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

We are limited energetically and the most expensive thing for the brain to do. Brain takes all your energy, right? It's 2% of your body weight it uses at rest. So you're not even working, you're just chilling. 25% of your energy goes to your brain. So the brain is always trying to be energy efficient. It's the first order of business.

But for people who are trying to increase their performance, if you can learn to work with fear, fear is awesome as a motivator because it gives you focus for free.

you don't have to struggle to pay attention to stuff that you're scared of you can't not stop paying attention so once you get good at this and once you can go oh yeah this is scary but this also brings out the best in me and focus my attention does a lot of stuff the best of the best always they use a fear as a compass oftentimes so people will see my books and they'll be like you know you'll get that there was a communication challenge right i wanted to communicate a bunch of ideas

And that's what they think the book is about. And that's fine. That's what you see. What I see in every one of my books was this impossible writing challenge that I set for myself. This like, okay, you don't know how to do this at all, but to pull this book off, you have to learn how to write like this and this and this and this and this. And they're crazy. Incredibly scary, hard goals.

The reason I like them is every morning when I have to face a blank page, they're scary. So I'm paying a little more attention for free. I'm not having to work so hard. So there's a lot of issues with fear. You've got to know how to control your nervous system. You've got to manicure your nervous system. We can talk more about why that is in terms of flow terms.

But like the best of the best, we all use fear as a motivator, I think, for the exact reasons you talked about. It brings out the best in people.

The environment, Matt. what you're doing. So the answer is going to be a little bit different depending on what the situation is, but let's just back it up one step and talk high level. So you want more flow in your life? Flow states have triggers. These are preconditions that lead to more flow. This is your toolbox. There's 28 known flow triggers.

There's probably way more, but that's what's been discovered. And as Joe pointed out, There's two varieties of flows, individual flow, me in a flow state or Tommy in a flow state. There's group flow, all three of us, right? We're in a little bit of group flow right now, right? The conversations, our focus is right here. The conversations bounce around.

We're sort of finishing each other's sentences and popping in a little group flow experience. So there's 16 triggers for group flow. The rest are for individual flow. So let's stay on the individual side. All the triggers do the same thing. 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 if you're interested in complete concentration on the task at hand, right? If it's a group setting, you want your entire team focused on the same thing. If it's an individual, you want all your attention here. So what does that mean?

You asked about flow killers. The first step is distraction management, right? I start my day with my hardest task. I wanna get the biggest, hardest, most complicated thing out of the way first. One, because I'm gonna have the most energy when I wake up, right? I know that. So that's where I go from me. You're telling me you start your day. I am telling you.

I am telling you, I didn't tell you why. I go from my bed to my desk in less than seven minutes. I bed, bathroom. I put my dogs outside and let them go run around. And I walk over to my office. I have big properties of my house. My office is on my property or from my house. Walk over to my office. Go on the coffee maker and I'm down at the computer and I don't.

So I not only do I practice distraction management, I make my to do list the night before. So I know exactly where I'm starting. I shut everything down in my office. There's no email. There's no phone. Slack is off. All the things that my staff can reach me on. All those things are turned off. There's no communication channel open except Slack. for messages.

And that's literally kept open for my wife and my business partner and my parents and a couple other people. Other than that, like I won't check anything. That's first distraction management. So like, you know, I've walled off. And in fact, I turn all my lights off in my office and I put my writing the night before in focus view, which is a Microsoft Word thing where all you see is the words.

So literally, I walk into a black room where my book is floating in front of me. And the only difference, Tommy, is the hardest thing I have to do is actually create new words, right? I have to advance my chapter, a thousand words or 2000 words or whatever. I start by editing what I wrote the day before. And there are flow-based reasons for it.

And I can talk about that in a second, but I start by editing and then I go into the hardest thing. So I guess I start my day with my second hardest task, which is editing what I wrote the day before. And then I go into writing. And I will tell you, like, if you're good at this and I'm good at this, 95% of the time, I'm on a flow state within like 15 minutes.

I usually write for four hours in the morning. I started four o'clock in the morning and I, at eight o'clock I stop and I'll usually take my dogs for a hike in the back country. At that point, I'm a big believer in long walks too. And I like, so I like to go out for like an hour right after I've written for a bunch of reasons that we can talk about.

This has been my life since I was 28 years old every day.

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