Bringing Flow to a Conscious Level

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D., developed the concept of Flow in the 1970s after interviewing artists, or those who were “creating meaning,” and he published his groundbreaking insights in the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. His creative subjects described an ecstatic sense of being outside of what they were creating. Geoff Muldaur might well describe moments of being so fully involved with his music that he barely notices the room or audience, or even his hands or instrument—or at least it appeared that way to me.

Csikszentmihalyi concluded that stepping outside of normal daily routines is an essential ingredient in Flow, as it required an element of creative choice. He also found that most of those who described being in Flow states had seldom analyzed what made them happy. He defined Flow as “feeling completely at one with what you’re doing, to know you are strong and able to control your destiny at least for the moment, and to gain a sense of pleasure independent of outcomes.” This is exactly the sense I enjoy every time I swim.

The Flow State eludes most athletes and is poorly understood by most coaches. And most of those athletes who are fortunate enough to experience Flow do so mainly by chance. But an extraordinary proportion of Total Immersion swimmers, by their own accounts, do experience Flow and—once they have—recreating that state becomes their primary motivation. Swimming faster becomes an almost inevitable result of achieving Flow, rather than the primary goal of their swimming. If Mastery is the purest goal of any Total Immersion swimmer, then knowledge of Flow is the most valuable aid in getting there.

WHAT ARE THE INGREDIENTS OF FLOW?

Csikszentmihalyi described several aspects that are keys to Flow. All have natural links to the program I’ve laid out in this book:

1. You are involved in an activity that you value and find meaningful. It’s safe to say you wouldn’t be investing the time to read this book all the way through if you didn’t value swimming highly.

2. When involved, you are completely engaged, focused, and concentrating—either because of innate curiosity or because you couldn’t succeed if you weren’t completely focused. Mindfulness is an organizing principle of TI Swimming and we provide countless aids to, and targets of, focused, attentive swimming.

3. You enjoy great clarity—knowing what needs to be done—and have simple means of monitoring how well it is going. The essential skills of Fishlike Swimming—swimming downhill, piercing the water, and moving fluently—provide you with clear goals, while stroke counting and sensory skill practice provide you with ready measures of success.

4. You strike a fine balance between the difficulty of the task and the skills needed to master it. If it were too easy, you’d be bored; if too difficult, you’d grow frustrated. By following the sequence of six progressive lessons in chapter 8, you can easily maintain that fine balance.

5. While involved in your practice, you become so focused on the present task that you enjoy a sense of serenity, of timelessness, and of transcending ego in ways you never have before. Once more, the value of mindfulness that we emphasize as essential to swimming well.

6. You enjoy intrinsic motivation—whatever produces Flow becomes its own reward. And the more rewarding your swimming becomes, the better you become at producing Flow experiences at will, the more you’re motivated to practice Total Immersion Swimming—the very definition of a “virtuous cycle.”

I hope I’ve given you the tools, insight, and motivation to achieve Mastery and Flow in your own swimming. If so, may you always experience Happy Laps … and perhaps one of those laps will one day take you all the way around Manhattan.

Terry Laughlin

New Paltz, New York

November 2002

Terry@totalimmersion.net