flow and creativity

Flow and Creativity

• Flow, also known as zone, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.

•In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand.

•Flow can happen for any activity that you can practice at your own cutting edge of mastery and challenge. It rarely happens when people are watching television or just “hanging out.”

•Flow experiences can occur in different ways for different people. Some might experience flow while engaging in a sport such as skiing, tennis, soccer, dancing, or running. Others might have such an experience while engaged in an activity such as painting, drawing, or writing.

•Csíkszentmihályi hypothesized that people with several very specific personality traits may be better able to achieve flow more often than the average person.

•These personality traits include curiosity, persistence, low self-centeredness, and a high rate of performing activities for intrinsic reasons only.

•People with most of these personality traits are said to have an ’autotelic personality’.

•Some people are more prone to experience flow than others.

•People with an autotelic personality have a greater preference for "high-action-opportunity, high-skills situations that stimulate them and encourage growth" compared to those without an autotelic personality.

•It is in such high-challenge, high-skills situations that people are most likely to enter the flow state.

Nine elements that together create the conditions for flow

•Clear goals that, while challenging, are still attainable.

•Strong concentration and focused attention.

•The activity is intrinsically rewarding.

•Feelings of serenity; a loss of feelings of self-consciousness.

•Timelessness; a distorted sense of time; feeling so focused on the present that you lose track of time passing.

•Immediate feedback.

•Knowing that the task is doable; a balance between skill level and the challenge presented.

•Feelings of personal control over the situation and the outcome.

•Lack of awareness of physical needs.

Flow as a route to Well-Being

Exercising Control

•One of the fundamental building blocks of well-being is autonomy, being in control of your own life and make your own decisions and choices about what to do or not to do.

•Control is an important part of the flow experience too, although it seems that, paradoxically, it isn’t the actuality of having control that matters, but the possibility of exercising control, and the lack of worry about losing control.

Experiencing Freedom from Negative Thoughts

•Flow seems more aligned with the concept of mindfulness because it requires you to be able to direct your attention at will to the task in hand.

•By paying focused attention to the task there isn’t room in your consciousness for other distractions, worries, or negative thoughts.

•It isn’t that you ignore the source of negativity as such, but that for as long as the flow experience lasts, which might be minutes or even hours, you’re oblivious to negative thoughts and therefore free from them.

Developing Mastery

•As long as the challenge of the task slightly outweighs the level of skill, experiencing flow can lead to mastery.

•Attention and intrinsic motivation seem to go hand in hand: ensuring that the years of practice are as enjoyable as possible, even if they are hard work, makes perfect sense.

Facilitating Personal Growth and Connection with Others

•Flow also leads to personal growth because it facilitates two contrasting psychological processes that enable the self to become more complex.

•On the one hand, it facilitates differentiation or separation from other people, that is, the feeling of being personally unique, capable, and skilled.

• On the other hand, flow facilitates integration, both of the self (harmony because your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and senses are aligned) and with other people (in terms of feeling more closely connected with them).

•It would seem that flow experiences not only enable us to learn and grow as individuals, but also help us to achieve the third psychological need, relatedness.

Building Confidence

•Flow experiences help build confidence. This isn’t just the confidence that naturally occurs as a result of becoming more skilled and competent at a task.

•Flow requires us to focus our attention so completely on the task in hand that there’s no room left over to think about our own selves.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s studies:

•He divide the teenagers into two categories

•“low-flow” teens—and “high-flow” teens

• Teenagers who spent a lot of time watching television and hanging out at the mall—“low-flow” teens.

•“High-flow” teens who spent most of their time on hobbies, sports and homework. The high-flow teens did better on every measure of well-being things like self-esteem and engagement except for one.

Applications of Flow:

Flow in Education:

•Csikszentmihalyi has suggested that over learning a skill or concept can help people experience flow.

Flow in Sports: 

•Just like in educational settings, engaging in a challenging athletic activity that is doable but presents a slight stretching of one's abilities is a good way to achieve flow.

Flow in the Workplace: 

• Flow can also occur when workers are engaged in tasks where they are able to focus entirely on the project at hand. For example, a writer might experience this while working on a novel or a graphic designer might achieve flow while working on a website illustration.

The Benefits of Flow:

•Flow can lead to improved performance.•Flow can also lead to further learning and

skill development.

Creativity

•Creativity is the ability to generate new ideas and new connections between ideas, and ways to solve problems in any field or realm of our lives.

•Creativity is the development of ideas and products that are both original and valuable.

•  It is essential for something to be both original and valuable to be creative.

Nurturing your creativity

•Know your strengths:

Take an inventory of your talents and strengths and practice them. Even the most talented athletes and musicians practice nearly every day.

•Capture new ideas:

Keep a notebook or voice recorder with you and next to your bed. Make it a habit to pause and jot down ideas and observations as they come to you.

•Challenge yourself:

Flow comes from the balance of mastery and challenge. And creativity comes from thinking about challenging problems

•Broaden your knowledge:

Seek out knowledge in a completely new and different area. Some of the most creative ideas have come from making unexpected connections in different fields of knowledge.

•Choose what to pay attention:

Make an effort to spend time doing things that are at your cutting edge of mastery and challenge. Give yourself opportunities for flow by creating time and space free of distractions.

•Redesign your work to use your strengths:

You may be able to work with your supervisor, team members, or delegate to others so that you can spend more time on tasks and projects that give you the best balance of mastery and challenge.

•Change your environment:

Put objects in your work space photos, clippings, comics, mementos, toys that inspire you and make you smile, and rotate them with new ones from time to time to help inspire you to take notice.

•Sleep on it:

Studies have found that creative solutions and new ideas really do come to us in our dreams, in the in-between state just before falling asleep, and after waking up.

•Collaborate:

Some of the most effective brainstorming happens when individuals in a group think up and write down ideas on their own, exchange or share them with group members, and then come up with more ideas.

•Go outside:

Some research has shown that people are more innovative and creative in natural settings

THE WORK OF CREATIVITY:

•The first step is period of prepration,becoming immersed,consiously or not, in a set of problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity.

• During this stage, someone may perform research, creates goals, organize thoughts and brainstorm as different ideas formulate.

•Examples of problems can include an artistic challenge or an assignment to write a paper.

Incubation:

•While the individual begins to process their ideas, they begin to synthesize them using their imagination and begins to construct a creation.

•Because of its mysterious quality, incubation has often been thought the most creative part of entire process.

•How long a period of incubation is needed varies depending on the nature of problem.

Illumination:

The third process of creative process is insight.

As ideas begin to mature, the individual has an epiphany regarding how to piece their thoughts together in a manner that makes sense.

Evaluation:

•The fourth component is evolution e.g. deciding whether the insight is valuable and worthy.

•This is often the most emotionally trying part of process, when one feels most uncertain and insecure.

Implementation:

•The implementation of an idea or solution in the creative process model is when an individual begins the process of transforming their thoughts into a final product.

Highly creative individuals &Benefits of creativity

1.Display a great deal of curiosity about many things.

2. Generate a large number of ideas or solutions to problems and questions.

3. Are often uninhibited in expressions of opinion.

4. Are willing to take risks.

5. Display a good deal of intellectual playfulness.

6. Display keen senses of humor.

7. Are unusually aware of his or her impulses.

8. Exhibit heightened emotional sensitivity.

9. Are frequently perceived as nonconforming.

10. Criticize constructively.

Benefits of creativity

•Stumbling upon a way to eliminate a nagging concern or pushing your abilities to new heights is wonderful for its own sake. But living life imaginatively comes with additional benefits and can even enhance your most important relationships.

•Creativity provides opportunities for self-actualization. "It makes you more resilient, more vividly in the moment, and, at the same time, more connected to the world," Richards says.

•Students who were engaged in everyday creativity had a greater sense of well-being and personal growth than non-creative classmates.