Sometimes when we’re playing, things just click. We’re completely focused on what we’re doing, we perform with effortless motion, and we feel like we’re riding on some awesome wave of capability. Other times, things feel much more clunky and awkward. And of course, sometimes things are in a comfortable middle ground between these extremes. In this blog, I’d like to talk about the first experience, where everything “clicks.” To put it a different way, everything “flows.” As it turns out, this state of mind has been heavily researched by a man named Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and this optimal state of mind has been called “Flow.” This flow state is a large contributor to in-the-moment happiness, and provides us with intrinsic motivation to keep doing what we’re doing when we’re in flow.
Mihalyi described flow as “the state in which people are so intensely involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter, the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” If you’re a musician, this idea probably rings pretty true with you. For me, some of the best experiences of my life have been when I was in flow during a performance. Flow, though, isn’t just experienced by musicians. Mihalyi found that flow can be experienced while performing surgery, rock-climbing or even doing daily chores. For more on Flow, check out this video of Mihalyi, and this blog post by Noa Kageyama. One thing that’s interesting to me as a musician is how this flow might occur in ensembles. Sometimes the whole group’s performance flows. Sometimes one player can bring a whole section crumbling and scrambling to stay alive. So what enables flow, and what puts flow out like a fire extinguisher? Flow in groups is something studied to some degree in sport psychology. A series of interviews conducted by Susan A. Jackson illuminated some of the dynamics of flow in groups. Many of the athletes involved in the study mentioned the interaction and performance of the team as an important component of flow in the group. One psychological theory that may be at play here is emotional contagion theory. Emotional contagion theory is what explains why babies instinctively smile back at you when you smile at them, or how symptoms of stress and burnout can transfer to coworkers. Social contagion theory is essentially the scientific version of the old phrase “attitude is contagious.” Does flow act like an attitude though? There is an interesting study where researchers examined flow states in music teachers and their students. The researchers found that the more often the teacher was experiencing flow, the more often the student would be experiencing flow as well. There’s a couple things that we can deduct from this. We could initially just say that flow is contagious, but I think the deeper truth here is that being in flow can help facilitate flow in others around you. Mihalyi stands by the viewpoint that you can’t catch or ignite flow with a switch – you can only provide optimal conditions for allowing flow to occur. In Mihalyi’s book, he suggests that immediate feedback, balance of skill and difficulty, and engrossment in the activity are three major components of creating flow. To me, this means that ensemble-members should communicate musical ideas frequently, strive for challenging but achievable rehearsal goals, and agree to focus fully on those goals in rehearsal. It seems like common sense, but it is good to remind ourselves of these things, and to realize that these small things will help facilitate the “sweet spot” in our performance experiences. Recapitulation So, there’s a state of mind where what we’re doing seems to just work. We can get there by providing ourselves with immediate feedback, balancing our skill with the task’s difficulty, and by allowing ourselves to fully concentrate on the activity. And we should remember that being in flow seems to allow our colleagues to enter into flow as well.
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