Conduct a Flow Audit
Part of what contributes to achieving Right Success, defining success on your terms, is engaging in activities you enjoy or want to master.
That means focusing on activities that create intrinsic motivation, those that are satisfying to you or are worth it to you to put in the hard work to succeed.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the psychologist who identified and coined the concept of flow which he defines as:
“A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”
Learn more about Flow here and here.
To identify your intrinsic motivations, or the work you love and when you lose track of time, try conducting your own Flow Audit for a week.
Daniel Pink in his book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us”, suggests using this approach based on a testing methodology developed by Csikszentmihalyi:
Create a timer that goes off at random moments over the course of a week.
When the timer goes off, note in a journal the time of day and where you are, what you are doing, how you are feeling, and if you think you are in flow state or not.
At the end of the week, review your journal entries and make observations about what times of day, places, and activities generated flow and those that did not.
At the end of the week, draw your conclusions—when are you and what are you doing when you are most motivated and engaged?
Do this simple experiment, paying attention and tracking the work activities where you lose yourself in what you are doing.
Those are the day-to-day tasks and events you should be looking to add more of in your current or next role. Those are the activities that will add more enjoyment and contribute to your feeling of personal success.
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