Want to Be Happier at Work? Try to Experience Flow

Want to Be Happier at Work? Try to Experience Flow

Who Doesn’t Want to be Happier at Work? Even if we love what we do, most of us want to be happier at work. We may like parts of our work but not others, such as paperwork, bills, answering email and so on. If we’re leaders, we probably want our team to be happier also.

The Experience of Flow: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a world-famous Hungarian-American psychologist, pondered this problem for most of his career. He started out studying musicians and other artists, endeavoring to determine what made them happier and more productive in their work.

What he found was that at a certain level of practice of their craft – sometimes as much as 10,000 hours – they started to experience a state he called “flow”. In this state, the world disappeared, and they were totally involved in the experience of the work. Some even called this an ecstatic experience.

Anyone Can Experience Flow: While he started out studying artists, he expanded his research and found the same state in “executives and assembly-line workers in Detroit, Himalayan mountain climbers, Navajo shepherds, Olympic athletes. Whatever they did, if they found a way to experience flow in their lives, they seemed to be truly happy.”

In one famous example, he studied a man who worked in a bagel shop in New York. The worker spent all day filleting salmon for lox. He tried to improve what he was doing every day and went home happy and knowing that he was the best at his job.

What Should You Do?

Here Are Three Steps for an Easy Mediation Exercise:

Practice, Practice, Practice: Like the old advice about getting to Carnegie Hall, what he found was that practice made people proficient and that helped them feel that experience of flow.

Focus on Improving: As Csikszentmihalyi puts his advice: “The world is so full of things you can do that you can try to do better. And if you can do that, it doesn’t matter what you are doing.”

So the key seems to be not just doing the work more and more, but trying to improve. The act of focusing on improvement itself seems to lead to flow.

For more advice on how to be happier at work, read the following articles:

Could You Have Your Dream Job Now? It’s Easier Than You Might Think

Snarling, Screaming or Sobbing at Work? You’re Not Alone!

When to Move On

What Do You Think?

Have you found ways to be happier at work? Call or write us at: 303-216-1020 or Lynne@workplacesthatwork.com