3.11 Into flow
If you’re going to do the work of self–development, the upgrade kind, then…
I want you to get the pleasure of the work.
And there is pleasure here. Probably more than you can imagine until you experience it for yourself.
And what I wish for you is that…
You get to love the process not just the result.
To help you do that, I’m going to show you five strategies I like to use.
1. System vs. system
To upgrade love, you’ve got to go up against…
The human operating system.
And if you’re going to take on a system, especially one as ancient and entrenched as our OS, you’re not going to do well if you approach it with…
A scattershot collection of random how-tos.
Or by…
Stuttering along, half-hearted, starting and stopping.
You’re going to need…
Your own personal self–development system.
Instead of being reactive, you’re going to need to be…
Proactive.
And vigorously so. Even aggressively so.
Instead of being a self–development dilettante, you’ll need to turn pro. You’ll need to be as serious as possible about making progress.
Here are some things I’ve found to be helpful. You’ll notice that none of these are a big surprise, but I find them to be helpful reminders when my spirit is flagging…
Envision the person you want to become as specifically as you can.
Think through the work it will take to become that person.
Make a game plan that can take you there. A plan that covers the immediate short–term but also the long-term, because this is a years–long project. Not that your plan won’t change along the way—it will develop as you develop—but it will keep you focused on the big picture.
Build momentum, and then sustain it, so you can feel yourself making serious progress. And so despair won’t get a grip on you.
And if you’ve got these things going for you, even on the hard days when the going gets tough, you will at least experience …
A quiet, underlying pleasure in your work.
Because you’re consistently making progress.
And on some days, you’ll experience…
Outright joy.
Even though you might still have a long way to go.
2. Strategic practice.
These days the top performance coaches rave about what they call…
Deliberate practice.
“Deliberate” in this context means you’re being smart and strategic. So I prefer to call this “strategic practice.”
And a surprising number of these coaches, focus on limitations and how to fix them. But I’ve found it best, in the process of upgrading love, to focus both on improving your deficits while also building on your strengths.
In fact, my favorite approach is to…
Use my strengths to improve my weaknesses.
I find this is not just effective to work this way, but…
Pleasurable.
Upgrading love happens when you engage in…
Gutsy practices.
Not easy steps. Of course, when you’re taking on an easy challenge and succeeding…
Easy steps can be a kick.
But when you take on gutsy practices, because you’re doing deep work, the pleasure you get runs deep. And it sustains you in a way a thousand easy steps couldn’t.
For example…
Let’s say you have a friend, Noelle, and she’s a pianist and she’s technically proficient. In her technique classes at the conservatory she gets top marks. But when she performs the audience is unmoved. And this disappoints her. In fact, she’s distressed about it.
So you talk to her about taking up strategic practice. And she asks, “What’s that?” And you make it personal. “How about if you focus for the next two months on finding the emotion in the music you play? And putting the emotion you feel in the deepest place in your heart into your music.”
And she says okay and asks for your help in taking the first step. So you go with her to the practice room and ask her to play one of her favorite Beethoven piano sonatas. And when she’s done, you ask what drew her to this piece in the first place?
And she says there’s a special power to Beethoven sonatas, a sense of unbridled romance, a wildness, and she finds that compelling. But she’s a shy person and has never thought of herself as wild. Yet she wishes she could be a bit stormy and exuberant like Beethoven, instead of a more controlled Chopin kind of person.
So then you ask her to play the sonata, not for technical excellence, but purely for the wildness, and you ask her to really go for it, even to overdo it, to bring as much wildness to it as possible.
And she does and you see her face light up. She’s getting it.
And then you ask her to play it again in a mood of utter, pristine tenderness. And she does, the same piece, but the feeling of it is so different. And now she’s seeing how she can make her music come alive with emotion.
And so she spends the next two months, and then two months more, practicing two hours a day, just playing with the feeling of whatever piece she’s working on. Then she does a public performance and she gets a standing ovation.
People come up to her after, and tell her, “I’ve never heard that sonata played with such a mix of feelings.”
The next day you meet her for coffee and she says, “This is what drew me to piano when I was a kid. I wanted it to bring me alive inside the music.”
Now what about upgrading love? Can you do strategic practice with this as well? Absolutely.
This whole book is a series of different takes on upgrading love. Different things you can try out to see if they work for you. Different avenues of investigation you can follow to see where they lead you.
I’ve got no set prescription for you, because…
Upgrading love is an open adventure not a set and limited program.
You engage and make discoveries. You run experiments and see what you learn.
But now let me give you a warning…
Developing your self is way more demanding than developing a skill.
At least that’s how it’s been for me.
And given how big a challenge it is, it takes lots and lots of hours of practice. So please don’t underestimate what it’s going to take—but at the same time, please don’t overestimate. Don’t scare yourself into inaction.
For example, it’s trendy these days to say that…
It takes 10,000 hours to develop a skill.
Which is bunk.
That statement comes originally from the research of Anders Ericsson which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. But what these guys were talking about is that it takes 10,000 hours to develop a world-class skill. Like to become the best chess player in the world. Or the best gymnast in the world. Or the best cellist in the world.
It takes a lot to do serious self-development, but it doesn’t take 10,000 hours to make serious progress and get yourself to a good place, a very good place.
And something else to consider…
Your self-development is going to be integrated into your life and your relationships.
Maybe you’ll have private sessions with a therapist or a coach to help you stay on track and design your next move. But it’s not like you’re going to be taking 5, 6, 7 hours out of your day every day to practice your skill.
You integrate your self-development right into your daily life. And then you won’t be counting hours.
3. Compound mastery
There’s something important I want to say about self–development by first talking about something that might seem tangential, namely compound interest…
Say you have the good fortune to be able to set aside some money each month to invest in a fund that pays interest on your principle. You can choose to have them send you the interest you earn each quarter, or you can reinvest it.
If you reinvest it, you’re compounding. Each time you accrue interest, you keep it in the fund and it becomes part of the principle. And because your principle is now larger, your interest becomes larger, and the total value of your fund increases.
At first, it increases slowly. So slowly lots of people opt out and try for quick gains in stocks with hot reputations. But if you stick with compounding, as time goes on your gains are bigger and bigger, until you get to the point that when you open your statement at the end of each succeeding year, you’ll feel like shouting “Hallelujah!”
Let’s look at the numbers…
If you save $10,000 a year for 20 years, at the end of that time you’ll have $200,000 in your account.
But if you invest $10,000 a year for 20 years at 5% interest per year, at the end of that time you’ll have $373,726, or almost twice as much.
Let’s say you extended the time period to 40 years…
You’d have $400,000 in your savings account.
But you’d end up with $1,338,798 in your investment account. That’s almost a million dollars more from compounding.
That’s the power of compounding. And why it works is because the interest keeps growing faster and faster as time passes, because…
Interest keeps feeding interest.
It’s in a positive feedback loop.
Very fun.
And guess what?
You can compound self-development, too.
You can be smart and strategic and make this happen.
It’s like the rich get richer except we’re not talking about money. We’re talking about you becoming a richer version of yourself.
Self–development can feed itself, so that…
The deeper you go with self-development the deeper you can go.
And…
The better you get at it, the better you can get at it.
And the reason is simple. You’re not just developing yourself…
You’re learning how to develop yourself as you do the work of developing yourself.
You get better at it because you’re strategically and consciously developing the skills and the mindset and the passion that go with self–development.
And with each victory you have along the way, you’ll begin to have more faith in your ability to make progress, so you’ll be more willing to take on each new challenge. And that very willingness makes you more successful until the process becomes self–reinforcing.
There comes a day when you surprise yourself because you’re actually eager to break into the next blind spot. You now have a different relationship with blind spots. A mature relationship. You know how to tackle them and win. And you’re building the confidence that comes with successive victories.
In the process, your relationship with self–development itself changes. This is no longer a struggle for you. More and more it becomes a pleasure. You might even get to the point where beyond the specific benefits it brings you love it so much…
You’re into it for its own sake.
At some point…
The pain/pleasure ratio flips.
In the beginning phase, there’s significantly more pain than pleasure. But as time passes, the pleasure increases, it comes into its own, until finally it eclipses the pain.
And then…
Self-development becomes more play than work.
I wish somebody had told me this when I was in my 20s. I wish someone had shown me how the compound mastery of self–development works. I think I would have been much more proactive and made much faster progress. It’s hard to put your heart into something that you believe is ultimately futile.
And here’s something to remember…
If you’re trying to develop a self you hate, that’s hard, discouraging work.
If you’re developing a self you’ve come to love, or at least believe you will come to love, that work is infused with delight.
There was a time when I had co-dependent relationships with people. Because of my approval–seeking and the people–pleasing that came with it, I was not able to stand on my own two feet. I was dependent on other people instead of independent within myself.
And it was a long, hard slog to get over that behavior. But…
With each step forward, I was more motivated to do the work and take the next step forward.
There was a time when I thought I was going to have to keep struggling with this issue for my whole life. But not so. It flipped.
Now if someone tries to suck me into a co–dependent rescue or a co–dependent relationship, I don’t even have to think about it. I get triggered. It’s like I have an allergy. And my response is just simply and immediately, “NO!”
Then depending on the situation, I might explain myself. And tell the person attempting to rope me in, that if she wants to talk about quitting co–dependent behavior, I’d be glad to have that conversation with her.
I have to say, that for me, coming from a place of deep despair about myself, decades of despair, to get to where I can relax and trust myself and know that I’m really living a different kind of life now and I don’t have to stand guard, and I don’t have to constantly police myself to stay okay, that’s a sweet pleasure.
4. Into flow
What do I mean when I use that word flow? I mean what musicians or athletes are referring to when they talk about, “I’m in the zone.” Or, “I’m playing out of my mind.” Or, “Time stops and thinking stops and I just soar.”
Even witnessing flow can be thrilling…
You’re watching a basketball star as he snakes his way through his opponents, twists front to back like a dolphin as he leaps and slams the ball through the net with his own signature finesse, and it looks so graceful you can’t imagine it takes any effort at all.
Your favorite singer sits down at the piano and sinks so deep into her music that she’s no longer performing. She’s gone lost inside. You never want this moment to end.
From the outside flow looks easy. From the inside, while it’s happening, that’s also true, the experience is one of ease.
When you’re in flow, you’re not struggling, you’re not working at it, you feel light, free, uplifted, because…
You’re playing, not struggling.
Getting there, though, is anything but easy…
It takes the total engagement of your mind, body, spirit, heart—all of you.
Sometimes flow is talked about in mystical terms as if it comes to you out of the blue. In fact, there’s a system to it and a science. The key factor is…
The skills/challenge balance.
Flow happens when you’re taking on a challenge that’s just a little bit beyond your skill level. So you have to stretch. You ask more of yourself.
If you don’t have enough challenge in your life, your life goes to sleep on you. You get bored. You maybe even get depressed.
If you take on a challenge that’s too big for you, you will fail, and shut down, and give up, and maybe turn off to challenges altogether.
But what happens when you take on…
A challenge that’s in the Goldilocks Zone?
It’s…
Not too little, not too much, but just right.
That’s when you succeed, but it’s a special kind of success. The challenge asks a lot of you, a whole lot, but not too much. So when you succeed you feel great because the challenge asked so much, and you came through because you gave it everything you had. You were totally engaged and that means…
Your victory is yours.
Usually people talk about flow in terms of skills not in terms of self. But just as you can experience flow as you do skill–development, you can experience it as you do self–development.
Being able to get to flow with a skill that you’ve been working on, is one of the best experiences we humans can have.
And when you achieve flow within your very self, that’s thrilling in a way that nothing else is.
5. Imagine
Imagine this…
You’ve worked your way through all your major blind spots. Maybe you’re working with a coach or a therapist and you decide to dig down to see if you can find any more trouble that needs to be dealt with, but you discover that you’ve got all the big stuff handled.
So you don’t have to be scared of what’s inside you anymore. No more bad surprises.
Sure, you still want to keep working on yourself. But you’re looking forward to it, because it’s now so much more pleasure than work. And because you’re now so good at it that it comes relatively easily. And each step forward that you take is a sweet bonus not an urgent necessity.
This can really happen.
