Finding Flow

Flow

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You don’t know what it is until you have it. You may even question whether or not you can achieve it. With practice, you can reach Flow State without the ambiguity of whether it will happen or not.

I think I can help.

Flow State isn’t unique to software engineering and programming code. Many disciplines describe “effortless performance” as a result of being in this special place. Sometimes it carries a mystical, almost magical quality. It may feel like intense cognitive concentration is needed to reach this state of intellectual nirvana.

Then why does it look so effortless?

I argue that Flow State is a release of cognitive pressure, rather than a focussing. It has more to do with resonance. To me it is the representation of the “ block of wood” that has not been carved yet, able to receive the creative act. There is an entire species of terms that fall around the same category. Know any of these?

• Intuition
• Insight
• Improvisation
• Pattern-Recognition
• Gut-Instinct
• Follow-Through
• Muscle Memory
• Didero’s Paradox
• Flow State

I’d wager that about half make sense right away to most people. Insight or Intuition are common parlance. A lot of the same shared understanding is around Improvisation. The capital “I” makes them look the acquaintance they feel: constructs of macro psychological phenomena that we use to interact with a dynamic universe.

The next three feel more corporeal. Descriptions of actions with more concreteness. They are still familiar to a lot of people and overlap with the first three. Sometimes they are interchangeable in conversation, some of them even describe each other.

As we get to the bottom three, it is now not so clear what we’re talking about. All of these terms separate themselves from the others because they require context. In fact, they seem like instructions or phases of one of the more recognizable terms above.

So what follows isn’t about the first six. I want to help you find the door to Flow State by getting real about the last three.

Tail Wagging the Opera

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The wavering of pitch you hear in an opera singer’s voice is called vibrato. This is different than the intentional changing of the pitch around a central tone called tremolo.

Singers manufacture vibrato through the use of tremelo and it can sound convincing and even artistic, but this is not true vibrato in a pedagogical sense. Vibrato is associated with the autonomous parasympathetic nervous system, the part of us that breathes air outward and won’t let the body self-suffocate.

Singers who can dial in their vibrato can mostly control when it happens. But it’s more like spinning a top than drawing circles with a pencil. This is because true vibrato is mechanical resonance in a singer’s anatomy. This means that while the pitch is being sung by the vocal folds (aka. “vocal cords”), a part of our anatomy that amplifies sound (somewhere in the throat and head, but also in the chest) resonates sympathetically and produces the wavering pitch phenomenon.

My voice teacher in undergrad taught it to me this way: Can you put out your hand and swivel it from side to side until it seems like it’s moving much faster without seeming like it’s under muscle control? That’s how you want to treat your vocal mechanism, controlled and yet autonomous.

If that doesn’t make sense, think of a dog’s tail. The reason a dog can wag their tail so incredibly fast is because of the same phenomenon of mechanical resonance. The tail muscles don’t actually have to work the whole time, they can begin the action and then let the resonance take over.

That clicked for me. Suddenly I “got it”, the loose-hand-shaky-thing in the context of a dog wagging its tail made sense. Incorporated as the act of “singing”, muscle memory forms through the practice of achieving vibrato. Before long I could turn my autonomous vibrato on and off at will (vibrato-less is a requirement for plenty of singing styles).

The Ladder of Emotion

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Muscle memory is what helps us get back on a bicycle and be able to ride it again even after not having seen one in decades. It is also associated with improvisation, especially when it comes to the immediacy of language and emotion.

“Didero’s Paradox” is what I learned in acting classes as the “Actor’s Dilemma”. It is described in different ways, and I know the first time it happened to me as if it were yesterday.

We were doing a short scene in the large rehearsal hall of the old building that the department soon vacated for a brand new facility. Aged like only university campus theatre departments can age a building, and I spent most of my first year there. In this scene I was up on a ladder, and I don’t remember the context or the lines or anything, but I experienced a blackout moment during performance. The scene ended and I could not recall what happened, having been so caught up in the acting that I had entered a state where my amygdala - or if you prefer, “right brain” - took over and was the driving force of my cognition.

The “ Paradox of the Actor” has to do with the character’s emotion being unavailable to the actor portraying it. Drawing on real emotion is a method many instructors recommend to help get into that character’s world. When the character’s emotions are being lived through by the actor, it is an artistic representation. In other words, the actor’s emotions are not themselves being actuated.

For a lot of performers “in the moment” like this, it manifests as a kind of dissociation like I described up on the ladder in my college acting scene. What does not manifest is the actual emotion being portrayed. And for every performance possible, the actor / singer / improvisor / dancer has to get to this Flow, somehow. And get paid!

One helpful technique is to use a physical object as a doorway, something that can serve to help the actor get into that character. This could be like a pocket watch that means something to you, maybe with an attached emotional memory relevant to the character. Looking at the watch before you go on-stage helps you transition into an emotional representation of the character.

Deliberate practice of the script, choreography, blocking, and everything else melts away, leaving only the character on-stage, the actor surfing on Flow.

How To Flow

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Learning how to Flow comes in two parts: Feeling and Adapting

Feeling Flow

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Step One is learning what your Flow State feels like in the first place. You gotta know what “there” feels like in order to know how to get there. This comes accidentally through deliberate practice.

For me, learning to perform a task goes something like this:

1. Think about the task, touch the steps it contains in your mind and name them.
2. Move slowly understanding each step of the task. Arrange them as visually separate in your mind. Use physical props if you need to.
3. Little by little, learn how each step is connected. Move the imaginary / prop versions of the steps closer together.
4. Do not complete the entire task the first time. Get a sense of how the interactions are shaped (physical props and illustrations help), try not to form a picture of the end state too soon.

As muscle memory is formed the brain builds models of how the whole physical action is performed, and becomes adept at doing it. Pretty soon you’re doing each cell and then each progression faster that after a while becomes intuitive.

String these intuitive actions together with the understanding that you cannot see all sides of the mental model at the same time. Novel pathways will emerge as your brain fills in gaps with pattern recognition and soon you are reaching for each part with each interaction effortlessly keeping the whole alive as the parts swirl around the room of your mind in a kind of automation that gives more of a sense of Clarity than it does Crowded.

Newly created outputs of information blend in, the thought is complete, the action performed… and will you look at that, where did the time go? If you’ve ever had that sense of lost time, congratulations! You may have entered Flow State.

Adapting Flow

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Step Two is repeating it.

This is surprisingly easy, but also not obvious. It’s practice again, but this time we’re into the Practice of Practice: how things are operated and what capabilities are deployed that we have made intuitive through deliberate practice.

Now you are able to witness yourself perform the task, it has become something so embedded that it is rendered effortless. You could do it behind your back.

That’s when you can notice your surroundings, how much sleep you had last night, what music you’re listening to, whether you’ve eaten, if a blanket of background noise is comforting or if silence is better, could meetings looming in just two hours give the time to get into a Flow State? The more I concentrate on getting into a Flow State, I seem to be further from it!

Pause and take it back to what you can see and touch (virtually or otherwise). If I get hung up on trying to get into a Flow State instead of allowing it to happen, I might return to the basics and do some rudiments or any of those steps I practiced. Sometimes being hung up on a problem that interferes with Flow just needs to be slept on. Other times I turn my attention to something different but domain-adjacent, which can have the power to jump-start me into Flow because of a sudden surprise association. Maybe I’ll go read some docs or paper and be inspired into Flow.

Sometimes you never know Flow is upon you until it is. You may get a sense of the path, but our universe is complex and change is constant, so paths may move or break. Keep going through familiar patterns and notice how things interact. With the finite resources we have, tapping the magic of human intuition is within all of our grasp. It doesn’t take special abilities to find Flow State, it only takes being human.