crystallize!

Flow: The psychology of optimal experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

How do you translate the “flow” state you experience when you’re engaged in some classic flow-inducing activity (making music, rock climbing, dancing, sailing, playing chess,…) into the rest of your life? This book offers a comprehensive look at how and why we seek out flow, and at the process of gaining control over one’s consciousness to “join all experience into a meaningful pattern” that can make even the most ordinary or difficult life enjoyable.

There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better. … Neither of these strategies is effective when used alone.

I was most captivated by the profiles of people who possess an unusual capacity for experiencing flow, what Csikszentmihalyi calls “autotelic” personalities (auto=self, telos=goal). If a welder at a railroad plant can maintain serenity and enjoy his repetitive work every day for decades, in an environment where all of his colleagues experience only boring, meaningless drudgery, what would it be like if anyone could transform any kind of work into a flow activity?

Paradoxically, the author’s study data shows that although people often do experience flow situations at work—they feel challenged, they report using high-level skills—and conversely spend most of their free time in non-flow pursuits, still they would rather work less. The more we perceive our work as being an investment in someone else’s goals rather than our own, the greater the perceived burden of the time spent. Lots of room here, you can see, both for aligning your work with your goals and for shifting your subjective experience of discontent. And, as he says, we need to do both.

For anyone interested in a deeper understanding of optimal experience, this classic is well worth a read.

Ten Zen Seconds: Twelve incantations for purpose, power and calm, by Eric Maisel

It’s an intriguing tool: a mindfulness practice that you can use to center and ground yourself anytime, anywhere, in just 10 seconds. That’s how long it takes to take a single long, deep breath and infuse it with a single, purposeful thought. If a more thorough approach to meditation isn’t your thing, or you’re looking for a way to tap into some of those benefits at critical moments when you can’t carve out the time for an entire session—when you’re, say, about to launch into a difficult meeting or conversation—here’s one simple way to create a touchstone for yourself. What’s not to love about shifting yourself out of anxiety, irritability, or distraction and drawing yourself back into a state of calm, confidence, and mindfulness, all essentially at the push of a button you create?

Maisel offers twelve basic “incantations” to fit more or less any situation, including:

• I am completely stopping
• I expect nothing
• I embrace this moment

He then spends a lot of time elaborating on the concepts underlying each, offering examples of how you might apply them in particular circumstances, and interspersing these with reports from individual clients about personal experiences with using them. The dozen includes one completely customizable incantation, “I am doing my work,” for which you always substitute your own language—for example, “I will write for two hours,” “I am making that phone call,” “I will stay very calm,” and so forth. He also provides many examples of other wording that he or his clients have used, and encourages you to develop your own sentences or sequences of sentences to be used together.

It’s perfectly true that this book doesn’t represent an earthshaking new development in cognitive psychology. In fact, in my reading I alternated between finding all the examples interesting and wondering why he was trying to pad his topic into the length of an entire book, albeit a small one. You know about affirmations, you know about stopping to take a deep breath, you know about intentionally replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. Nevertheless, I found some utility and even charm in this formulation of age-old information, mostly because knowing about those things doesn’t mean you always do them. In experimenting with the technique, I’ve found it provides me with an extra trigger to help me step back and center, and even a new practice to help me get to sleep when my brain is racing. I wouldn’t recommend going out and buying it at list price, but I think it’s worth a read from the library.