Characteristics of Flow: Balance Between Challenges and Skills

Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes

This is the fourth in a series of articles about Flow. In each of the articles I’ll look more closely at Flow, each of the individual characteristics, and how we can use Flow in our leadership practice.

In the first article of the series, I talked about the idea of Flow as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and introduced the nine characteristics of a flow experience. This time I’d like to examine the third characteristic which is that there needs to be a balance between our challenges and our skills. In order to find Flow, we need to find the sweet spot between our skills and the challenge of the activity we are participating in. When the challenge of the activity matches our ability to do that activity we have the opportunity to experience Flow.

I’m Bored!

We usually like things that we’re good at because it’s always more enjoyable to do things we do well. But sometimes we can have too much of good thing. Sometimes we find the task at hand boring because there is no challenge in it; our skills are much higher than required for the task. When we find ourselves in an activity where we aren’t challenged we don’t enjoy the activity as much because of the boredom factor. In order to experience Flow during situations like this, we’ll need to increase the challenge of the activity to more closely match our skills.

My first job during high school was working in a bank doing bulk coin deposit verification. Drivers from several vending companies would bring deposits to me of the money taken from their vending machine routes. I would count the coins and dollar bills to verify the amounts they were depositing. It was a pretty boring job to do day in, day out. So, I created what I saw as a game. I started to track all of the deposits by coin type, vendor and day. I kept all of this information in a spreadsheet. But remember, this is back in the day when spreadsheets were kept on wide green ledger sheets. Adding this additional tracking of information allowed me to change the job to more closely align the challenge with my skills.

This actually paid off over a year later. My girlfriend at the time (now my wife) also worked for the bank and had just gotten a $.50 / hour raise and I had only gotten $.25. I took all of my information and turned it into a report that I sent to management. They were surprised to learn that I handled $1 million worth of coin deposits in the previous year. They previously had no idea. It got me the additional $.25 / hour!

I Can’t Do This!

Sometimes we are engaged in an activity where our skills are no match for the challenge. We just don’t have the skills we need to accomplish the task. In situations like these, we have trouble finding Flow because we are constantly anxious about completing an activity that we know or think we can’t do.

At this point, we only have two options. We can find a way to change the activity so that our skills match the challenge, but this isn’t always possible. The more likely option is to increase our skills. That’s how we learn. We encounter a challenging task that we don’t quite have the skills to accomplish and we go out and learn what we need while we’re doing the activity. By increasing our skills we not only learn something new, but we become less anxious as we feel more confident in our ability to complete the task.

In this situation, the most important thing is to not allow the anxiety of not feeling confident in our skills make us shut down and back away from the challenge presented by the task. Once we can get passed the anxiety, the learning of new skills can begin. As we are able to gain new skills that are more in balance with the challenge of the activity, we are in a better position to be able to experience Flow.

Finding opportunities to match our skills to the challenges that lie before us is essential to finding Flow. But many times we don’t have this balance between the challenge of the activity and our skills. This imbalance is an opportunity for us to grow. When our skills are greater than the challenge, we can find ways to increase the challenge which allows us to find new ways to use our skills. When we don’t have the skills required to complete an activity, we can learn new skills which allow us to be more competent and able to do more that we could previously.

Leader’s Reflection: When we are able to experience Flow on a regular basis we are able to live a happy and satisfying life. When we are able to experience Flow in our everyday work we find the work more satisfying. If our skills match the challenge of the activity we are engaged in, we have found the sweet spot that will allow us to have a Flow experience. When our skills don’t match the challenge, we have an opportunity to grow as we seek Flow.

You also might be interested in:

1. Characteristics of Flow: A Growth Opportunity
2. Characteristics of Flow: Deepened Concentration
3. Have You Found Flow?
4. Characteristics of Flow: Clear Goals
5. Characteristics of Flow: No Worry About Failure