Chapter 14The Role of Y.O.D.A. in Finding Flow
We've all been there before, immersed in a magical mind‐body experience where we become so deeply absorbed in what we are doing that we literally become one with the activity. You become the ball in a tennis match, the notes in a piece of music, the puck in a hockey game, the brush while creating a painting, or the mountain you are scaling. There is only you and the act of doing.
“Flow” is a delicate psychophysiological state that facilitates performing to the upper limits of one's talent and skill. This concept of the special mind‐body state was the brainchild of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a brilliant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago who authored 14 books and over 200 research articles on the topic. In short, when awareness has merged so completely with whatever you are doing that they become inseparably fused together in space and time, you are in flow. Think Roger Federer playing a five‐set match against Rafael Nadal—stunningly elegant masterful tennis! Second‐guessing, self‐doubting, negativity, and outcome fears are conspicuously absent, and so is self‐consciousness and critical inner voice messages.
The questions to ask here are: How does the experience of flow and its supporting research connect to issues of personal wisdom and choice making? In what way does flow connect to one's inner voice and Y.O.D.A.? Of note, the flow state has been linked by researchers to issues of personal happiness, intrinsic ...