There are five necessary ingredients to achieve an optimum flow state
There are five necessary ingredients to achieve an optimum flow state. Today I want to tell you what they are. Let's cure that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our lung changes? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Roman welcome back to the Roman cycling podcast. It's a while since I don't want my wild weird singing entries so it's all you know what why not it's the internet and I can do whatever the fuck I want so here you go. Roman today I want to talk to you about focus or flow because when we can get into this state we can achieve so much more in terms of training effect we can achieve so much more in terms of productivity quality of time spent with other people. And ultimately, there's a story I'm going to reference later that shows that people who get into flow achieve much higher scores in life satisfaction, meaning and happiness. And so since the mantra it is podcast is how do we achieve health, happiness, and longevity? I was like, well, I can't ignore these studies. This is some pretty fundamental building blocks for what we're trying to do. So before I jump into all that I want to remind you about Patreon. Patreon's how we fund the podcast guys. Patreon is how the show keeps rolling forward. If you haven't subscribed already, you're a free loader. I'm sort of getting sort of half-kinned. If you can afford it, please do head on over to patreon.com. It's the price of a beer once a month if you can afford it. If you can't, your other listeners, they've got your back under carry and yet for now and they're kindly digging into their pocket to keep the podcast going, to keep the podcast moving day after day, week after week. So you can head on over to patreon.com to make a small donation, the price of a beer, once a month, keeps the podcast going. In return, you're getting the podcast every day, plus you're getting a members only secret podcast where I give you it's sort of my inside scoop and I tell you unfiltered what I think about what brands are approaching me that I'm turning down, how I'm using stuff like ketones at the moment, protocols I'm using that I can't disclose because it's been non-disclosure agreements that are limited in scope and I can't broadcast them to open airwaves. But over there there's some really cool stuff going. So patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch. But today I want to talk about the idea of focus or flow. The idea of flow or peak performance. Like I'm supposed to start out what is this because if it's not a concept you're familiar with, you're probably like, well, I don't really care about this podcast. But this is something you really need to understand. And I'm going to show you how to cultivate this flow state. And when I'm going to hit you with some stats later on, and as a great philosopher, Homer Simpson once said, statistics can prove anything. 96% of people notice. So with Homer in mind, a flow state is it's an optimum state of consciousness. So you're so focused on what you're doing that everything else vanishes. It occurs when the brain, it switches off all unnecessary processes. So we stop thinking about anything that's not relevant to the task we're focused on right now. And we really narrow that focus. I think of an analogy, no idea how it is popped into my head, but I think of a laser beam. And when the laser beam are magnifying glass, remember you used to burn ants when you were a kid or magnifying glass or you tried to burn them but they were too fast. And you could get the magnifying thing super concentrated.
Could set fire to your piece of paper with the magnifying glass, but…
You could set fire to your piece of paper with the magnifying glass, but if you move the magnifying glass further away, the rays were kind of dispersed. I think about focus like that. If you can focus it in on wanting, you can set fire to that piece of paper. But when it's out and it's dispersed, it's now good. Nothing's catching fire, and that's not a good situation. So if you think about times you've achieved this state of focus, think about times you've achieved this state of flow. For me, immediately I focus back to track cycling events of the tandem, maybe because it's the last competitive cycling I've done, but it's just totally focused on delivering the effort. I know exactly what I have to do on lap one, on lap two, on lap three, I know the pacing, I know the technique, I know the cornering, I know how to deliver my effort, and absolutely nothing external to that effort matters. Now, there's some things that are just toxic to this idea of focus, and that's task switching, and the biggest culprit for that is the mobile phone. And one small hack that I'm using at the moment to prevent the mobile phone from distracting me when I'm reading, distracting me from working. I've got a little, it's like a Tupperware container with a time lock on it. And I just pop my phone into it, set it for two tree errors, however long I wanna read for a work for, and it won't let me get my phone out for that two tree error period. Pick it up on Amazon and I can't tell you what it's done to my productivity, true to roof. But the idea of flow isn't something that we've just discovered. It's not some sort of hippie new age, zoom, sort of discovery or creation. This has been known about for a long time. Philosophy versus Fireback is Nietzsche, or psychologists back to even Maslow. You remember Maslow from the hierarchy he needs. They all spoke of flow in their works and they all understood the importance of it. And if you look across the high achievers, from actors to playwrights, to roiters, to athletes. You think about Bennett, sprinting. That's a state of flow, where nothing else matters. Bennett's not thinking about his mobile phone bill or his credit cards or a text message he should have replied to in that moment where he's delivering the sprint. That's flow. And when we get ourselves into that, the benefits are astounding. Listen to some of these. So a study show that motivation and productivity can increase up to 500% when you're in flow. that's absolutely insane. Other studies have shown creativity up to 700% increase. Another marksman were trained up to expert level in 50% less time when they were able to achieve this flow standard. People scoring higher on the flow stage they scored the highest on life satisfaction meaning and happiness in a Swedish study. So the big question now if you're understood to understand the importance of flow and how it can impact everything from relationships to sport to work to our productivity and our personal pursuits. How do we drive focus in the present moment? Well it's actually pretty easy. There's a five-step process that's pretty much agreed upon by philosophers and psychologists alike. You need to have risk, novelty, complexity, unpredictability and pattern recognition like linking ideas together. So you can use these concepts. I'll just want you to again, it's risk, novelty, complexity, unpredictability or pattern recognition. That's our five-step process. So when I understood this, we started building days into our coaching framework, which I talked about earlier in the week, that coaching or training isn't the totality of cycling. Like if you're just jumping on the bike and you're following this with the plan, a trainer road plan or you're working under a couch and you're wondering why you're not getting the outcome. Well, it's because you're only doing one piece of the framework.
Framework to get your desired cycling results, it's like a recipe and…
The framework to get your desired cycling results, it's like a recipe and you're only breaking eggs to make your quiche. You need the entire framework. You need training on the bike, training off the bike, your strength and conditioning, your stretching, you need your nutrition protocol, you need your recovery protocols and you need your biohacks to reduce the stress or mitigate the effect of all the other stuff. these pieces of the framework training alone isn't going to get you there. But if we can harness this idea of peak focus or flow into our training and that's what we try and do. We try and build in these concepts like novelty, complexity, unpredictability and pattern recognition. We try to subtly build these into training plans so you can unknown to yourself achieve peak flow during training sessions. And this is going to be a big focus at a company going forward when we in the next couple of months you're going to see we're announcing this new blueprint system and this idea of focus and flow is going to be at the heart of it. But you can tap into this in any aspect of your life. Like if you have work to do instead of every single day, just go on, you know, if you're work from home instead of every single day, just sitting down at your desk to do complex tasks, use the idea of novelty to spark flow. So take that work, move to the local coffee shop complete the same work in the local coffee shop and you can tap into this idea of flow. It's brilliant so you take those five steps risk, novelty, complexity, unpredictability or passion recognition and figure out how to blend them or merge them into your daily pursuits and watch yourself hit that flow or peak state. Roman this is a concept that's really work playing around with but with great power comes great responsibility so just between me and you don't use it for evil. Roadman, thank you and I'm gonna chat you again on Monday. Hey everybody, it's Anthony again. Really quick, I want to invite you to join arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the Roadman community. It's a challenge. It's a challenge called a 14-day Kickstarter challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is going to be the catalyst for making you faster and making you the leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guesswork out of everything. It's 14 days of training plans regardless of what your level is. There's a master's beginner advanced, there's meal plans, shopping list and even a video course holding your hand and talking you through at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmansoycling.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the bio that roadmansoycling.com slash 14 day. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you Hey everybody, it's Anthony again. Really quick, I want to invite you to join, arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the roadman community. It's a challenge. It's a challenge called a 14 day Kickstarter challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is going to be the catalyst for making you faster and making you the leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guess walk out of everything. It's 14 days, training plans regardless of what your level is. There's Masters, Beginner, Advanced, there's Mail Plans, Shopping List and even a video course holding your hand and talking you true at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmansoycling.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the that's roadmancycling.com slash 14 day