What’s your flow profile?
Don’t know the answer? Well there is a personality test to help you capture it. What is flow?
Csikszentmihalyi is credited with defining the experience as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”
How often do people experience flow?
“If you ask a sample of typical Americans, “Do you ever get involved in something so deeply that nothing else seems to matter and you lose track of time?” roughly one in five will say that this happens to them as much as several times a day, whereas about 15 percent will say that this never happens to them. These frequencies seem to he quite stable and universal. For instance, in a recent survey of 6,469 Germans, the same question was answered in the following way: Often, 23 percent; Sometimes, 40 percent; Rarely, 25 percent; Never or Don’t Know, 12 percent.” (Source: Psychology Today)
Nakamura and Csíkszentmihályi identify the following six factors as encompassing an experience of flow.
- intense and focused concentration on the present moment
- merging of action and awareness
- a loss of reflective self-consciousness
- a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
- a distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time is altered
- experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience
Jamie Wheal has spent much of his adult likfe researching flow:
He explains his ideas in this compelling TED talk: Hacking the GENOME of Flow:
His colleague goes deeper in the Rise of Superman