Steven Kotler is the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective and a leading expert in peak performance. He is an 11-time national bestselling author, known for successful books such as “The Art of Impossible,” and “The Future is Faster Than You Think.” In this episode, we talked about the science and application of flow, recovery and energy management, motivation and goal-setting…
Chapter 1: What is flow and how does it relate to focus?
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.
Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.
Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299.
And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview.
Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. Today is an amazing day. It's a Sunday. And you guys know Joe Polish and I are great friends and part of the 100K group. He is probably the best networker on the planet. I've never seen anybody even come close. And his great friend, Stephen Collar, here. I got to know Stephen Collar at the last meeting. It was probably like six months ago.
Yeah, about a year ago. And Stephen's wrote... I don't like not one, not two, but probably a dozen, 14 books, 14 books. He's the expert of flow. I mean, there's like, he is the world renowned expert. And this idea of flow is what athletes do. It's what doctors do. It's what businessmen do. It's what everybody does when they get in this 500% better results. And we talked a lot.
We're going to talk about goal setting. One of the biggest things you talk about a lot is just the neural connections and some of these ideas of these different ways to get in the flow. And now there's the neurotransmitters, the dopamine release, the Burning Man festivals, and just all these different ideas. So we're going to jump into this.
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Chapter 2: How do we lower cognitive load for better productivity?
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.
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Chapter 3: What triggers the flow state?
So a lot of people say, I don't have the time. And they get boggled down and distracted. And ADHD is a real thing, especially for business owners. I guess, how do you find the time to get into flow? And what are the actions?
If you had to build a step-by-step guide, and we can go into the three tiers of goal setting too, but if you had to set a guide to kind of go into this state more often and get your team into the state.
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.
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