Stephen Collar

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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

But what we've discovered is what used to be this rare experience for people is

we found like our training we have an eight-week digital training right zero to dangerous standard flow training we and we measure everything so the last thousand people who went through the training we saw a 73.82 increase in flow for the last thousand people that's pretty average we see 70 80 increase in flow for most people i'd love to tell you that's my kung fu that we're that good and we're good

That's biology. That's all of us. Once you start figuring out how this shit works, you can do that yourself. It's really amazing.

Yeah, let me, this is worth hammering on because it's so critical. So we've known since the 60s, this is Mihaly's work, but it's now baked into psychology and positive psychology. So we knew that flow underpinned happiness and well-being. We now know it underpins life satisfaction, meaning, purpose. In fact, when positive psychologists define happiness, there are three tiers.

The upper two tiers, the best you get to feel on the planet, have flow baked into the definition. That was where we were for a really long time. I worked on this recently. The point I made a minute ago, we started to figure out the opposite. It's hard to prove happiness.

low helps with depression or anxiety those are trickier because you need a specific kind of studies in this brilliant team in europe just to publish a study in nature and in one of the nature publications 10 000 twins so if you're going to study depression or anxiety or any of these conditions twin studies are the gold standard right you got

identical twins are separated at birth what happens to one what happens to the other and it's like the nature versus nurture yeah it gives you just the best sort of benchmark and they had took a 10 000 person twin sample this is where they discovered flow is protective against depression all uh anxiety bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and cardiac-related stress conditions.

So for all of us getting older, cardiac-related stress conditions as well. And then my lab proved that flow overrides PTSD. And my friend Karina Pfeiffer proved that flow overrides burnout. And so right now, the whole world seems to be suffering from burnout. And this is the only, there's no pill, there's no protocol in the world that treats it.

all those conditions there's literally there's nothing else you can get that will protect against those conditions massively increase happiness and well-being and overall would the word antidote be appropriate for that is is it the antidote to burnout or is that i think so i'm not gonna say it's the antidote to depression or anxiety those are bigger things but it may be the antidote

to burn out certainly here's the crazy thing this is worth knowing so back in the 60s the book that introduced flow to the world was a book by chick sent me high known as beyond boredom and anxiety and he ran this really weird study where so there's macro flow that's what happened to me when i go when i went surfing right this is full-blown flow state time passes strangely self disappears you start on one with the ocean all that stuff and i can talk about the science of that if anybody cares

But microflow is what happens at work, right? You go to work. Let's say you work in an office. You sit down to write a quickie email to your colleague. It's supposed to be a paragraph long, take two minutes. But you get so sucked into what you're doing. An hour goes by and you look up and you've written a whole essay and it's great. You're like, what happened to the time? That's microflow.

Microflow is really common at work. Most of us spend about 5% to 10% of our work lives in microflow, even without noticing it. So Csikszentmihalyi found a way to block microflow in people back in the 60s. He did this experiment. He blocked it for three days. And then he recorded what happened to people. Look what happened to people in three days blocking microflow. It's like extreme burnout.

They go from normal, well-adjusted, happy to deeply paranoid. I can't think. I'm suspicious. I'm anxious. I can't focus. I'm miserable, et cetera, et cetera. Here's the thing. Modern business is designed to block microphone. The entire way we do business these days blocks microphone. The way almost every company is organized 11 different channels of communication coming in. You've got Slack.

You've got email. You've got all this stuff pulling your attention on the present moment. You're blocking microflow. You're literally creating conditions for yourself and your employees that are going to drive everybody into burnout almost immediately. Hi, welcome to your new job. Have some burnout. That's literally what we're doing to people in our companies most of the time. They're our company.

Toyota doesn't do it. Patagonia doesn't do it. The best companies in the world, you look at what they're doing, you look at their management philosophies. They've got pro-flow management philosophies, and they've found a way to go against that. But most companies have no idea. They think all this technology is making them more efficient, and it's making them miserable and less efficient.

I think it's because he can lift a car on his shoulder.

So here's the other thing that's really also interesting. Just let's go back to culture because we were talking last night when the three of us were together about the importance of culture in organizations. Flow is a culture building engine. That's one of the things. So here's something that's really interesting.

You hear a lot of stuff these days about, oh, I want psychological safety in my workplace or we're going to be an inclusive workplace. Right. And first of all, first question, how the fuck are you measuring? Because it's fine to say it out loud. Who doesn't want psychological safety in an inclusive workplace? We all do. But how are you measuring it? And most people are trying to measure it.

They end up breaking their companies because everybody's got their personal little things. And that's what comes up, right? Psychological safety and inclusion becomes code for, oh, no, anything that personally is bothering me, I can now call it I'm unsafe or I don't feel included. And suddenly the company's screwed. So you want to really, yes, we want these things. How are you measuring them?

Here's something cool. You can actually measure flow because you can't produce flow for reasons we can get into without psychological safety or If you're working in an organization and you don't feel safe or included, you can't get into flow. So you can literally measure flow in your employees as a way to find out, oh, do they feel safe?

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