
A guitar player merges with the instrument and becomes the music that he plays. Complete concentration on what one is doing at the present moment, with no room in one’s mind for any other information.For example, in a competition you know what you’ve got to achieve and you know exactly how well you are doing, i.e. Clarity of goals and immediate feedback on the progress.He came to the conclusion that flow is a universal experience, which has several important characteristics: Neither of these two cases result in flow.Ĭsikszentmihalyi investigated the phenomenon of flow by interviewing thousands of people from many different walks of life – chess players, mountain climbers, tennis players, ballet dancers, surgeons, etc. If skills exceed challenges, we usually become bored (like bright kids at school). If challenges exceed skills, one can become anxious. So both the challenge and the skills are at high levels, stretching us almost to the limit. The state of flow happens under very specific conditions – when we encounter a challenge that is testing for our skills, and yet our skills and capacities are such that it is just about possible to meet this challenge.
THE FLOW EXPERIENCE HOW TO
Making Flow Happen: How to Enter the Flow State It is possible that if it wasn’t for the enormous popularity of Flow and for Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi meeting accidentally in Hawaii and becoming friends, the positive psychology movement might have never happened.

It became an instant best-seller, making its way to the top self-help classics.

His celebrated book Flow: The psychology of happiness is one of the best examples of a marriage between non-reductionist scientific and deep thinking, within the accessible self-help genre.
