Flourishing and Flow: Two States Worth Reckoning With

Understanding the concepts of flourishing and flow is vital to understanding the field of positive psychology.

Flourishing

Flourishing is one of the most significant concepts in positive psychology, as it encompasses and extends to so many other concepts.

In short, flourishing refers to a state of being we can accomplish when we tune into each aspect of our holistic wellbeing. Dr. Martin Seligman used the PERMA (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, achievement) Model of wellbeing. My training and practice use the SPIRE (spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational, emotional) Model. When I taught, it was all about the Mind-Body Connection, and many religious institutions expand this to Mind-Body-Spirit. Regardless, it requires us to pay attention to our human welfare and how to bring this to fruition.

Early in his work with positive psychology, Dr. Seligman used the term happiness more than flourishing. He found that in order to truly feel complete happiness, we need to also accomplish a sense of achievement. “We flourish when we find fulfillment in life along with achieving more traditional objectives related to success when we are truly living the ‘good life’” (Seligman, 2011). Hence the addition of the ‘A’ in PERMA. To learn more about Seligman’s definition of flourishing, watch this great video: https://youtu.be/e0LbwEVnfJA and/or read Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (2012). I know I have a highlighted copy sitting on my bookshelf!

As with any other new scientific theory, the concept of flourishing has been studied by many others.Positive psychologist and professor Dr. Lynn Soots (n.d.) describes flourishing as the following:

“Flourishing is the product of the pursuit and engagement of an authentic life that brings inner joy and happiness through meeting goals, being connected with life passions, and relishing in accomplishments through the peaks and valleys of life.”

Further, Soots emphasizes that flourishing is not a trait, a characteristic, or something you “either have or don’t have;” rather, flourishing is a process that requires action. While flourishing may not always come easy, it’s encouraging to know that anyone can flourish!

Flourishing is surely an important concept in my coaching practice, as my tagline is ‘Fostering Flourishing Families!’ On my website (larahaascoaching.com), I state that it is necessary for each person in a family unit to feel a sense of flourishing in order for the entire family to flourish.

What are your thoughts? How can WE foster flourishing families? How can YOU foster YOUR FAMILY TO FLOURISH?

Comment here or go to my website if you’d like guidance learning to flourish or helping your family flourish!

Flow

Another well-known topic in positive psychology is that of flow. The concept of flow was first scientifically explored and defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, our second “founding father” of positive psychology. In the last decades of the 1900s, Csikszentmihalyi noticed that many artists fell into a particular state  while they were working. He described this state as ‘characterized by intense focus and great concentration on the task at hand, to the point of losing track of time for hours at a time.’

He continued pursuing this topic and noticed it in others as well. Athletes, musicians, writers, and other creative professionals frequently reported losing themselves in their work in a similar way. As he gathered more descriptions of this phenomenon, he observed six factors that characterize a flow experience:

1. Intense and focused concentration on the present moment,
2. Merging of action and awareness,
3. Lack of attention to the self,
4. Sense of personal control or agency in the situation,
5. Distorted sense of time passing, and
6. Experiencing the activity or situation as intrinsically rewarding

(Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). Notice the date on that, 1975. Wow, that was nearly 50 years ago! I know I’ve felt in flow. It’s an incredible feeling. It happened frequently while I was teaching. I was totally immersed in what I was doing, not so much the subject I was teaching, but being and collaborating with my students. It’s as if we were working like a unit, playing off one another’s learning.

I learned about flow from Csikszentmihalyi’s first book while I was teaching. What I didn’t understand until recently however (or at least I didn’t remember from the book), is that this sense of immersion arises when the challenges of the activity we’re engaged in are significant and roughly equal to our skill at the activity. So, do I not achieve a state of flow more often or during other endeavors because I didn’t regularly challenge myself enough? It is a question worth pondering.

Once I learned that, I challenged myself to new tasks more frequently. I was taking risks and trying out new things. I think in some ways, my subconscious was telling me I needed to work harder to earn the pleasure of finding flow. You see, when we have high skill and low challenge, we are bored. When we have high challenge and low skill, we feel overwhelmed. When we have low skill and low challenge, we grow apathetic. It is only when both our skill and our challenge are high that we enter a flow state.

Entering a state of flow is intrinsically rewarding and often enjoyable. Flow has therefore been found to be linked to greater happiness and wellbeing, heightened levels of academic and career success, and more positive and healthier relationships (Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi, 1988). To learn more about flow, Csikszentmihalyi gave an outstanding TED Talk on the subject: https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare. If the video only piqued your interest, you may want to consider Csikszentmihalyi’s books on flow:

• Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (1998)
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (2008)
• Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (2013)

When/where are you in flow? What puts you there? How does this feel? Why?

How can you find opportunities to experience flow more often?