Dave Evans

You know, if you just got an elevator ride, you got a minute or two to tell somebody, what's currently going on with you?

What's the current caption, the long caption of your story?

So when you take these three little narratives, my view of life, my view of work, my view of my present experience of being me,

In those three things, you've put a surprisingly good description of who you currently are.

And then we can take those three things and probably we can reverse engineer what we call your compass values.

Like if I read these three things, there's no more than three pages.

What values are emerging is most important to you.

So those three documents and a little list of the core values that are hiding in there is a real good starting place.

Yeah.

Well, flow, the psychology of optimal experience, was the book written over 20 years ago now by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the well-known psychologist of flow who, in collaboration with Martin Seligman from Pennsylvania, started the whole positive psychology movement about 20 years ago.

Good people doing good work.

And he defines flow as the experience of full and deep engagement where time stands still and so on that can occur when you're operating in the flow channel.

And the flow channel is a place of experience where the task you are currently involved in

and your skills to perform that task are in approximate balance.

You're neither over-talented, so you're bored, nor under-talented, so you're anxious and nervous you might fail, but you're really right at the edge of your capability, which means this task is demanding your full attention,

That's the flow zone, the flow channel.

And in that flow channel, you might, not necessarily, you might drop into the flow experience of suddenly finding yourself fully, deeply engaged, time stands still.

And when it's over, the whole thing seemed very satisfying.

It's a really wonderful experience, sometimes called getting in the zone.

Now, our thoughts on that, by the way, are that's a great starting place.