You may have heard of bestselling author and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book ‘Flow – The Psychology of Optimal Experience’. This popular book has been around since 2008. I revisited some his other work this week.
Here’s how he describes flow:
‘Flow is what describes this peculiar feeling of complete involvement with what you are doing that comes when you are paying attention to a goal, and when you are receiving the feedback from the goal.’
He describes the important role of receiving feedback in experiencing ‘flow’:
‘With feedback, you know every moment if what you are doing is getting you closer to your goal of not. You can summarise that by saying that feedback is immediate. You know moment by moment how well you are doing. Clarity of feedback is essential for keeping you focused on what you are doing because you get information about how you are doing, and you can improve, and you can change your course. If you don’t know how well you are doing, then it is hard to keep concentrating. But if you know how well you are doing, you can focus on what you are doing’.
I love Csikszentmihalyi’s emphasis on the importance of receiving Evaluation feedback (this is how you are going according to expectations).
It’s interesting to note that Evaluation feedback is the type of feedback that the majority of Leaders struggle to offer. Here’s my own research conducted with 109 leaders in in 2022: