Flow Architecture

I spent a couple of very interesting days last week thinking about elite performance through an autonomics lens with elite performance coach Jordhynn Guy, MUSE.CYCLES™ inventor Shara Raqs, and a group of very interesting folks. We were thinking about elite performance and entering flow states across a number of domains, ranging from musicianship to martial arts to athletics to public speaking to clinical work.

Flow is clearly a salugenic state, clearly vitalizing, clearly life- and health-giving. We cannot talk about elite performance without inquiring into how a person enters into and sustains a flow state, and how they learn to micro-adjust to stay in it when they get shifted out of it.

I’m starting to think about this in terms of flow architecture, and the kind of autonomic parameters that govern our ability to reside in this kind of a state.

There are clearly different kinds of flow. Kids enter into flow states all of the time, getting creatively absorbed in a project, without putting in ten thousand hours of practice. But for most of the endeavors we were thinking about, whether they be playing the drums, elite athletic performance, or public speaking, the pre-requisites to flow are

1. talent

2. 10,000 hours of practice

Everybody says ten thousand hours, and there is enough research to back this up that I don’t contest it. Mastery takes that much time. I do however wonder if mastery is to some degree transferable. If someone has achieved mastery in one domain, can they apply this mastery to another, and possibly reduce the practice required in the second domain to, I don’t know, five thousand hours?

I find myself applying, for example, my mastery in teaching and facilitating (well over ten thousand hours) to how I’m on a tennis court. It is not perfectly parallel, but I do feel that the experience of mastery in one area of my life is to some degree transferable. Or at least mappable.

The point about ten thousand hours of practice is that it can take this long to allow movement to become automatic– which is also to say autonomic. For the feel of movement to reside in the Central Pattern Generators subtending the limb (the arm, the leg) or the faculty (the voice) being used.

What everyone in our class who regularly experiences flow states remarked, irrespective of disciplinary area, is that in a flow state you are not thinking. Cognition is not happening. If you find yourself thinking, it is a sure fire sign you are not in flow.

For the first several thousand hours of practicing tennis, you are assuredly thinking, because you are reminding your body to move in a technical way. People spend literally thousands of hours learning how to get your feet in the proper place, how to bend the knees deeper, how to keep the racquet face vertical at the point of contact, how to roll the wrist over the ball, how to keep the head down.

But from this mindset where you are paying attention to these details, thinking about them, reminding yourself, you cannot enter flow.

Flow happens when the mind turns off, and the body takes over, when the intrinsic feel we have developed is self-calibrating.

Rafa Nadal, the Spanish tennis phenomenon, played tennis 3-4 hours a day, six or seven days a week, from the time that he was three years old. Do a bit of rough math on this and you figure he is clocking about a thousand hours a year. Ten years of this, and by 13 years of age he’s been on court for ten thousand hours. Rafa is obviously a great talent, but without this training regime there is no way that he is playing professionally at age sixteen.

TIME

We noticed also that across the domain of expertise, flow is characterized by changes to our experience of time. Time dilates. It slows down. It dematerializes. Most of us are aware of chronicity to some extend in our ordinary lives, but open the door to a flow state, and suddenly it is three hours later and feels like no time has passed.

AUTONOMIC CALIBRATION

When we start thinking about entering flow in an elite performance context, Jordhynn maps three related domains - POWER, FINESSE, and CONNECTION that seem to map to autonomic physiology pretty precisely.

At the elite level, performers become adept at very closely regulating both autonomic balance: how much of the health-creating facets of each of the three autonomic systems is online, as well as the neurochemistry suffusing it.

When a tennis player jumps up and down on the service line before serving, or makes a fist and shouts, “Let’s go” at full volume, they are adding adrenaline to their systems (in differing amounts). Blowing on the fingers between points and rocking side to side as they prepare to return serve adds oxytocin.

We learn to manage the autonomic engine, learn to become increasingly particular about the rev on the engine, and the kind of fuel flowing through it.

At a certain point we learn to dial into feeding the flow state just what it needs to continue to unfurl.

TECHNICAL MOVEMENT

There is also a fascinating conversation here about the technical nature of movement. I’ve had this happen several times in my life as a tennis player, where I discover that I’ve hit a peak on shot-making because there is something technically imperfect about a stroke that needs to be altered. Often these technical deficits, in my experience, come from unmetabolized allostatic load in the body. A place where we aren’t bending the knees deeply enough because there is a bit of shutdown in the joint. Or we aren’t swinging through because there is some unresolved allostatic load in the arms.

I find the degree to which movement can continue to be refined nearly astounding. I mean, most people, if hard pressed, can run. But most of us, even if we have run alot, do not do so in a technically perfect manner. You can do something all of your life, and still not do it with a high degree of technical movement.

One of my favorite people to watch is my friend Fernando, who has been a gardener all of his life. At sixty, he is still significantly stronger than I am, with significantly greater endurance. If he gets hurt, he cannot work, and so he is extremely precise with his movements. If he is lifting something heavy, he always does it with his legs. There is tremendous economy of movement, effortless precision.

This kind of awareness of movement, which is not taught to most people in the general population, but is instead the domain of specialized movement coaching, could make a huge difference in people’s lives if it were more available. I think that most of us fail to realize most of the time how deeply our experience of being human is shaped by movement.

I’m excited to continue thinking about this in more and more refined ways as we deepen into the third book in the Autonomics trilogy.