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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The Home Service Expert Podcast · Achieving 500% Productivity Through Flow States · 10 Jan 2025 podcast

full-blown macro flow experience. I had an out-of-body experience at the time. I lifted out of my body to watch myself surfing. We now know why all those things happen. But at the time, I was like, what the hell is going on? But I felt great. It was the first time in three years I actually felt alive. I was happy or at least functional. And it felt so good. I caught like four more waves that day.

By the fifth wave, I was done. They brought me home. They put me in bed. People brought me food for like two weeks because I couldn't even get out of my bed to make my kitchen. And on the 14th day, I had a neighbor who was a pro surfer or semi-pro surfer. And I knocked on his door. He didn't even know I knocked on his door. I was like, hey, I'm your neighbor.

I think you need to take me to the ocean because I got to go surfing again. And that was all I did over the course of about six months. I was surfing and having these. I didn't even know they were actually flow states because flow was this sort of smaller thing. I was having this crazy experience. I didn't know what it was, but my health was getting better.

And I, like, still, I'm just, like, lying on the couch in between surf sessions. But it started out as 14 days. And then it was 10 days. And then it was eight days. And then it was six days. And slowly my health is improving. And, like, surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions. So what the hell is going on?

And I really thought I was, even though I was feeling better, I thought I was actually dying because the Lyme had gotten into my brain. I didn't realize these out-of-body experiences, these things that I was having experiencing the waves were actually sort of common in deep flow states. And there was biology in them. I thought I was losing my mind.

I thought the disease had gotten into my brain and it was just eating my brain. That's what was happening. So I lit out on a giant quest, like what the hell is going on with me? And I very quickly discovered that

The same state of consciousness flow that had helped these, you know, the folks in the action sports world go from zero up to Superman was helping me go from like seriously subpar back to normal. And it was the same thing on either side of the equation. And Joe's right. Like if you go into a lot of treatment centers, I'm not talking about like court.

Not the industry around treatment, but actually people who are doing really good work. They're built around flow programs. We now know that flow can override addiction, override PTSD, override burnout. It can do a light... fights against depression and anxiety and bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

It's the only static thing in the world that will treat all those conditions at once because it's optimal performance. We're all hardwired for it. I didn't know any of that. And I didn't know that flow massively improves the immune system and can reset your nervous system.

So we now know why flow cures Lyme disease and is used for autoimmune conditions and addiction and all this stuff that we didn't back in the 90s. I was just trying to figure out, am I dying? And if I'm not dying, am I crazy? And if I'm not dying and I'm not crazy, what the hell is going on? And can I get more of this? How does it work? Can my friends get more of this? Can we control this?

Can we learn from this? What is this? And The 90s was really cool because not only did the neuroscience start getting laid down, but flow in the beginning when we started in the 60s, it was just like, how do we define it? Oh, we define it as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. Then it expanded from that.

Oh, flow refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. It's so focused on what you're doing. Everything else just starts to melt away and disappear automatically. Sense of self goes away. Time passes strangely. You know, the common experience is you just get so sucked into what you're doing, right? Five hours go by. It feels like five seconds.

And all aspects of performance, physical, mental, and emotional go through the roof. Now, back in the early days, all the work had been done on athletes. So we sort of knew, okay, fast twitch muscle response increases in flow, strength increases in flow, stamina increases in flow. We didn't know how those things worked or why those things happened. We just knew that they were happening.

And then Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and myself also, both of us, not only were we interested in sports, we were also creatives. I was a writer, he was a writer, and a lot of our friends were artists or whatever. And we started to realize, oh, artists, we were doing this in our art too. It's getting into these low-grade flow states while I was writing.

And when I was in like a low-grade flow state, as you just pointed out, productivity goes through. If the number you gave that 500% above baseline, McKinsey, the business consultancy, they went around the globe. They talked to leaders, like CEOs of major companies for 10 years. And they said, how much more productive are you in

You always got to take it with a grain of salt because it's like a self-reported thing, right? They were asking questions. We've studied it at more length and gotten better numbers, but it's still pretty accurate. The average was 500% more productive. You got to put that in context. That means you go to work on Monday. It's been Monday in a flow state.

You can take Tuesday through Friday off, and you're going to get as much done as everybody else in the company out of flow in one day that takes them five days to get. So that's what was happening in my writing. Like something I was sit down to write and I produce a whole chapter where before I would produce a tiny little, you know, paragraph. And I was like, okay, this is kind of amazing.

Like productivity is going through the roof and other things followed. We now started to figure out, okay, it's not just physical, it's cognitive. And now we know it's emotional. So when we talk about optimal performance, it optimizes physically, mentally. and emotionally. All three of them are lifted as high as they can go in humans. This is literally us performing at our very best.

Because it's neurobiologically based, we're all hardwired for it. So everybody listening to this podcast can get into flow for free. This is like biohackers are spending $2,000 a month on supplements and blah, blah, blah. No, no, no. This is hardwired into everybody. It's yours for free. Just figure out how it works and you can get more of it. Get as much as you want. It's untapped.

You can't live in a flow state because it's a cycle, right? We used to think it was a binary, like a light switch. You're in the zone, you're out of the zone. It doesn't actually work that way. Most things in the body are a cycle. So you've got these four stages. You've got to move through all those stages to get back into flow.

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