-We are failing in college basketball if a kid who leaves us at twenty-two is not really well prepared to enter post-basketball life, whether that is after a career in the pros or without one.
-My game is educating kids.
-I've always laughed at people who talk about how complicated the game we teach is. If a kid can play, he can play, and age doesn't really have a lot to do with that.

Knight. My story. By Bobby Knight. Quotes X

-A Nike official told me one time during negotiations that the only two coaches he was aware of who gave shoe money back to their university were Bear Bryant and I.
-Indiana kids were a priority for me.
-Calbert, Calbert, you are too good to play like this.
-I don't want a point guard and a shooting guard. I want both of them to be able to shoot. In neither of them can shoot, then I want both of them to be tough, big rebounders who can play defense.
-We all have things that we wish we could do over again.
-I've always enjoyed going to movies.
-The George Steinbrenner I know and like a lot above everything else is a damned good man.
-This is the time, 1994 or 1995, when I should have left.
-To win, you have to eliminate the reasons why you lose: sloppy ball handling, poor defensive effort, lack of boxout, poor shot selection, etc.
-Basketball is a game of errors.You try to reduce the number of errors to give your team the best chance to win.

Knight. My story. By Bob Knight. Quotes IX

-I told him no, I couldn't do that. He said, 'Take it', put it in my hands and headed out to the field. I meant it: I didn't think it was right to do that. So, I put it on a shelf in his locker and went out to watch the game. PETE ROSE'S GLOVE OFFERING TO BOBBY.
-One thing my Dad pounded away at me when I was a kid growing up was 'Never get involved with gambling in any way'. And I never have. I've always been antigambling.
-Last Game, Next Game.
-Controlling the tempo. (Expression)
-Their strength was their defense, not their offense. I felt if we tried to hold the ball, all we were doing was playing into their defensive strength.
-The year before, when things just weren't fitting together for us, I went to a three-guard lineup and we put a pretty good run together.
-He was made to play this game, his size, his abilities, his understanding of the game. (On Edwards).
-Screening was the guts of our offense,  the heart of it.
-I experiment every day with what we do offensively, not defensively, but offensively. There's a dynamic to our play offensively as well as defensively that just doesn't exist in most offensive and defensive basketball. We change daily. What we emphasize in our offense in this game may not even be involved in the next game, except in the very basic fundamentals of play.
-I always felt you can beat average, mediocre teams in a lot of ways. You can only beat good teams with good, solid basketball.
-Shoe money. I always used some of it to add to the income of our coaching staff and others, including secretaries in my office and others in the support staff.
-

Knight. My story. By Bob Knight. Quotes VIII

-You and I have sixty one seconds of international basketball left and then we are done with it.
-During a time out at one of our pre-Olympics games with the pros, I asked our players: 'hey, what the hell does Jordan do to you in practice when you have to play him one on one? Somebody tell me what it's like'
One of them said: 'Well, it's hard. It's tough. He tear us up'
Then, I said: 'do you think there is any chance we could see that he gets the ball a little bit tonight, because he is going to do the same thing to these guys that he does to you'.
-There were a lot of times that night when I felt tears welling up and I was genuinely close to letting them go, certainly when our kids were standing up there on the medal stand, wearing their gold medals, while the national anthem played and the American flag went up in their honor.
-The possibility of losing is what makes winning mean something.
-When Steve Raid was at the free-throw line to shoot the technical for Purdue, I wheeled around, picked up a plastic chair, and sent it scooting across the court.
-I made one of my biggest mistakes: I agreed to open our Indiana basketball program, from the start of practice in fall 1985 to our last game, to John Feinstein of the Washington Post, for a book he would write. He had an incredible access to everything. And, with my full knowledge, he got unbelievable help from my assistant coaches, mainly Royce Waltmana and Kohn Smith. Feinstein made a ton of money out of the thing and never once offered to endow a scholarship or do anythingat all for Royce and Kohn, who were putting kids through college on assistant coaches' salaries. He did not owe me a cent. I didn't want anything from him at all, I had made that plain. But when profits came in for him way beyond any possible expectations, he sure as hell could have done something on his own to help those guys.
-I don't think you're ever more sorry or disappointed than when a marriage doesn't work out. My wife, Nancy and I did get a divorce. I blame myself for it far more than her because I spent so much time trying to develop a career  in coaching.

Top 10 signs you are a great teammate

10. You're willing to play any role that helps the team

9. You would rather score less and win, than score a lot and lose

8. When your team scores, the first people you congratulate are your teammates

7. You LOVE practice as much as you LOVE games

6. You respect your opponents but don't fear them

5. You listen; you are coachable; you respect your coaches, teammates, officials and opponets.

4. You are quick to pick up a teammate who is having a bad day

3. You help younger teammates who have less experience

2. You learn & grow from your own mistakes, as well as others

1. You're confident but not arrogant.