Steven Kotler on Embracing the Art of Impossible

on Holy Human. Yea intact in fact, Stephen Coottler, thank you so much for joining me on the Holy Human Podcast. I'm excited to have you on. I stumbled upon your book The Art of Impossible randomly, and I fell in love with it. It was really really interesting to read, and so I just want to dive in with you, if you don't mind, because I have a zillion questions when you talk about impossible, how do you define the impossible? Because I feel like that can be very personal for

each and every one of us. So the way I think about it is just sort of maybe the way I experienced it when I started my career as a journalist. I was interested in those moments in time when the impossible became possible, when stuff that had never been done before,

literally got done for the first time. And this could be in sports, this could be in sciences, in technology for twenty years when whenever there was a sci fi technology that turned into a science fact technology, the first bionic body part, the first artificial vision implant, the first private spaceship. I was, They're trying to figure out what the hell is going on? How did you guys just do this or gals? But what I learned, the lessons I learned, and at the heart of the book the

art impossible. They're all lessons learned from people who have accomplished capital impossible. They're meant to be applied by anybody interested in what I call lower case I impossible, those things we think are impossible for us. The example I given the book is I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio in the nineteen seventies. It was a blue collar steel mill town. And from the time I was a little kid, I wanted to be a writer, and I didn't know

any writers, didn't know how you became a writer. There was no Internet, there were no books, there was no It was like I woke up one day and one mom and dad. When I grew up, I'm gonna be an elf No, no, no, hobbit, I'm gonna be a hobby right. I mean like that was for all I knew how to get there. That was a lower case

I impossible. Overcoming deep trauma, rising out of poverty, becoming world class at anything right, stamp collecting music, I don't care what it is, becoming a successful artist, becoming a successful entrepreneur. These are all lower case impossible. Is the one thing I wanted, the caveat I want to sort of attack on the end of this is I say a lot that peak performance is nothing more or less than getting our biology to work for us rather than

against us. So the cool thing is this, if you're interested in capital ie impossible, that which has never been done, well, that's what our biology is good for. We're designed to go after those kind of big challenges. So fantastic. The same biology is what gets us to go after a small eye impossible. It's the same it works the same tool kit. But if you listen to me and you're like, dude, shut the hell up, I'm just trying to get through Monday. Man.

I did like this Monday, okay, like some people. Right, So the cool thing is it's the same biology, the tool kid is the same. So that's what you know. That's why it's worth learning a little science along the way with this stuff because it gives you through a foundational tool kit and you can apply it to whatever you know. I want to get along with my kids a little better. I want to be a little more productive at work. I want to become a writer. I wanna,

you know, serve hundred foot waves. Take your pick, right? What So your original impossible was becoming a writer? Is there a what you're impossible? Now? So I'm fifty four, and there are about eleven biological reasons why it should be impossible for somebody my age to learn how to park ski. Um, I don't know if you know what parks. What I was going to say, jobs, rails, rail slides, box, it's jobs, hips, X game stuff. And there's there's like

eleven different biological reasons why that. And but there's all this new reason. There's a new field called peak performance aging, and it's legit. It's not like blue Zone how to like have happiness and while being antil your in your nineties.

It's literally how do you kick ass to your eight and ninety there's a whole bunch of new discoveries in kind of cutting into neuro science fields like embodied cognition and things like that that are pointing at hey, wait a minute, like those reasons that it's impossible for a guy like me my age to learn how to do this, maybe they're not Maybe that's not true. There's not enough to write like a definitive book, but there's definitely enough

to run a living experiment. So that's what I've been doing for the past year is trying to learn how to park ski. I've had eight five days on the hill. I've done quite a bit of damage to my body a lot of the way um and but I've also made on more progress some of the people I'm working with, I've coached Olympic athletes and things like that. So like I've made more progress than I thought than anybody thought

it was possible, including me. We're like, holy crap, look what you can do with this stuff in a year. So that's been right in front of me, and that there's always you know, half a dozen ongoing projects at the Flow Research Collective on kind of the narrow biology of this that are you know, big challenges that I like, but they're not skiing. Is really was was really absurd at great fun. I love it. That's like me wanting to I love boxing, and I've always like, that's my

next day. I'm gonna be like a female boxer. But I need a really really good plastic surgeon on hand. I feel like you need a really good doctor on hand when it comes to the beating up that you're gonna that you're doing to your body. I did not until about days sixty five of the season, and I got to a point where and luckily I do what I do is so I called my friend Fred. It runs that you would perform, etcetera Baby Mexico. It does this for a living. I was like, okay, I have

taken it about as far as I can. I've got like, did I do perfec damage to my shoulder? How fund is my knee? R my language? Uh? Well, at least having fun doing it? I mean that's key, right, Yeah,

I love it. Well. You know, it was so interesting to hear in your book about the biochemistry and neurochemistry of what is behind being driven and staying driven and creating and achieving, because you know, why is it so important for us to understand that you've answered a bit of this, but our biochemistry in order to achieve greatness in order to not just survive in the world, but to actually thrive. So there's no quick answer to this.

So we're gonna piece together, all right. You asked hard questions, lady. Sorry, it's good. The first thing is what's new in this field and what's really exciting. And what we figured out is you heard me say performance is nothing more than getting our biology to work for us or against us. It turns out that biology is a limited set of skills. It's not like this never ending thing of things that I have to work with. There's a bunch of skills

that we file under the heading of motivation. That's a catch all tournament means intrinsic motivation, extrinsic grit, and goal setting, but we call it motivation signs. There's a bunch of learning skills. There's a bunch of creativity skills, and finally there's flow skill. Flow is the optimal state of consciousness, world feel the best and former best. That's the full tool kit. And the way I'd like to think about it is when you face any challenge, motivation gets us

into the game. Learning allows us to continue to play creativity, especially when you're going after those kind of high hard challenges. I don't quite know how to get there. How I want to become a writer, and I live in Cleveland, right. Creativity is how you steer and flow because it's this state available to all of us, and it boosts everything. It's operable performance that we can come back to. What that really isn't how it matters. It's how you terb

or boost the results usually beyond all reasonable expectation. That's sort of how the formula to getting Gordon and possible. That's the format of getting towards anywhere in peak performance. What's interesting, what's cool, what's new is we've known about elements. I mean like, hey, you need grit for performance, this is a new writer. Hey you need some motivation, or you've got to know how to learn. Or what's cool and new is we've started to figure out is one

this is the full tool kit. And two it's a system. It evolved to work in a certain order, in a certain way. And if you use the system in the order that it's designed to work, you get so much farther, so much faster and with with a lot less fuss, if you can part of the alliteration. But caveat, here's the caveat, and here's the other side to this. The way I like to explain it is we're designed to go big. We're literally as as organism was designed to

go after hard challenges. But if you don't use the system the way it was designed, there are significant penalties. And I have to explain a little bit more about what do I mean by system to talk about the penalties. But let's just start with motivation. So the research is really clear on motivation. If you want to be motivated um for any kind of hard goal, it's not enough to have like one or two things driving you towards that goal. It's like an athlete going towards a physical challenge.

They're gonna have enough fats and enough carbs and enough proteins, and they're gonna be well hydrated, they're gonna sleep, they're gonna do everything they can charge up every single energy source for the athletic competition. The same thing is true with our psychological energy sources motivation. So if you're going after any kind of hard challenges, it's hard. Here I mean, thirty years of studying the best of the best in the world, people have accomplished amazing us down and things

in every field. It's hard for everyone. I've never met anybody who has an easy time in this life. And so if it's hard here in general, and it sucks here but it turns up, it sucks worse if you sit on your ass and just like look at life, or then it sucks less if you go after you high hard goals, because the system is designed to go after higher goals and it literally is less unpleasant to put it differently. So I have the one thing I have to explain before this is gonna make any sense

is when we talk about intrinsic motivation stacking fuel sources. Right, there's five big intrinsic motivators curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and man history, and they're all linked together. Curiosity is literally designed to be built into passion biologically. Passion is designed to be coupled to a cause greater than yourself, which gives you purpose. Once an organism has purpose, and this could be a human or a an analy it doesn't really matter what do you need. You need autonomy. I

want the freedom to pursue my purpose. And once you have that autonomy, what do you need? Mastery the skills to pursue it really well. And if you get all those things right, For reasons that we won't go into, they're all flow triggers. So as a result of doing all this, you get a lot more time in flow. That's how the system is designed to work. That's an order is designed to work. It. So anxiety and depression are at epidemic levels right now in the world. We

need to go into this. Okay, So and there are I said earlier, not going big is bad for us. Here's what I mean. There are eight known causes of anxiety and depression. There are two that most people pay the most attention to, and they're not exactly accurate. So you hear a lot about genetics. Hey, my brain is screwed up. I can't make enough serotonin and I can't be happy. And the other one is trauma. This really horrible thing happened to me. I can't get over it,

and I've got anxiety and depression. And let's just point out that one out of TEND adults is going to get diagnosed with anxiety depression this year. It's the largest stray and on public health coffers. And somebody kills themselves in America once every twelve seconds. So we see we absolutely suck at treating again epidemic and um, we're bad at So if the two big causes I said, our genetics and trauma, but they're not right. Genetics, if you

look at the data, is only fift percent of the equation. Ever, it's always my genetics, my early childhood experience and how I'm living my life today with trauma. And we all know this. The vast majority of time bad ship happens, and you don't get PTSD, you get post traumatic growth. You deal with the bad ship, you lift yourself up, you grow in your stronger afterwards, and we call that life. That's how it usually works. What are the other six

major causes of depression? The number one positive depression is lack of meaningful work? What does that mean under the hood when we peel it back and we look at it neurobiologically, means work that I'm not curious about, that doesn't give me dopamine that I get from curiosity. It's work that I'm not passionate about. So there's no dopamine and nor open after there's no purpose. It's not aligned my purpose or my strengths or who I am as a person. I'm not giving the autonomy the freedom to

pursue it the way I want to. And there's no opportunity for mastering. Nothing I'm doing at work is affording me. I'm not learning skills that I will help me achieve my dreams. And as a bonus, there's no flow. That's right. The system is designed to work one way. When we don't use it the way it's start to work, there's a significant penalty. And we call that penalty anxiety and depression. But can you actually have a chemical imbalance and be at a deficiency? Um? Do you know? Do you know

what I'm saying? Yeah? Well, so what what you're saying is based on, um, what I believe that people will argue this. What I believe is the fault, the hypothesis. The fault. The hypothesis is there's sich things as un normal. There's sich thing is a right? Like there, what's the freaking baseline? Right? I can introduce you to Dr Nett Hallow. I was the world leading expert on a d h

d's at Harvard. He used to be on my board at older company, and he will tell you that a d h D is a natural product of evolution and is actually a superpower if you know how to manage it, because it helps you get into flow much more easily. So is a d h D a handicapped or is this superpower? I will tell you that one of the reasons I've written fourteen books and had all the success I've had is because I've got a bad case to the O c D, and it's fantastic for the work

I need to do. I've also got ridiculous amounts of anxiety. My best friend is my editor for twenty five years, looks at my career and he literally calls it the m higher the fear built so right, you know this as well as I do. Every successful person I've ever met is running away from something, just as you're asked, as they're running towards something because it's really hard to

get any place good. So you can have to You need all the motivation, right, you need to learn how to take that fear and use as a motivator, because a fantastic motivator get focused for free, that's amazing, right, Like for free cool all right, we are going to pause for just a second and catch our breath, but we'll be right back with the dynamics. Stephen Codler, Welcome back, love. Stephen Codler was just taking us on a whirlwind tour

of explaining how fear often morphs into motivation. Every book that I write, there's always a communication challenge. I gotta teach you something. There's always a style challenge. I gotta pick the right style to teach it to you in. And then there's a secret challenge, something you never saw that is something that's scares me about the book. My book Bold, for example, every business book I've ever written,

I think sucks terrible. I think they're awful. And why I'm a punk rocker from Cleveland, Ohio, I am not a business guy. So when Bold came my way and I was like, oh my god, I'm gonna write a business book. I want to write a business book that doesn't suck. Right. It took me the longest time, and I was on Wall Street when some of my early flow works started. Haything, I pulled into Wall Street. We did.

I do so much work on Wall Street. Now it's silly, but in the beginning I was always like, do you have any idea who's standing in front of you, Like, do you have any idea? Like what you literally tried to beat me up all through high school? Like I guaranteed, my god, that's hysterical. I feel that way to something.

I mean, especially just starting this podcast. You know, you talk a lot about the challenge Gil's sweet spot, you know, for performance, and starting this podcast was terrifying for me. I mean, like it was one of the things that people don't get. If you see people on stage, they don't understand that every single a medium is different. I always tell people I got my ass kicked on television

for ten years. Ten years. I'm sure you did too, So you can figure out how to talk that fast and answer that question in thirty seconds or radio radios or twice as fast as normal life. And like the hosts are not particularly nice, so you talk more than like thirty one seconds for the answer, and you like, right, if you're like, they're gonna you're gonna get shouted down completely. I mean yeah, And I started so young that I

guess it was a good thing. I've always said it's a good thing because I didn't really have any expectations or experiences ahead of time to to kind of compare things too. And I was able to to blow into each little you know, to radio to television. I learned it as I was much more talented than I was. And I was also yeah, because asked me, I all of it. I was an extreme introvert. I've always been agree So it just so happens that, like I have found that when I'm on thee the center of attention,

and it helps me turned my braid off. So every now and again I'll play extrovert. I'll get on stage and give a speech or you know all that kind of that kind of thing. I can play extrovert sometimes it'll work. Um, So all that stuff was really hard for me. I was like, oh my god, there's like eleven people with cameras and they're all looking at I

get it these people. I feel like I'm very introverted to I made the joke like I picked the wrong profession, because really I do feel like I'm an introvert and being I love that you say, playing an extrovert, because that's really kind of what I do all the time, being down in this pandemic, you know, for a year, and a half. I haven't been off stage for that long.

Since I was thirteen, I've performed, so by the way, I haven't beat because I haven't been off stage since um during the pandemic, since I was eleven, because I started doing professional magic when I was eleven, and I was doing like far misspis and birthday parties, and I was like stage at eleven. I was also an introvert, but I was talking about professionally since I was well, I was getting paid. Oh, I was getting paid said offessially,

I was getting paid solid. That's amazing. That's amazing. So you talk about magic, like how did magic play into this for you? Like that was that was kind of your opening? And what was amazing about magic is good magic really good close up If even when you know exactly what's going on, like you have expert level, I know what's going on, real good magic, you'll you won't see it and be it will look like actual magic, like it looks like you're like what I know all

this ship and what they'll just happened. I learned that behind every impossible thing you look at, you see there's a skill set, there's a process, there are steps, no matter how impossible it looks. That came to my advantage when I as an early journalist, When I first started encountering the impossible, it was covering action sports, especially in there when we had never seen anything like it. But even still, like if you go to an event like Red Bull Rampage, you go actually see the X Games

in person. It's one thing to watch it on TV. The camera flattens everything, and you go and see any of the events live, it looks like people are trying to kill themselves. And when they don't kill themselves, right, it looks like actual magic. This was actually sports in the nineties. They talked about is the Great Era of Impossible.

More impossible things got done in a shorter term period than everyfor and athletic history, and the limits of your performance got pushed farther faster than every reform and even history. And you know, I had a front row seat. Um, it was like it was doubly peculiar for me because I was living in Squaw Valley. I knew these people, they were my friends, and I would tell this story in the book. But what caught my attention wasn't just

that they were doing the impossible. It was that most of the people I knew came from like broken homes and bad childhoods. They had little money, they had very little education, lots of drugs, lots of alcohol, lots are risk taking, Like normally, put these things together in the community and people die younger, go to jail. They don't

reinvent what's possible for the human species. So what the hell was going on was my initial sort of question that I bought to it, but everybody else was like, Oh, it's athletic talent, it's something right, And I went, I've seen this before. I've seen things that look impossible before, and there's always a skill set, there's always a process, and I wanted to know what it was. It's sort of what led me into neuroscience. It's not just about

physical skills. There's something else going on. There's something mental going on. I want to understand that because I was on the hill, I was skiing with these these same people, and I could see what they were doing and it was the mental game was most of it, and I wanted to know how that worked. Yeah, the mental game is so much of it. Absolutely. You talk about these the five intrinsic drivers and stacking can you get that stuck? You said you can get it wrong? How do we

get it wrong? What's a common not like a waiting get a really a really common one, especially in today's world, because so two things out there too. There's two answers I'll speak to because I think they're relevant here. The first is, in today's world, for a lot of probably very admirable reasons, we have fetishized passion and purpose to

a level that is almost absurd. We have a rule of my company, which is have a passion and have a purpose, and keep it to your damn self, right, And I mean that both because the size of goal setting tells you that you want to keep those things to yourself. They're more powerful until you've actually achieved success in your goals. Giving them to yourself is way more powerful. It keeps more motivation inside. So every time I meet somebody who starts at meeting, Hi, my name is Sally,

and my passion is I think one. You're lying. You're lying to me, that's not actually your passion, Because if if that was really your passion, I would freaking know you're telling you're faking it till you make it, And I don't want I don't believe you. And two, I think even if that is your passion, you just literally drained motivation out of your system drain dup mean out of your system and are now gonna have a harder time achieving your passion. So I think that's a disaster

talking about your passion, talking about your purpose. But biologically, why do these things matter? They matter for the same thing I said earlier. You get focused for free. That's the big deal. The brain is a is a huge energy hog. It's uses of our energy at rest right Um, it's two percent of our body mass energy at rest, almost a quarter of what we eat, and if we're trying to do something hard, it's like half of what we eat is go into our brain power. What does

the brain spend most of that energy on. It spends a lot of it on focus. So if you are curious about something, focus for free. If you are passionate about it, think about romance glove. That's neurobiologically the same as I'm passionate about my writing or im passed about my music. Think about like the first time you fell in love or a reason, how much you couldn't stop looking and thinking about the other person did you Were you expending energy to do that? Where was it like

doing homework? It had you couldn't stop it? It was right? And well that's how there's the fine lot fashionate obsession is essentially you're splitting hairs. Right. We call it obsession if we think what you're doing is unhealthy. Right, we call it passion if we like it. But I don't know what you're like when you're recording an album, and

may makes albums anymore so I'm dating myself. But when I write, when I recorded, when I'm writing a book a large chunk of the time, you could call it passion. You could also call it like an insanity, right, like if the book isn't going well, it's that Like what is madness or what is passion? God sideway, you know what I mean? Like, I don't I like so um purpose which gets supermistified these days. Curiosity is a little bit of dopeming and a little bit more apid effort.

Those are the pleasure chemicals that make us feel excited and give us that focus for free. Passion is a lot of nor up and effort and openin Purpose is nor up and effort and dopein at passion levels plus pro social chemicals like demandamide, serotonin, and endorphins. These are the chemicals that underpinned social bonding. So endorphins right mother child love, those are underpinned by endorphins. Friendships deep friendships are underpinned by endorphins. Oxytocin is the so called cuddle

chemical called the trust chemical. Serotonin is that warm I'm open to you and your ideas, kind of feeling, etcetera, etcetera. You're getting more feel good neurochemistry. You're getting more focus for free. That's the big deal here. There's no like, it doesn't have to be super mystical and super weighty. You're just playing games with their chemistry. So that's meant to sort of take the pressure off. I think people feel a lot of pressure. And the most important thing

is neurobiologically, the systems designed to work in order. It is designed to work slowly. We're not built as organisms to discover our passion overnight. That's not really how it works. Passions are built slowly over time. And where I see the biggest mistake, especially in younger people or so at the flourish collective wet clientele, are women in their forties and fifties, usually powerhouse women who parked their career for a while to raise of family, and now we're getting

after it again. And they are like they like, they're like, okay, I'm I parked everything. I give me my goddamn passion. I want it now, right, I want it now. Let's fix it down, and like, I'm like you, you guys are ferocious. But I really like that. But it's but

dial it back in the dial. Well, you don't because the thing that where you where you really don't want to screw this up and you'll get this immediately, is you do not want to be two years into your passion to discover oh shit, it was only a phase and that can happen, right. Curiosity is designed to be built in a passion. Passion is really the intersection of multiple curiosities. But you have to like figure out I

am curious about this, I'm curious about this. In intersects here, you play there, you learn a little bit, you grow a little bit. Then you find another passion, another intersection, and that's how you grow it. I have a friend who will go unnamed, who discovered it at a out thirty seven that it turned out med school and all that. No, it didn't matter even that she was massively in debt. She was supposed to be an archaeologist and that was

her real passion and her real calling. And yeah, signed up for a two year dig in Egypt and got like three months into the dig and let a ship. I got it wrong, and I've like literally committed there are people depending on me. And yeah, so she's still in Egypt, not particularly thrilled about it. That's that's so interesting. You know, I started singing so young. I mean, obviously I had a natural gift. And I have recently started asking myself, after twenty five years of this, is this

really what I'm supposed to be doing? What are my other passions? Because for a long time, I don't think I thought I had any other passions. And I'm now at thirty eight, like asking starting to ask myself that question of like what else am I passionate about? And how? Because that's really been the only thing I've been focused

on my whole life. But I mean, there's whatever it is that you choose next, even if it's so far away from singing, do it for five to seven years and suddenly you know, you're going to be like, oh wait, I can blend this with singing, right, Like, oh, totally don't. In my head, there's a version of me that's like, okay, I could do a stage magic show, and I did have action sports and magic, and we can explain the neuroscience of people. I mean that ship happens all the

time in my brain. I just haven't done it, but like sooner or later, That's exactly where I'm at with it, too, is like, how how do I start to blend all of these things together? You know? And the thing that I also real heroes of mine, UM give you an example from music. Tom Waits is a is a giant hero of mine. And one of the reasons he does things with language that very few other people are doing. He does them music that very few other people are doing.

But he's reinvented himself over and over and he has had the longest career. And I'm super impressed with lifelong creative careers because it's so hard, because you have to reinvent yourself nine, ten, eleven times. And so when I see that, and I see somebody who is even late decade in life are doing like truly amazing creative things. Stratibia has built two of his best violins in his eighties. Right,

that's interesting doing. How do you do that? And I think one of the ways you can do that is you have to kind of keep reinventing yourself a little bit by discovering, Okay, this is another passion. This is how it feeds into the old. All right, you gotta keep doing that. And with that, we are going to take another very quick break, but we'll be right back very soon. Hello, my beautiful friends. We are back with performance and flow experts Stephen Cotler discussing why reinvention and

passion often go hand in hand. That's why I like. One of the reasons I learned to park Ski at fifty three is I have never been able to think really kinesthetically physical, like right, and I wanted to know how does my writing change when I add an entire new kinesthetic length rodge to my life. There's a bunch of interesting things that start happening to your brain and your fifties that are the result in superpowers if you do it right, and they go horribly wrong if you

do it wrong. So I've tried to do it right. Interesting, you know, Yeah, that's interesting. Well, I do want I want to get into flow with you a bit because you're you're skiing. I actually took up tennis a couple of years ago, and I have found it's one of my favorite things to do. I do it twice a week, and I am so in flow on the tennis court because it's the one place that I really go to just have fun. There's no expectation like I'm learning and I'm good at it, and I I just truly enjoy it.

It was something that I needed in my life that I didn't know I needed to give me the high of the same kind of high that I get on stage, I get on the tennis court. But for different reasons, I'm kind of jumping ahead, but I totally get like adding adding those things to your life, how they change in you and how you see the world and how you like you're saying. It can change your writing. For me, and it's given me an outlet to to express myself and play in a different way that I didn't have.

So it definitely intertwines and plays into the rest of your life when you discover those pieces. Yeah, and it's also like, if you have to be an expert all the time, which essentially you do. It's really fun to be a beginner again, right, It's really really fun and not like I can look as bad as I want to, right, you, You're not allowed to judge me here because this is not like, this is not the judging arena. There's a

different there's a judging arena. And that's fair because I I put myself there and said I'm gonna make a living here. That's one of the reasons Park scheme was super fun for me because I was like, I'm fifty three years old, I'm an author, I run a Darro science research is too. There's zero reason whatsoever you could ever expect anything out of this. I love it. Yeah,

that's very very true. So so follow for for you know, that's becoming like a very big buzzword and I would just love to hear from you your explanation of what that is. Yeah, so let me um, let's start with the scientific definition and then I'll like, I'll build out from that because it will be useful. So in the scientific definition we gave it earlier, it's it's almost worthless from an explanatory point of view, but it's an optimal state of consciousness, and this is what's important. Where you

feel our best and we perform our best. So those two components more specifically refers to any of those moments of wrapped attention and total absorption. Get so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you do, and everything else just starts to disappear. Action awareness are going to emerge, your sense of self self consciousness, the voice in your head, you're inner critic are going to diminish it. Really quiet time is going to dilate, which

the fancy way I say it passes strangely. Sometimes most common experiences, you get so sucked into what you're doing right that an hour roes by and you're like, I didn't notice what happened? Right? That was five minutes. Usually, um, you have to go the other action. You'll get a freeze from effect. For many who's been in a car crash, time will slow down and throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof and through

the roof is not exaggeration. I'll just throw some I'll talk about what flow does. These numbers are from research done by dozens of different researchers all over the place. We know that grit, motivation, and productivity will spike above normal and flow we see creativity, innovation spike four inner just seven scent. The Department of Defense figured out that soldiers and flow learned two hundred forty faster than normal.

We see empathy go through the roof and flow. In fact, one of the things we're doing now is working with a lot of police forces because cops want more empathy in today's world. And thank God, and uh, there's two options compassion and do seg meditation will produce empathy or flow work will produce empathy and try to teach cops compassionate disag meditation was flow was better, We'll do the flow.

So empathy, collaboration, cooperation, those things. And the most important thing probably is that overall life satisfaction, well being, meaning and purpose all skyrocket and flow. So it's a huge lift. Finally, when psychologists measure flow, they say, hey, the experience has six phenomenal logical characteristics. It's a big word, and all it means is this is how the experience makes me feel.

And I listed some of these already, so we know we're in flow when there's complete concentration on the task at hand, when action awareness start to merge, when time passes. Strangely, when this sense of self disappears. We don't have a register that says peak performance. What we feel is like we can control things we normally can't control. This is me as a writer being able to do things at twelve a clock on a Monday morning with my words

that I can't normally do. Right, or a basketball player something the hoop is as big as ah loop and right, that's that experience. And finally, psychologists use this term flow is autotelic. It means it's an end in itself. It feels so u fork, so good, so addictively fun that you will go extraordinarily out of your way to get more of it. Right, That's what it means. So when

those six characteristics show up during given experience, it's flow. Now, one final thing that I want to explain because this is very useful for people to understand. It's not a single experience, it's a spectrum of experience. Is much like anger, Right, you're a little arc you're homicidally murderous. It's the same emotion you can be in micro flow. So this is when those six characters that show up, but they're like

one or two on a scale of one to ten. Right, you gotta work, sit down and write a quickie email to your boss and something you get like so drawn in that you end up writing a huge essay. You look up two hours I've gone by. You didn't notice, So maybe your sense of self didn't totally disappear, but bodily arness did. And when you pop back in your head, you're like, oh wow, I really have to go to the bathroom. You run off to peak. That happens to all of us all the time. Right, that's micro flow.

Macro flow is the other end of that spectrum. It's when those experiences all show up at once, and they turned up to eleven. This is a very powerful experience. Until the ninety fifties, scientists thought it was a spiritual experience or a mystical experience, meaning was found in spiritual and religious communities. And it was only in the fifties that we started showing up. Flow started showing up in

the eight populations of atheists. People were studying and they went, oh wow, it's not just for religious people, is for everybody. What's going on the other end of the spectrum, time will slow down and instead of like the self doesn't just disappear, but you can start to feel like you're one with everything. All out of body experiences are common.

We understand scientifically, now what causes these things in the brain, um, why they're happening, and why they happen in flow, but it doesn't change the fact that when you're they're happening to you, like, what the hell is going on? This is medic it is magic. Well, you say the mystical experiences, like does is meditation? Like being in meditation? Is that? Are you in flow during meditation or can you be so? No? And yes? Okay, so um, flow is a focusing skill.

Meditation is a focusing skill. They are different kinds of focus. Okay. Most meditation systems, whether it's a focused meditation when you're focusing on your breath or in open senses meditation when you're trying to let all things in and you're not judging them, both are phenomenal training for flow because you

need attention totally in the in the present moment. So there's work going back into the eighties that says, hey, meditation is and we treating people in specific types of mindfulness practices to traut them get into flow as a general, but it is just like a low grade trains on state. It mimics some of the neurobiological changes in flow. What happens to the brain and flow is like a page long. What happens to the brain in meditation is like half

of that page, right, And there are differences. And it also and hears that there are certain meditation systems, for example Tibetan contrit Buddhist meditation and Jewish Coblistic meditation. Both of them involved large amounts of visualization. And like take imagine this letter in the Hebrew alphabet and turning into this letter and put it on a five sided diet

and manage it all this stuff. And because of that, so there's all this work now that is looking exactly at what happens in the brain during different meditation systems. Those systems, because there's so much pattern recognition, they produce more dopamine than most other meditation systems. As a result, they may be able to drive us into flow. So unlike so, I can't give you a definit advance there. It depends on what kind of attation you're doing. That's how good you are at it a lot of things

like that. That's really interesting. And on that interesting note, we are going to take another quick break, but we'll be right back, I promise. All right. We were discussing mindfulness and flow with Stephen Codler. So mindfulness would be like the opposite of flow. Well, it's um so because if you're paying it, I mean, you're in the present moment, but you're still very Show you the difference. Okay, you're so.

I apologize. And of you who's listening to this, who has no interest in neuroscience whatsoever, because you're about to get some So give flow. A bunch of different things happened in the brain. One of the main things that happens is the prefernal cortex, part of your brain that's right behind your forehead, basically deactivates you swatches. The prefernal cortex turn off. Now is a really powerful part of your brain. This is long term planning, your logical decision making.

Since morality lives there sins willpower also um In flow, the brain performs an efficiency exchange. It is okay, you need all this energy for focus, so let's turn off non critical structures and reuse the energy for focus on the present moment. That is known as transient hypo frontality transient meaning temporary hypo h y p O. It's the opposite hyper and just slow down to shut down. The activate frontality means the prefrontal cortex, the part of your

brain that's right back there, so both flow and meditation. So, by the way, let's put this in common terms, exercise induced transient nival frontality. When you're playing tennis. About twenty five minutes into playing tennis, it starts to get quiet upstairs, and your lungs expand you can breathe a little bit more and it's quieter upstairs. That's exercise induced transy nipol

fodeality front end of a flow state. There's more work that needs to happen in the brain to produce flow, but that's micro' you're now at the edge of micro flow when you're there and in exercise. Probably happens to you on stage two. If you're dancing and you're moving right, there's probably a point. Even if you're not in your body and you're not feeling like performing, you're going to get exercise news trans and ample frontality about a half an hour in and suddenly you're like, oh wow, I'm

in flow. This is great, right, So that in meditation you were trying to forget the self, let myself, right, So part of the brand that stays turned off most of the time. And this is a little controversial, it's an easy way to explain this. The media prefrontal cortex is the middle of the brain and it does a lot of different things that governs creative self expression. In meditation, you're not doing anything creative. There's no self ne's expression.

You're trying to forget this self. So this work from the brain turns off right. In flow, flow is nothing but creative self expression amplified all the way up to eleven. This part of the brain stays hyper echon. So that's what I mean by there are differences in meditation. You will drop the brain into alpha, for example, or theta and hold it there. Flow is an active state, and we're gonna bounce all over the brain wave map. We're going to drop into beata and back to alpha, theta

and all over the place. And it's really about how you can transition between brainwave of states and get back to that baseline, not can you just hold yourself on that baseline. So there's differences, but one meditation is really good for training flow. We live in the world. If you live in a monaster area, that's your life. Meditation maybe for you, but as a general case, if you're trying to live in the world, I think flow is the more powerful tool and meditation is training for flow.

There are other people who might invert it, right, like for example, yoga traditions. Why do you start physically with yoga? You start with physical yoga to exhaust the body, so then you can do meditate focus meditation afterwards. They think because people they are being monasteries and they privilege meditation, so they start with the body, put their body into flow, exhaust the brain, and then they meditate because it's easier. I live in the real world and I'm a bolder,

active guy likes to get ship done. So like I inverted and that's how I think about it really. I mean, like, no one is not better than the other, depends on where you're trying to go. Got it. Well, you talk about living in the world and this fast paced world that we do live in and being goal oriented. So if someone's listening right now, that is that that's the way they feel that's who they are. How does one get into a flow state on with that kind of

stimulation going on? M hm, well that's interesting, So let's just talk about how you get into a flow state first and then let's go to Okay, So flow states have triggers preconditions that lead to more flow. There are twenty two that have been discovered. It's probably way more, but there's twenty two we've discovered and they all essentially worked same way. So flow follows focus. It only really shows up when all of our attention is in the right here, the right now, on the present moment, on

the task at hand. That's what the triggers do. They drive attention into the present moment, the right here, right now. They do it one of three ways. They either push dope me in into our system. They push nor ep and effron into our system. Both of these we talked about them earlier a little bit. These are they're performed that neural chemicals are multitools. They do a bunch of

different stuff at once. But dope, I mean, you know, makes us excited, It makes us pay attention, makes us want to make meaning out of the thing that's happening in front of us, and nor Ep and Effern kind of does more the same, and basically we just pay attention to whatever is in front of us. Or these triggers will lower cognitive load kinda loads all the crap

you're trying to think about any one time. If I lower cognitive load, I liberate a bunch of energy that your ray will then repurpose for paying attention to whatever is in front of you. That's what the triggers do, some combination of one, two, or three of those things, and they come into varieties because flow comes into varieties. They individual flow, me in a flow state, you and a flow state, or group flow. This is interpersonal flow, me and you in a great conversation. A couple of

hours go by and we don't even notice. That's inter personal flow. This could be group flow. You and your band on stage and everybody's flying perfectly together, perfectly sink the music is soaring, Or could be group flow at scale communityAs everybody in the audience is a giant concert. When you merge with the band and have the bands just clapping and sank and we're all one together and right,

that's just group flow at scale communitas. So there are ten triggers that we know of for group flow, and there are twelve for individual flow. And so if you want more flow in your life, these triggers are your tool kit. Now you asked an interesting question, which is this what do we do in today's kind of fast paced world, and you actually have to it's kind of counterintuitive. Flow follows focus. The most important trigger is uh, complete concentration.

Can I swear on your podcast? Yes? Please? So when I work with we do a lot of our with the organizations, and I, as I said, I'm an old school punk rocker, so there's only so much you can do with me. And I always tell people I'm not child proof. Don't bring me around your children. I'm not like I'm not safe. But like when I walk into organizations, I always tell people I'm gonna look. You can't put a sign in your office door. This is funk off.

I'm flowing. You can't do this work like forgot about it. It doesn't like you need complete concentration. And what does that mean? Well, it means a couple of things. One distraction management. You want to close your door, You want to turn off yourself phone, you wanta turn off messages, you want to protect the container. You want to create an environment that maximizes complete concentration. This also includes having conversations ahead of time. I always tell people is the

most important thing. Flow massively amplifies productivity. You will get time back in your life. Spend more time and flow. The result is you get more time back. But you have to do it a specific way. So I always tell people, talk to your kids, talk to your husband's, your wives, your spouses, your boss is, your coworkers. You get more of me later, but I need this now, so I can write that has to be the trade off.

You have to have those conversations out loud. Otherwise people start like, what are you doing willing me off from the rest of the world for ninety minutes? And here's the other part, how much? How long? The human brain has been designed to focus for twenty minute periods in the same way that we have ram cycles ninety minutes, hundred twenty minutes of sleep right, dreaming, same we have focused cycles. That there's the same line. Monostory education is

one of the highest flow environments on Earth. One of the reasons is it's built around minute periods of uninterrupted concentration. We're designed to focus for that long on single tasks. So we tell people when we train people, one of the most important things you can do is you want to work. You want to try to work in accordance with your circadian rhythms because it's hard to fight your

own biology. Right, I'm an extreme lark. I wake up at four o'clock in the morning, three thirty in the morning, two o'clock in the morning, and I go to work and I'm happy as hell. My wife is a night out. She's not awake till like eight, nine, ten o'clock at night. Right, she does want to start working until then. So um, try to work in accordance with the kiddy and rhythms as you can and start your work period, practice distraction management ahead of time, and then nine in twenty minutes

for on concentration. So that's like, you know, in a fast paced digital that's a hard thing to do, but it it's a huge benefit for flow work. How does flow really benefit, like you're saying, I mean, one benefit is you know, having being able to give more of yourself, you know, and and getting some time back in your life. Like what are the other benefits of flow that, like

spill over into your relationships and other pieces of your life. Well, I mean relationships, you get more empathy, collaboration, cooperation, communication all sore when you're not when you're even when you're not in flow. So yeah, because there, well you have to remember that all of those things from a neurobiological standpoint are essentially like their patterns, their synapses, your building. Cooperation,

as you know, is a habit. Good communication is a habit right there, So there's there's there's a skill portion of it. Empathy is a is a skill. Multip perspective thinking, the ability to see things from other people's perspectives is a skill set. And so when you spend time and flow and you can see it activates the part of brain that allows you to do it. You're training yourself to be more empathetic when you're out of flow as well. And I always tell people like, the more flow you get,

the more flow you get. So if you're getting flow on the tennis court, you're probably now getting more flow as a musician. And when I get flow on the ski hill, I get more flow as a writer at it,

and will flow as a scientist. Yeah, you know, it's it's funny because being on stage, Like, I know I'm inflow often, but there are you talk about the prefrontal cortex shutting down, there are so many times where my sense of self is still there, Like I can still judge, I can everything's going on and I can't shut that off. Is my prefrontal cortex basically not shutting down? Is that

what's happening? That is sort of what is happening. Yes, And I like there's a lot of there's a lot of different Right, you're outside the challenge skills sweet spot usually, right, And that's what I was wondering. Yeah, you're you're and it's probably because there's stuff in your personal life leaking in and or there's too much physical exhaustion, there's stuff in your body, right, Like, it's just it's usually and it could be something like I was laughing, but decision fatigue.

If you've made fifty or a hundred decisions during the day, you've now suffered division. And the problem is this when you burned out a little bit of energy. Flow is a high energy state. So when you have something like that, you don't have the energy to kind of get there. You can get there, and you sort of have to you usually physically, like, you'll ride the endorphins, and you'll probably get into flow towards the end of the show

rather than early on. Right. Actually, by that point you've written the physical So I always say that if I can't get into flow skiing right by sixteen laps, I'm in flow no matter what. It doesn't matter. At that point, I am so exhausted that my system has to produce endorphins. There's other other things going on, but endorphins are like the slowest gateway into flow. I always feel bad for This is what endurance athletes and and and s and m folks have in common. They like to ride the

endorphins and to flow. That's their trigger. I always feel bad for them because it's a really slow path. Because if you're a train bike rider, right, a trained cyclist or a train runner, and uh, you don't like you can go out and run ten miles, You're gonna have to run like fifteen miles to get that Like, oh yeah,

now I'm tired. Now it's work. You're right. You're gonna have to really push yourself, which is why you'll get into flow at the end of your you'll just tie yourself out at a certain point in your body will start producing the endorphins and then end of mine and it'll walk you in that way. The interesting you can shortcut it a little through rituals pre show rituals and things like that. You've probably noticed that sometimes but not always. No,

not always. It does work sometimes, But it's interesting that you talk about when you're making decisions all the time. I've noticed that as I'm running a business, I'm constantly answering questions and doing a gazillion things, and then I'm going to go on stage that night. And I have noticed there have been over the past several years many ways I start texting my energy knowing that I have to go on stage because it's so important, you know. Yeah, I mean the train if you like, because I write

it first thing in the morning. Like try to come mess with me after like eight thirty at night, Like ask my wife how well but that goes for her? Right? Or wake me out in the middle of the night, see how well that's gonna go for you? Yeah, I will, Like I am ferocious in terms of protecting energy, just fierce about it. Well, and you're reminding me of that, so thank you, because I'm about to start going on

tour again. I mean, you know, starting to play shows, and you're right, if I'm exhausted from the rest of the day, like it definitely emotionally drained. Like any of those things, it definitely plays into well, you have to the problem. One of the things is when you've done all that stuff, you have to shift your state before you can get into flow. You have to kick your brain into alpha. So like a focus meditation along walk

in was a little nap. That's a meal, right, So that that really is your best is your best friend if you can shift state a little bit, So that really is the key, the first key to just starting to shift into flow. It's not in all situations, but you're talking about a particular situation, which is you've had a crazy day and then you have to actually drop into flow to perform and do your job late at night. Then like state shifting is pretty helpful on it because

you need some kind of a reset. Interesting, this is all fascinating stuff to me. I feel like I get go on and on and on. One last question, what do you think of the biggest misconceptions people have around their potential? That's a great question. I always say that after thirty years of studying this stuff, there's like just a couple of big lessons. One is we are all capable of so much more than we know. And what I literally mean by that is human potentialism will, especially

to ourselves, and it's invisible for two specific reasons. We only figure out what we're capable of by pushing on our skills to the utmost again and again and again. And that is makes the capability and emergent property. You have no idea like, you've got to level up your skills and that in your and you'll discover, oh wow, a little better or a little worse. And then right, it emerges out from that, but it goes even farther than that. This is not my research, but it's overwhelmingly clear.

There's a bunch of science that says you will not know what you're gonna like or what you're gonna be good at until after you try it and start getting better at it, even if you're talking about very adjacent skills. So let's say I don't know if it's true or not. Let's say you've never sung an opera before. Okay, that's an adjacent skill, right, You sing a lot but you've never sung opera? If as at Land can you? Can you sing opera? Will you like it? Do? The research

shows that you can't answer the question. I go to Lebron James and say, Lebron, let's say he's never played Batman, Lebron, do you think you're gonna like Badman and be any good? The research is he can't even answer the question. You're talking about something that's like right next door to what you do, and you don't know if you're going to be good at it or if you're gonna like it until after this that even potential is literally invisible in that way, and you're really all gable more more more

than I know. Yeah, I've got out of my way to meet the most extraordinary people who have lived over the past fifty years. That's what I basically did for a living, and I got to study them right, And nobody starts out extraordinary. Everybody starts out ordinary, right, you just become extraordinary. That's it's the same for everybody. I always say. The funniest thing about pick performance, it's really difficult to understand. Is it hard? Work works? Yes, it

does right like nobody. But it's the one thing you want, like you know, when you read the R Been Possible and you look at like you get to the end, you're like, Okay, there's six things to do every day, and there's about seven things today every weekend. That's what peak performances, right once you do the on boarding procedures, like biologically you got do these six things. You gotta do these seven things. But it's really all works that

compound interest. It's not people. Well, occasionally at stepped up after I give a speech and say things like, what are the three things I can do Monday morning? And my answer is always if you're asking that question, you're not serious about this work. It's not three. Yeah, I can give you three things to do Monday morning, but that's not the point. The point is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday,

Sunday repeat. And where it gets really interesting and really fun is two years in and three years in and five years in. I mean, yes, you'll get rewards three months in and six months and what, But it gets cool after long periods of time the final verse and then I'll shut up on this. But I always like to point this out to be because people forget, we

never trust our own history. I've been asking for I've been asking people to tell me about the thing that happened that you did that really like wants you the college your proudest of and that when it was done changed everything afterwards. You learned so much along the way that everything performance changed forever. I have never in twenty five years of asking the question or somebody said, dude, there was this time I was walking across the bus station.

I looked down, there's a lottery ticket, and my life there. It's always like, no, man, I lost my arm in a car crash and my father died and I had just support the kids and go to night school. And it took me seventeen years to get my degree. And now I'm Oprah's proctologists and look at me. I love Yeah. I mean, it's it's the grit. It's the it's the day in and day out and the grit of it all. I mean I think that for me, I know how

gritty I am. I know how much I just personally have gone through and survived and how I've come out the other side, and how I'm thriving in this part of my life and I've accomplished as a child and how I don't feel like that's even remotely close to

what I can. And it's interesting that for me, grit has always been putting my head down and getting in there and doing the thing, doing the work, and daily chasing that high of getting better or accomplishing something little things on the daily especial mastery leads to flow is our favorite high. We like it more than all the other intrinsic motivators. We will take flow over sex and drugs.

It's the most addictive state on earth, and when it's coupled to mastery, the most difficult thing about So I always say that the performers know something that everybody else doesn't know, which is always crawl, walk round. There's no shortcut, right, Like, that's what performers know. Most people show up in a situation they're like, dude, I don't I don't crawl and I don't want to walk. I'm going to figure out

how to start jogging. And you meet performers. And one of the things that people always says, how like you look so far ahead, how you get so And one of the reasons is they don't dick around at the front end. They're like, I know I'm gonna suck. I'm gonna suck. I'm gonna suck in one day, I'll be better. And they just started do it and like it doesn't right, So there's there's a lot of time saved on that one.

I think, just sort of accepting that that's just going to be the experience of embrace the But it's also that's that's the front end. What the other half of it is. Experts always know that the ultimate danger is the addictiveness of progression. That right, Like, it's why athletes get hurt, it's why burnout happens. It's like, right, it's

super that's the most addictive thing. And if things get really wayward when you're chasing progression, like people make bad decisions for sex, and they make bad decisions you know, over drugs sometimes, but man, I have made some really bad decisions in the name of progression. That's crazy. I mean, it's very true. I can I totally end stand that

from my perspective. Flow is so interesting. Thank you for sharing the bits and pieces that we discussed here, and I know there's so much to discuss, but I just want to pivot into one thing because I always asked my guests about music, and I know you said you love music, so yeah, so I have to tell you you're an awful person. You're terrible, because I heard that you were going to ask me this question. So yeah, so mind you. I have now spent a month on

your goddamn question, you mean, woman, a month. I got categories, I've got lists, i got vector diagrams. I love you. Okay, You're awful and here, so there's there's only this is the only way I could do it. I have chosen. I had to choose like my favorite song inside categories of music, and I've not allowed myself to choose covers. Okay, okay, So those are the caveats, and I've given you a month of my freaking life to get this answer to you. So no particular order because I can't pick an order.

But we'll start with Tom Wade's Cold Cold Ground, Cold Cold Ground by Tom Waits in The Cold Cold Ground, Ground Ground Ground Rise against re Education through Labor Time, and that's the punk category. I'm telling you. I'm a huge punk rock interesting this Corrosion by the Sisters of Mercy and the Light Gos category. I'm an old god as well, so there's a god category in hip hop.

It was until I collapsed by eminem and then you'll never say that I'm not killing them because when I'm not, and I'm gonna stop kidding no me, no, I'm not pop and I'm just not deminem subliminal thoughts. When I'm gonna stop spending the women a point went spinning in Hoppin, I'm a trendling shot the Penicilly could not get sailing to stop a facility too. And then finally the last one was fake Plastic Trees by u Um Radiohead fud wanted We'll find You. I have left out both metal

and reggae, which are two enormous categories of music for me. Um, I love you for doing that. I did my first Holy five and mind Go from Emotions. I tried that as a category I did. I just crazy by doing love song. I was like, okay, can we can do best love song, best time anger song, best heroic resignation. Yeah. I tried that. Brains work very similarly in some ways because you have to do categories. I love it. Oh my god, that's funny. Well, thank you for spending a

month on that. I appreciate it. I hate you. I'll take that as a compliment. Thank you so much. I really do appreciate it. Yeah, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. And that brings us to the end of this episode of Holy Human. I hope you found this conversation and Stephen as fascinating as I did. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments wherever you're listening, and share this with anyone who could use a little more full and productivity in their lives too.

On our next Holy Human, I'll be joined by internationally acclaimed expert Bethany Webster for insight into healing the mother wound. She is quite amazing and this conversation was deep, so I'm just warning you now trigger warnings everywhere, but it's

so good. Everyone has to listen to this episode. She believes that the mother wound is something that we have all inherited to varying degrees, and she'll join me to discuss why this is a core wound and how healing it helps us grow and emerge as our full selves. And Mom, if you're listening, you might not want to listen to this episode, or you might because we all have mother wounds and they've all been passed down from

one generation to the next. So I think this is probably some of the most important work we will ever do and one of the most important episodes that you'll ever listen to. So join us next week. So join us next week on the next Holy Human. Holy Human with me Leanne Rhymes is a production of I Heart Radio. You'll find Holy Human with Lianne Rhymes on the I Heart app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get the podcasts that matter most to you.