NEURO-SEMANTIC SYNERGY

The Secret of Flow for Developing Expertise

Who doesn’t want to be his or her best self? This drive for excellence comes with being human. You can see it in the raw in small children. You can see it in professional athletes, in professional people in every field. It drives people to keep searching for excellence. It’s natural and it is inevitable. Although I should add, it can be distorted and even extinguished, if we’re not careful.

What’s normal is to want to step up, take on the challenge of living fully, and strive for mastery. That is an expression of being alive. But how? That has always been the big question. How do we unleash our potentials and make what is potential actual? We now know how. In the past 50 years, research from many different areas have identified the process. And in Neuro-Semantics, the Meaning— Performance Axes defines the Self-Actualization Quadrants and the synergy zone, that is, the flow zone.

Yet how many people live in that zone? How many have learned how to access it and live there? The problem is that there are some other zones. There is the Panic Zone, the Drone Zone and the Dead Zone. And we find ourselves in these other zones depending on failing to create a synergy of meaning and performance, challenge and skill. When the ratio is on, we’re in “the flow zone,” when the ratio is off, we’re thrown out of it and into one of the other zones.

The Dead Zone is the place where you live when you do not have significant meanings and challenges informing and inspiring your life. And without an internally significant value, vision, or meaning, then you will also be failing to take effective action to a meaning real in your life. We all start here in the undeveloped quadrant (I) and we leave it when we start constructing positive and inspirational meaning.

The Drone Zone is quadrant II where a person focuses primarily on doing. Here you are active and energized and involved, but what you may be doing lacks the quality and richness of significant meanings. You do what is required and what is conventional. You follow the rules and do what you should do, must do, need to do, etc. You are busy, you look busy, you stay busy, you confuse busy with doing something significant. You have far enough skill to do what you do— so you’re bored, uninspired. You strive, but for what?

The Panic Zone is quadrant III where the dreamers live. They take flights of imagination into the stratifield, dreaming and imagining, creating wonderful ideas and meaningful concepts. But they are less likely to act on their dreams, innovate what they have created. They tend to always be waiting until it is perfect and/or as soon as they finish one dream, they are off onto other adventures of the imagination. Here panic arises when it comes to acting on a dream. It’s one thing to dream, it’s a very different thing to act on it. Now things are getting scary. That’s because there is too little competency.

The Synergy Zone is quadrant IV and is characterized by a balance ratio of meaning and performance, challenge and skill. And most amazingly, it begins just at the edge of quadrant I so that to enter into the flow zone and to create synergy does not require a high level of either meaning or performance. It only requires that you combine the two. A heuristic for this zone is: “Do what you can with what you know.” That puts you in the synergy zone, the flow zone, and now you’re off and running. Another heuristic is: “Whatever you’re doing, add some meaning or challenge to it.” When you add doing, you also add risk. Now there are things at stake. When you add meanings, you add inspiration.

The synergy zone explains why it is so absolutely critical to close the knowing—doing gap. That gap is the very gap that stops you from being “in the zone.” It keeps you in the dreamer’s Quadrant III, the panic zone where there is plenteous of meaning but not enough skill to handle things, hence panic. Or it keeps you in the drone zone of doing when you are in danger of burning out because there’s insufficient meaning.

With meaning you are challenged to rise up to access your values and vision. With performance you are challenged to translate the meaning into the world in your behaviors. Do both in a synergistic way and you close the knowing—doing gap and actualize a little bit more of your potentials. You become more fully alive, more fully human.