Stephen Collar
speaker
310 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Stephen Collar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The Home Service Expert Podcast · Achieving 500% Productivity Through Flow States · 10 Jan 2025
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Flow follows focus. It only shows up when all our attention is the right here, right now. So that's what all the triggers do. They drive our attention into the present moment. If I wanted to get into the neuroscience, they do it a bunch of different ways. Some of them push dopamine to our system. Some of them push norepinephrine to our system. Some of them lower cognitive load.
Cognitive load is just all the crap you're trying to think about at any one time. And if I lower cognitive load, this is why people will tell you, clean your office, right? If when you're totally distracted and you're all over the place, what do I do first? You clean your office. Why would you possibly clean your office? It lowers cognitive load.
All the crap you're trying to think about starts to go away. And what happens? You liberate some extra energy. What does the brain do with that extra energy? It repurposes it for focus and attention. So complete concentration is the first flow trigger, the most important.
So it's worth backing it up one step because it's relevant. So I came out of college trained as a poet. So I came out of college with an absolutely worthless degree. But I became a journalist and journalism. They sort of pay you to be curious. And I was really geeked on a neuroscience thing.
because i like i think like a lot of us i wasn't born with an instruction manual i wasn't a super talented kid there were better athletes these people were funnier these people were smarter i had big dreams and i grew up in cleveland in a steel mill town basically at a time it was a steel mill town and i didn't have an operating man i wanted an instruction manual i was really pissed that i wasn't born with an instruction manual and
I figured out very quickly that neuroscience was that instruction manual. And that sounds really strange if you're not geeked on neuroscience, but it's the difference between psychology and neuroscience is about precision. Psychology is squishy. It's subjective. People figure out, oh, this is the model and it sort of relates to who I am. So I'm going to train you with it.
And it usually doesn't work and it doesn't help. Neuroscience is precise because it's shared by everybody, right? Evolution shaped all of us. So the way my brain works and the way your brain works and the way your brain works, it's very, very similar. So if you can get down to the level of neurobiology, suddenly you're dealing with mechanism.
Suddenly you're dealing with something that like works like an engine rather than like this amorphous car in the sky. And that was really useful for me. And I was covering action sports, surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding and the like, and this is the part that matters. At the time, I was living in what was then Squaw Valley was now Palisades Tahoe. And I'm an old punk rocker.
And Squaw Valley was like the punk rock mecca of the action sports world. When it was back, this is before it was a world. It wasn't an industry. It wasn't anything. It was a bunch of basically skate punks and ski punks and surf punks and whatnot. And the 90s in performance and action sports is often talked about as the era of impossible.
More things that had never been done got done in that era than ever before. Right. And if you knew anything about performance back in the 90s, it was all about like better have a lot of money. You better have the right coaches. You better go to the right schools. You better have the right parents. You have the right genetics. It was all this stuff that you couldn't control.
And I'm living in this community with people who are routinely not just setting world records. They're doing things that for all of our query history, we thought was going to kill people that you couldn't do. And I always say it's like one thing when you see like Laird Hamilton surfing a big wave on a screen.
And it's one thing when you go out drinking with your buddies on a Friday night, every time you wake up Saturday morning and go into the mountains together and they do something that for all of recorded history has never been done. It sort of catches your attention. What really caught my attention was everybody I knew, they didn't have any money.
They were like broken homes, blue collar, very little education. There was a lot of substance abuse in those communities and a lot of high-risk behavior. Normally, you put those things together in a community, you know what happens. People die younger, they go to jail. What they don't do is reinvent what's going on for the human species, what's possible.
That's what I was seeing on almost like a weekly basis. So the question was, what the hell is going on? Where is this coming from? And if you started talking to people about it, nobody had that word flow back then, right? It was in psychology, but we talk a little about being in the zone, but you couldn't really, hey, my sense of self disappeared in time passes.
Like you couldn't talk about that stuff out loud. Back in the 90s, people really thought you were crazy. But if you talk to these action sport athletes, that's what was happening. So. In that milieu, out of that milieu, I got Lyme disease. And I spent three years in bed and was going to end my life. The doctors had pulled me off medicine. My stomach lining was bleeding out.
There was nothing anybody could do for me. I was so- What year was this? I got it when I was 30. So it was 1999 is when I got it. And I was sick to like 2002. I was basically in bed for three years. Brain fog was terrible. I couldn't think. I could function like 10 minutes a day. So I had 10 minutes a day when I was clear-headed. The rest of the time, I laid on a couch.
I could watch basketball, but I couldn't even watch basketball because I had no memory left. So I couldn't watch the Lakers. Anybody playing a half-court style was too slow. The Clippers that year were playing that like Antonio's seven-second offense where they'd run up and score back. It was the only thing I could follow on television because it was the only thing that was making any sense.
And a friend shows up at my house. I'm literally ready to kill myself. And she says, let's go surfing. You know, my response was, fuck you, right? You're out of your mind. You're crazy. I can't walk across my room. I can't go surfing. You're out of your mind. And she wouldn't leave my house after like four hours. I was like, fine, let's just go surfing.
At least like, you know, what's the worst that can happen? And they had to carry me to the car. They gave me a board the size of a Cadillac. They brought me to the wimpiest beginner wave in Los Angeles. And I was out there
maybe 30 seconds they walked me out to the break put me on this big board i'm just bobbing in the waves and a wave came and i hadn't surfed in like five years but i popped up it was just like muscle memory i just spun my board around and popped up probably all the energy i had in the world left period was to pop to my feet but i popped up into a dimension that i didn't even know existed i've had flow states experience but i had never had it like with is known as macro
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