Do you feel engaged in your daily life or do you often find yourself running on auto-pilot mode?
Engagement is the second element of Positive Psychology’s PERMAH model and it has a significant impact on how you perceive and experience your life. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring the Engagement Pathway in more depth so you can learn to feel more present and engaged in all that you do.
Let’s jump in!
What is Engagement?
Engagement is the feeling you get when you’re fully absorbed in what you’re doing. It’s that feeling of “being in the zone.” It’s when time seems to stop, and you lose all sense of self-consciousness. It’s the feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.
Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow, describes a state of high engagement as flow. He found that flow is more likely to occur when you have a clear goal that balances your strengths with the complexity of the task at hand. Flow is achieved when there is a delicate balance between high challenge and high skill.
Can you think of a time when you were challenged at a high level to perform a task, but you did not have the skills to do it? Compare it to a time when you were highly challenged, but you had the skills to it.
Reflect on these questions:
- Did you experience anxiety vs. flow?
- How did you react to each situation?
- What brings you flow?
- How can you create more flow opportunities in your everyday life?
Why Should You Invite More Engagement and Flow Into Your Life?
Because frequent flow correlates with life satisfaction, achievement, better health and creativity.
Csikszentmihalyi’s studies revealed, “Every flow activity, whether it involved competition, chance, or another dimension of experience, had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance and led to previously undreamed states of consciousness. It transformed the self by making it more complex. In this growth of the self lies the key to flow activities.”
Let me give you a personal example. Running puts me in a state of flow. If someone told me I would run a marathon one day, I would have laughed. I was never good at sports, as a matter of fact, I would be one of the last to be chosen in gym class for a team.
In the early ’90s, I started a walking program with a neighbor. I enjoyed being outside, as well as the camaraderie. Eventually, walking turned into walk/runs, and before I knew it, I was able to run a 5K. I loved running races, not because I thought I would become a famous runner (lol), it was a sense of accomplishment to finish, then, finish strong, and at times, achieving a personal best. I was running 5Ks every week in the summer when I decided to run a half marathon.
My first half marathon was in 1998. I was inexperienced at running long and didn’t know there were training programs, or that I should be able to run the distance in training. I didn’t have the right gear or pace myself in the race for the long run. I finished that race, not strong, but I finished! Even though I was hurting, and I couldn’t move from the spot in the grass I fell into, I knew I wanted more. Why? Because I was challenged and I knew I had the skills to do it, I just had a few things to learn.
The whole process of planning to run a half-marathon or marathon put me in a state of flow. First, it was about learning all the things I didn’t know about running the distance, putting the training plan together, then, actually running the distance on the plan every week and seeing my progress. It was everything the study revealed!
To Conclude
The point here is that when we commit to something and become passionate about it, it’s easy to fall into a flow state. And when you do get into the flow state your creative juices flow, you feel engaged and present with the task at hand, and you maximize your chances of enjoying the moment you’re in.
Being more present and engaged in your daily life will ultimately make you feel more connected to everything you do and the people you spend time with. It builds sense of purpose and it drives you to push and challenge yourself past your zone of comfort.
Keep going, keep growing…
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Discover Your Strengths and Feel More Creative, Confident, and Engaged
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