Are you ready for the alchemy of connecting with your genius and finding your flow?  I’ll show you how! Discover the surprising secret of tapping into the ultimate positive psychology resource, including the most important trait that allows you to access your hidden “gold” on this episode of The Alchemist’s Heart Podcast. 

Here is the ultimate positive psychology resource:

It’s my beauty secret. 

Flow. 

Remember a moment in your life when you were fully engaged in something you loved, when self-consciousness disappeared, you felt strong, alert, capable and you lost track of time.

In that moment, you were in a state of flow. 

Here’s the surprising secret:

This optimal experience does NOT occur during relaxing, receptive, passive times.  The happiness of flow is not something that happens to us, it is alchemy we can actively court & encourage to enter into our lives!

As Flowmaster Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics), “The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Here are 5 key points to develop your flow: 

1. Immerse yourself in a challenging activity you enjoy.
2. Set goals that have clear and immediate feedback.
3. Pay attention to what is happening in the moment.
4. Learn to enjoy your immediate experience.
5. Proportion your skills to the challenge at hand (it can’t be too easy OR too hard – must be right in the “sweet spot“).

And, as promised on this episode of The Alchemist’s Heart Podcast, it delights me to share my favorite step-by-step ways to alchemize the parts of your life where there seems to be no flow at all! 

So turn your attention to one single area of weakness you’d like to transform. Something that drives you CRAZY when you have to navigate it.  A genuinely onerous area.

Choose something you’ve done so badly for so long that you’re actually ready to give it a dose of healing. Got it? Go!

1. Give yourself the gift of compassion as you consider the problem you want to solve.  Don’t try to force it to change.  I’m serious.  I’ve tried this about 15 million times and I swear to you: force doesn’t work.  Witness the truth of the situation gently. 

Bonus tip: Enlisting supportive allies is totally encouraged.

2. Become aware of what it is you’d rather do instead of the challenge in question.  Ask yourself:

What do I naturally excel at?

Where does my mind like to play? 

What feelings do I have when I am engaging in the flow of the arena I love? 

DO hold the feeling in mind that you WANT to have while doing the challenging task.  Return to this.  There is power here. 

3. Allow yourself to begin to opening to creative solutions. Consider there may be a way, even if you don’t know how, to have a better experience succeeding in the area that feels so dang tough. Believe in your capacity to do this. 

4.  Ask yourself: HAS THERE EVER BEEN AN EXCEPTION TO THE RULE?  If possible, remember a time when you were successful in this area, however briefly. 

If not, allow yourself to imagine a space in the world where you experience ease while accomplishing the goal that’s felt so hard. 

Ask yourself: “What might make this current situation a little bit better?”

What resources do you need? 

What tools might help? 

Brainstorm. Write it all down.  Free associate.  Don’t filter.  I promise even improbable ideas can be incredibly fruitful. 

5. CHANGE ONE THING. Try something different based on steps 1 through 4 and see if you get a slightly different result. 

And when you do? CONGRATULATE YOURSELF! Give yourself some love, a

little extra nourishment. Revel in the fact that you’re using alchemy to successfully shift a lifelong pattern. THAT’S FREAKIN’ AMAZING! 

Now do it again.  Build on your success. Keep changing things to better the experience a little at a time.  I promise if you keep at it, the changes will add up and you will find freedom you never knew was possible.

And if you’d like to check out the outstanding article I mentioned by Sandra Gardner at TallRedPoppy.com, click here for I worked hard and you should too and other lies your parents told you!

Plus, here is an additional resource from today’s podcast – I highly recommend Thomas Moore’s book A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born To Do

So how ’bout it? Are you up for bringing more flow into your life? What are your favorite ways to invite it? As an alchemist at heart, I’d love to hear what lights up your life!

Remember, if you like what you hear on The Alchemist’s Podcast, share some stars with me on iTunes to help share me with the world!