All Quotes By Tag: Flow

“If you have a good idea, use it so that you will not only accomplish something, but so that you can make room for new ones to flow into you.”

“Did I know myself less, I might perhaps venture to handle something or other to the bottom, and to be deceived in my own inability; but sprinkling here one word and there another, patterns cut from severalpieces and scattered without design and without engaging myself too far, I am not responsible for them, or obliged to keep close to my subject, without varying at my own liberty and pleasure, and giving up myself to doubt and uncertainty, and to myown governing method, ignorance.”

“When you stop beside a river, you get this message: Flow! And when you flow, you meet the never-seen and the never-lived parts of the life!”

“If you go with the flow, life will take you where it pleases, good or bad. If you take charge and fight, you can go anywhere that you please.”

“Flow is a state of being when we are completely focused, and fully immersed in what we are doing. In flow our work seems effortless, creativity goes into overdrive, we feel inspired, and motivation springs forth from within.”

“Be with the flow, take the flow with you, align and make a rhythm out of it”

“Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.”

“So it is said, for him who understands Heavenly joy, life is the working of Heaven; death is the transformation of things. In stillness, he and the yin share a single Virtue; in motion, he and the yang share a single flow.”

“As your faith is strengthened, you will find that there is no longer the need to have a sense of control, that things will flow as they will and that you will flow with them to your great delight and benefit.”

“During moments of strife and ‘dis-ease’, check your flow and redirect your focus to that which is naturally good.”

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

“Just as the bird needs wings to fly, a leader needs useful information to flow. Leaders learn.”

“When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we’re doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.The life coach Martha Beck asks new potential clients, “Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?” That forgetting — that pure absorption — is what the psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi calls “flow” or optimal experience. In an interview with Wired magazine, he described flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”In a typical day that teeters between anxiety and boredom, flow experiences are those flashes of intense living — bright against the dull. These optimal experiences can happen when we’re engaged in work paid and unpaid, in sports, in music, in art. The researchers Maria Allison and Margaret Duncan have studied the role of flow in women’s lives and looked at factors that contributed to what they call “antiflow.” Antiflow was associated with repetitive household tasks, repetitive tasks at work, unchallenging tasks, and work we see as meaningless. But there’s an element of chaos when it comes to flow. Even if we’re doing meaningful and challenging work, that sense of total absoprtion can elude us. We might get completely and beautifully lost in something today, and, try as we might to re-create the same conditions tomorrow, our task might jsut feel like, well, work. In A Life of One’s Own, Marion Milner described her effort to re-create teh conditions of her own recorded moments of happiness, saying, “Often when I felt certain that I had discovered the little mental act which produced the change I walked on air, exulting that I had found the key to my garden of delight and could slip through the door whenever I wished. But most often when I came again the place seemed different, the door overgrown with thorns and my key stuck in the lock. It was as if the first time I had said ‘abracadabra’ the door had opened, but the next time I must use a different word. (123-124).”

“Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that wemake happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last blockon a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.”

“Flattery does not encourage the perfect flow of love in the vein of your relationship. Be genuine and speak out what you feel for each other without hiding the painful truth.”