Reaching Flow State in Our Everyday
Working all day is stressful. Our lives are full of being busy. We are expected to work then gym then home make dinner and do it all again tomorrow. We only really get a break on the weekend. There is no escaping from stress, but there are ways we can help ourselves to cope better with challenges in our everyday. What if there was something that could help you be more creative, train your attention from negative thoughts and reach a flow state. For me this is baking. Baking to me is like meditation. Focusing one task, ignoring everything else learning a new skill and reaching a flow state.
Julia Child once said, “Drama is very important in life you have to come in with a bang. You never want to go out with a whimper. Everything can have drama if it’s done right. Even a pancake.
In other words you can make any task exciting and reach a flow state if we make it fun. I woke up one morning and I felt not as happy and I didn’t know why. Then I realised I hadn’t baked anything in 6 weeks. I would usually come home with a plan on a Friday night to bake a new recipe I had seen on Instagram, like a Basque cheesecake, first I would make dinner wash dishes and then spend the next hours baking up something I had never tasted before. It was exciting, a new goal each time a new skill to learn, and the fun of seeing whether all my hard work would turn out. I was reaching a flow state without knowing it.
After I realised how important baking was for my mental health I never looked bake I started entering cake sculpting competitions getting more complex with the cakes. And now family ask me to do cakes for events.
Getting in the Flow Sate with Baking
When you lose track of time or yourself then you are probably in a flow state. This usually happens the most when you are in a learning situation where there is a reasonable balance between our skills and the requirements of the task but where we are still putting our self on the edge of our comfort zone. For example a painter who is confident in her painting skills but who has never tackled a particular subject before. I think learning baking can provide us to experience a sense of flow, which in turn feeds into our happiness and our desire to learn and challenge us in a creative way.
Having a goal for what you want to achieve is another beneficial condition for achieving flow. But we also need to have a realistic view of what the challenges might be. If you have the goal of to baking a new cookie or cake recipe you found you will need to face certain necessary tasks, such as learn what order the ingredients get mixed, baking techniques, equipment to use. This means developing skills. To develop skills you need to be able to monitor your progress and start to recognise the impact of the exercise of the skills and other factors on the taste, rise and texture of your baked goods.
Giving your full attention to the task of learning to make a recipe you can achieve flow, mindfulness and healthy losing yourself. Keeping your awareness on what you are doing requires regular realigning of your attention. Distractions present themselves either from the outside world or from your own thoughts and the challenge is to notice this and pull your attention back to what you are doing.
What is Flow State About?
Understanding flow takes us back round to mindfulness and another level of satisfaction and peace with our lives. Flow is about chasing the high of improvement trying to get a little better at something that’s aligned with our own curiosity, passion and purpose. Our conscience is formed of what we choose to give our attention to. one of the reason depression and anxiety are so debilitating is that they rob us of our attention and drag our focus into worrying thoughts and past or predicted catastrophes. but when we learn to set goals to develop skills and learn from feedback how to direct our attention and immerse ourselves in what we are doing we have to the potential to find joy in everything and anything.
“Well, all I know is this—nothing you ever learn is really wasted, and will sometimes be used.” Julia Child
What Flow State Can Teach Us?
Reaching a state of flow gives us the tools we can use in other areas of our lives. Failing at a recipe can gives us a chance to
- feel defeated,
- create a new strategy and
- correct our failure.
These little failures and wins in the kitchen can help us in other parts of our lives. Using the same skills we learned to correct the mistakes in our failed recipe we can use to overcome other challenges. If our marketing strategy in our business isn’t reaching the right number of people we can use the same strategy, acknowledge you feel defeated for not reaching the goal, create a new strategy such as change the copy writing and correct the failure seeing more views on our platform.
This flow state can then become how we live our entire lives. Whatever we are doing the activity can be enhanced by being in the moment and by giving it our full attention. As creatives we can also cultivate the ability to be more absorbed and focused on what we are doing, whether we are writing or baking or building a business or going for a walk.
Setting a Goal
As a creative you might have a determination to build an audience and to add value to their lives. By letting this to guide your everyday life as well as your creative work, you will be able to generate a sense of harmony in any task you focus on through out the day. When mindfully making a new baked good for my boyfriend I am expressing my purpose of letting him know he is loved. Learning to be in the moment and learning to recognise what we really care about can lead us to one of the most precious gifts we can give ourselves the knowledge that we can transform our experience by training out attention and understanding our sense of purpose.
Okay So How Do We Achieve Flow State?
How can you implement flow into your every day? These are the steps you can follow. Our main goal is to reach a state of flow with the task we a wanting to complete. Reaching a state of flow is achieved by:
First setting a goal what is a massively large transformative goal that can be focused on through out the day.
Second step balance challenge and skill. The task mustn’t be to hard that we don’t even try it but it must be challenging enough that we don’t get bored of the task. This is where self awareness will come in, only you know you have accomplished before and how much you can push yourself to achieve something new.
Third step is reduce distraction and stop multitasking. Giving ourselves a chance to forget worrying thoughts almost like meditation. It involves a challenge skill balance. The idea is focus creates flow and we pay the most attention to the task at hand, when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. To do this you need feedback this is a brilliant ways of learning from your accumulating experience. Feedback can be from others but can also be from yourself.
Taking note of yourself. Noting what you did well and note what you need to improve on for next time. Take a baking a loaf of bread for example. Maybe you understood the process of mixing and proofing. But when you baked the bread it didn’t rise enough in the oven. Then you write a note to yourself to let the bread proof an hour longer before baking. Improving you process for next time.
