What I got wrong about 🌊flow🌊

Stop the presses, everyone: people at work would often rather be doing something else.

I know, I know. Captain Obvious here. But as I’ve been digging into research on flow, I’ve realized that I previously missed a crucial component to finding satisfaction at work.

First, a definition. The flow experience, writes psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, happens when “attention can be freely invested to achieve a person’s goals.” People who reach this state “develop a stronger, more confident self, because more of their psychic energy has been invested successfully in goals they themselves had chosen to pursue.”

Flow helps us grow. It captures those moments when our attention is so completely engrossed by pursuing our goals that the rest of the world melts away. I’ve included flow in the Map Your Career River exercise as a way to evaluate how well our job choices let us feel positive momentum. When people are in flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi, they’re more likely to feel:

• Strong
• Active
• Creative
• Concentrated
• Motivated

But here’s the part I didn’t realize until reading Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Just reaching flow at work isn’t enough.

In research studies, Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues found that people reported some of their most positive experiences while working. But “even when they feel good, people generally say that they would prefer not to be working.” The opposite is also the case: “when supposedly enjoying their hard-earned leisure, people generally report surprisingly low moods; yet they keep on wishing for more leisure.”

People felt they were in flow about half of the time at work, but only 18 percent of the time they were off the clock doing things like watching TV or hanging out with friends. The reverse was also true —people felt apathy, the opposite of flow, much more often when supposedly enjoying their free time compared to when they were on the job.

So even when we’re having positive experiences at work, we wish we weren’t working. And although our free time is also largely free from flow, we want more of it.

Perhaps Catherine O’Hara can shed some light on the missing ingredient here.

‘Good forever’

What’s the equivalent of buyer’s remorse when you get a much-desired job only to find it’s not all you thought it would be? Let’s call it corporate climber’s remorse.

In the first episode of The Studio, Seth Rogen’s character is explaining to his mentor, whose job he took, how miserable he is now that he’s in charge. Playing the displaced Hollywood studio head, Catherine O’Hara explains:

“The job is a meat grinder. It makes you stressed, and panicked, and miserable. One week you’re looking your idol in the eye and breaking his heart, and the next week you’re writing a blank check for some entitled nepo baby in a beanie. But when it all comes together, and you make a good movie, it’s good forever.”

What helps people put up with the meat grinder of work? The possibility of reaching the goal that matters to them. Making something good. And we get to decide what’s good for us to create.

So here’s the mindset shift. It’s not enough to have work that challenges us to grow, but it also has to connect to our own personal goals — whatever the equivalent of making a good movie means for us. Even though people experience flow more at work, Csikszentmihalyi writes, they consider work “an imposition, a constraint, an infringement of their freedom, and therefore something to be avoided as much as possible.” The problem, he concludes, “seems to lie more in the modern worker’s relation to his job, with the way he perceives his goals in relation to it.” When we see our work as being in service of someone else’s goals rather than our own, he writes, we tend to discount the positive aspects of the experience.

I originally thought getting into flow through one’s work was enough. But just developing skills to meet a challenge won’t make us more fulfilled. We need to find ways to pursue our interests.

In other words, ask yourself: what ecosystem do I want my river to nourish?

Purpose, momentum, meaning — it’s not just about moving forward, but moving toward. O’Hara’s studio head knew it, and now I do too. When it all comes together, you can make something that’s good forever.

Happy navigating,
Bridget

💡Resource: How to write three resume bullets telling the story of 𝗬𝗢𝗨𝗥 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗰𝘁 via Nikki Anderson on LinkedIn

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