I’ll never forget Dad’s excitement when he witnessed Michael Jordan lead his team seemingly effortlessly and without duress or mishap through so many games . . . Dad’s excitement was REAL because this (state of flow) is SUCH a rare happening. I think I remember that he mentions this in one of his books – maybe “Wave Rider”.

This was 30ish years ago, and it literally reshaped my perception of High Performance.

I wanted (craved) to learn about this thing called “flow”.

• How can we experience FLOW more often because it’s so inherently rare and fleeting? (enigmatic)
• Unpredictable . . . Like Spirit and inspired creativity, it just happens.
• We don’t just know what it looks like . . . We also recognize its energy and the pure exhilaration we feel when we witness it.
• What conditions need to be present to invite FLOW?
• Can we teach flow?
• Is it possible for people, teams, organizations to live in a sustained state of FLOW?

I think not . . . We cannot “bottle” Flow and gift it to all of our friends and family for Christmas.

Flow is a little bit of lots of things – Like MASTERY and Intuition and authenticity and persistence and consistency and pain and uncertainty and Extreme HIGHS and devastating LOWS . . . It’s a result of doing ALL of the things whatever they may be.

Many years of discovery (and being lost) have instructed me that Flow is not goal or a destination, it’s something that happens when we’re living in alignment with who we are instead of striving to achieve success.

For sure, it’s the journey that teaches us every step of the way.

The perspective of living to create a state of on-going flow is fraught with disappointment.

Seth Godin punctuates everything above written nicely in today’s blog post.

Is optimal the point?

As soon as competitive people start to measure something, there’s pressure to make it better. And once better reaches the maximum level, it’s optimal.

But perhaps that’s not really the goal.

What about resilient?

Or perhaps we could value delightful, stressless or reliable instead.

Optimal is ultimately sterile. It leaves no room for much of anything else, including joy.

Let go and LET’S GO!