Flow State, Comfort Zone, and Jumping Out Into the Water

Let's talk about finding the golden path between anxiety and boredom

The flow state (a.k.a. being in the zone) is a mental state where we perform some activity fully immersed while feeling energized, focused, involved, and enjoying the process. This state was named by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in the 1970s, and the term is widely used across different fields.

Finding the Golden Middle Path

The flow state happens when there is a good balance between what we are capable of doing, and what we want to achieve – between our skills and the challenge.

In case the challenge is too big, and our skills are not that high – we will fall into anxiety. In case our skills are at a high level, but there’s no challenge – we will fall into boredom. Right in the middle, there’s the flow state.

The trick is not only finding that middle path once, but also staying on it – as our skills develop, so should the bar for the challenges be raised.

Growth and Being Out of Comfort Zone

I believe we not only excel at and enjoy what we’re doing in the flow state, but also grow.

In that sense, there’s a related theory coming from educational psychology: zone of proximal development (ZPD), known more widely as the learning zone. It was started by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky.

Similar to flow state, there are three zones in this model. The first zone is where learner can do something unaided, the second is zone of proximal development (where learner can learn with support), and the third zone is for what learner cannot do in any way. In Popular psychology, they are often represented as comfort zone, learning zone and panic zone.

What Does This Mean for You?

We should remember to strive for the middle path.

If you’re always staying within the comfort zone – you will fall into boredom (flow state model) or get stuck with not learning new things other than what you already know (ZPD model).

On the flip side, if you push too hard, you can end up in the panic zone and fall into anxiety. The worst case in this scenario is that despite your pushing, you will likely not grow or learn as the panic freezes us.

By staying on the middle path, apropriately raising (or lowering) the bar so you’re in the flow, you will keep growing. With just the right amount of challenge to not get bored, but also not get parallized by panic – we can continuously grow.

Jumping Into the Water

// personal example and update

This year, I challenged myself to achieve 2 things:

• Write a book

• Become speaker

Both things were/are scary and challenging, but just the right amount so I don’t get parallized by panic.

I also tried to be smart about it by doing it step by step and getting support. For the book, I am doing it through this newsletter and I get feedback and support from readers + a hired professional. For speaking, I enrolled Toptal’s internal program for developing speakers, tried out presenting to people from the community before the events (and even rehearsed in front of my mom).

~Half a year in, I have around 15.000 words and 2 segments of the book finished. So far sent out 12 newsletters, and gathered a bit over 100 subscribers.

On the speaking front – I spoke at a virtual conference in Istanbul, then at a live conference in Amsterdam, and wrapped everything up yesterday with a talk at an amazing agile conference in Krakow, happening in a movie theatre, in front of hundreds of people and a huge screen.

One challenge achieved – one to go!

P.S. Notice how I gradually stepped further and further out of the comfort zone versus trying the biggest thing right away. Maybe the metaphor of jumping is not the best one in this sense? (But, to be fair, “jumping” does sound more interesting than “gradually entering the water step by step”. Maybe it’s a matter of making the jump at the right moment ;)

Offtopic: Conference Recommendation

The last conference I mentioned is called ACE! Conference in Krakow, Poland. It’s been happening since 2010!

The organizers are amazing people, volunteers were awesome, and I honestly made so many meaningful connections and had great discussions with attendees and other speakers – all on top of great talks and workshops.

In case you are thinking about an agile conference in Europe next spring – I heartly recommend ACE! It’s around the middle of May.