SEARCHING FOR THE OPTIMAL STATE

From the beginning, NLP called the optimal state—the “genius” state. I don’t know who started that. Judith DeLozier and John Grinder popularized it in Turtles All the Way Down (1985) from their 1983 workshop. Robert Dilts did a modeling project on actual geniuses and wrote his series of books, Strategies of Genius. Anyway “genius” became the NLP word for the optimal flow state.

In 1990 Csikszentmihalyi’s studies on “happiness” led to his naming the state flow and he then followed that up with many studies as well as books on flow. That was his popularization term for what Abraham Maslow had termed “peak experience” some 40 years prior. And in the domain of sports, the most popular term has been, and continues to be, “in the zone.” All of these terms and phrases are different ways of talking about the one’s very state for a given activity.

More recently Steven Kotler has explored the state of flow in his book, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance (2014) which he repeated with co-author, Peter Diamondis in Bold: How to Go Big, Achieve Success, and Impact the World (2015). In these books they have some valuable things to say about flow.

“Csikszentmihalyi ... is a more pedestrian version of Maslow’s inquiry. The ones who felt their lives had the most meaning were those who had the most peak experiences. It often involved an element of novelty and discovery. ... Csikszentmihalyi renamed peak experiences— flow.” (2014, p. 20) “McKensey found top executives reported being up to five times more productive when in flow. Creativity and cooperation are also amplified.” (Ibid. p. 21)

Kotler even gives a lot of attention to the neurochemistry and the brain autonomy involved in flow. Here is a sample: In flow, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is also deactivated, an area of self-monitoring and impulse control. Flow also activates the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that governs self-expression. The brain release a number of powerful painkillers that deaden us to the damage being done and allows us to push our maximal strength closer to its boundary. In the hypofrontality, the same events that create our sense of self also distort our sense of time; temporal awareness is calculated by multiple areas of the brain working together.

But there is a problem. In The Rise of Superman he focused almost entirely on those athletes who are engaged in extreme sports. And while the reading of the young men who push the limits of the human body in rock climbing, jumping off cliffs, running, skiing, etc. is exciting, even mesmerizing— it leaves several false impressions. The first is that to get into flow, to access this

wonderful optimal state, you have to engage in doing something extreme and dangerous. In this, the book is not balanced and over-stresses the importance of danger, high consequence environment, and risk as key flow triggers.

That’s just not so. Csikszentmihalyi’s studies provide a far more balanced approach. While he included some examples of extreme sports, he also wrote about playing chess, reading, writing, etc. The optimal state is not only, or even mainly, a function of getting your nervous systems into a revved up state. Flow is actually more about one’s state of mind— attention, intention, purpose, etc.— than about a physiological state of intense arousal.

Another false impression is that it takes both the intense physiological state and a period of time, like twenty minutes, to get into the flow state. The idea is that you have to work up to it. You have to rev up the body in preparation. This is what many of the extreme athletes described and talked about.

Our experience in Neuro-Semantics is the very opposite. Like any state, the optimal state of flow is a function of preparing your mind and body to be in your best state and once there, then that state of mind, body, and emotion is a state that can be anchored. And if it can be anchored, then it can be called forth very quickly. That’s what we refer to when we say it allows you to have the flow state at your command. For most things (reading, writing, speech, etc.), I can turn it on within seconds.

This is what we do in the “accessing personal genius” state that we train in the APG training. We prepare a person with the prerequisites of genius— those foundational requirements so that you can put it together and then turn it on and off at your command. The NLP premise behind this is that if you know how you create a mental-emotional state, and you set up the required frames and triggers, then you can have it whenever you choose in a moment. You do not have to sit around waiting for it and you do not have to get your body into a revved up state.

Csikszentmihalyi enabled us to recognize the flow zone as that sweet spot between challenge and skill. Take what you understand about some activity and act on it, developing your skill at the challenge-appropriate level. Do that repeatedly, and you will find yourself in the flow zone—lost in that valued engagement and getting better at it. Here meaning and performance comes together into a synergy. Here your intention and your attention synergy to close the knowing—doing gap. Here your attention comes to the here-and-now fully and you become of one-mind about what you are doing. Now you are in the flow or genius state of full engagement.

Books related to this: In the Zone by Tim Goodenough and Mike Cooper Secrets of Personal Mastery. See www.neurosemantics.com / Products / Neuro-Semantic Books