How To “Tweak” Your Mindset For Optimal Flow

Have you ever wondered what people actually mean when they use the word “mindset”?

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It’s one of those terms you hear thrown around a lot.

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According to world-renowned Stanford psychologist, Dr. Carol Dweck:

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“A mindset is a self-perception or “self-theory” that people hold about themselves”.

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Dweck differentiates between two types of mindsets, which you’ve likely heard about.

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A “fixed mindset” assumes that one's character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens.

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Factors that we can’t change in any meaningful way.

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Under a fixed mindset, success is the byproduct of that inherent intelligence.

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It’s an assessment of how those “given” abilities measure up against an equally fixed standard.

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Striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining this sense of being smart or skilled.

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A “growth mindset,” on the other hand, thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as an inevitability on the path to growth.

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It’s viewed as something that simply stretches our existing abilities.

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An immense amount of our behavior, our relationship with success and failure, personally and professionally, and our capacity for well-being is enormously influenced by whether we’re holding a fixed or growth mindset.

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So how do we begin to optimize our mindset?

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Dr. Michael Gervais, clinical psychologist, high-performance coach for the Seattle Seahawks and member of the Flow Research Collective advisory board talks about three different “kinds of mind”.

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First, there's a negative mind.

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Self-criticism, worry, doubt, and limiting thoughts that lead to constriction of your inner experience.

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This is a kind of cognitive choking. Similar to a fixed mindset.

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Second, you’ve got a “positive mind”. This is optimism, a place that creates space. Similar to a growth mindset.

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Finally, there’s “no mind”.

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This is flow. You’re locked in, engrossed, and engaged in the present moment, where thoughts fade away entirely.

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Gervais’ key point is that you can’t jump from a negative mind to no mind.

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You can’t go from self-critical doubt, and frustration and automatically get to no mind. It’s not how it works.

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However, “If we hang out in positive mind long enough,” explains Gervais, which can counter-intuitively be about self-talk that isn’t always positive but simply calm and or neutral in tone, “we have a chance to slip into no mind or flow state, the most optimal state we can be in as humans.”

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So what’s the point here?

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Do your best to dodge negative, limiting thinking.

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Get yourself to at least a neutral state of mind and then, the possibility of going past the mind entirely, and into the flow, opens up.

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In sum:

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Growth Mindset/Positive Mind —> Calm & Neutral Self Talk —> Flow

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Also, our last email on stress had a neuroscience typo in it!

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We said the amygdala “atrophies” with stress. We meant to say “augments”.

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Thanks to the nerds who caught that!

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