Flow and Mastery - Part 1: Charts!

by Mike

This article will assume you've read both Flow and Mastery. The two books are complimentary and we'll examine how to view them, in this case how the Path of Mastery fits in to flow and the optimal experience. Or more properly, how someone on the Path of Mastery can take advantage of Flow. Specifically now we'll look at the three types of people who never get on the Path of Mastery and then the Master, see where they go wrong and how one can use the concept of flow to stay on the Path.

Click on the pics for larger.

The Flow Chart

Figure 1: The Flow Chart

Figure 1 is the standard Flow...chart. The gist of it is that if your skills match the challenges presented to them, you can achieve flow. Note that the flow channel is a channel and not a line - this means that at any given skill level, you can take on a variety of challenges while still being able to attain flow and also, any given challenge will allow for a variety of skill levels to attempt it while still being in flow. If you have some spare time, think about why it is - it's pretty fascinating.

As the level of the challenges you face gets higher relative to your skill, you will eventually find yourself outside of the flow channel and experiencing anxiety. Boredom works in the opposite fashion - it occurs when your skill is greater than the challenge presented to it.

To stay in the flow channel then, one must increase the challenge in proportion to their skill. This of course assumes that you're engaging in an activity that can provide flow in the first place.

Simple enough, right? Note that time is not represented on these charts. Time is necessary in that it takes time in order to learn new skills and complete challenging tasks that will allow you to learn, but your skills and challenges and progress are largely independent of time. It's also largely irrelevant, at least for this discussion. It will become important later when we discuss the Power Law and how to apply it to your training.

As an example, I'm sure you've had the experience of training something over and over and noticing an improvement, however slight over the course of a couple weeks. Doing better at that task moves you to the right of the chart and allows you to take on more difficult challenges, which allows you to move up on the chart. Let's say that your practice lets you move one "skill unit" to the right. It took you a couple weeks to get there.

I'm sure you've also had one of those revelatory moments where all of the sudden something "clicked" and you could immediately incorporate that into your game. Maybe you took a seminar and saw the instructor move a certain way, maybe you were watching a fight and you noticed the practical application of something you knew in theory but could never make it work in practice, or maybe what your coach had been telling you all these years finally sunk in. Regardless, you incorporated that into your game and it worked. You moved up a "skill unit" and it only took you a couple seconds.

Of course, as your skill increases, it's entirely likely that before too long you'll hit a point of diminishing returns and and up on what Leonard called the plateau. How you deal with that separates the following three types of people from the Master.

Figure 2: The Dabbler

The Dabbler, our friend who is enthusiastic when he starts something but drops it when he gets outside the flow channel is pretty easy to understand. Jumping in and increasing their skill rapidly, but not increasing their challenge, they get bored and quit. Alternately, they will get so far in that they take on challenging tasks that their skills can't handle. They then get frustrated and quit.

They'll then find some other activity and continue the pattern. I'm sure you've seen these people around the gym. The worst cases tell you they are having a lot of fun but can't come in more than once or twice a week because Monday is kickboxing, Tuesday is motorcross, Wednesday is cooking, Thursday is a TV show, Friday is networking dinner, etc. For guys that sorta stick around, you'll find that they've been training for years, hopping between schools whenever they get promoted, or are about to get promoted, get frustrated or bored and find a new gym to continue. In this, they are much like the Hacker.

The Dabbler has enthusiasm but not drive. He is missing the Master Key of Practice.

Figure 3: The Obsessive

The Obsessive is particularly dangerous to himself and possibly others, depending on where you find them. For purposes of our discussion, they're the type of guy that starts out, gets good pretty fast, but hits a plateau or finds that he's progressed beyond his class level/training partners but hasn't been moved up yet. So, he compensates by either trying to sneak his way into the advanced classes, starting a powerlifting routine before and maybe even after class, starts doing yoga, etc.

Sooner or later, you see him using any excuse necessary to get the advanced guys in the ring for some full contact sparring and shortly thereafter he ends up injured, burnt out or not welcome because he pissed everyone off.

The obsessive has no understanding of feedback and/or an inability to accurately judge his own skills. They also tend to be control freaks and unable to surrender themselves to their practice (Leonard's 3rd Master Key).

Figure 4: The Hacker

The Hacker is our buddy who spends his time reinventing the wheel (and reinventing again, and again) rather than progressing. In effect, he has traded novelty for complexity. This is not to say that he is unskilled, but that he's topped out with how far he's going to push himself. In flow terms, we could say that the hacker moves horizontally through the flow channel - when he starts to hit the upper bound, instead of moving towards increasing his skill to meet the challenge, he instead probably takes a step back down to a less-challenging (but still at the edge of the flow channel) position where he just figures out another way to do whatever it is he's been doing.

While doing this, it's likely his skill will increase, but if he hits the lower bound of the flow channel, he'll just figure out another way to keep performing the same task in a different manner rather than increasing the challenge of the task.

Thus it's possible that the hacker will increase his skill, but that's rather accidental and much slower than it would otherwise be if he were working towards increasingly difficult goals - the biggest failure of the hacker is improper goal setting. He doesn't understand Master Key 5 - The Edge.

As an aside, the hacker is unfortunately named - Leonard means it in the sense of a tinkerer. To him, the hacker just wants to "hack around with fellow hackers" (Leonard, 23). This is different than what most of us think of as hackers, those who understand the limitations of a tool and either use it in unintended ways or modify the tool in question to improve it's effectiveness.

Figure 5: The Master

The Master succeeds where the other three fail by combining their positive traits, mitigating their flaws and adding a couple things in besides.

How does the Master use the Five Master Keys to stay within the flow channel?

1. Instruction - aka. feedback. Whether the Master has an instructor or some detailed metrics, they will know when it's time to ease up and when it's time to work harder. The Obsessive either lacks or ignores their feedback.
   
   
2. Practice - Unlike the Dabbler who likes the thought of doing something more than they like the practice or the Hacker who mistakes busywork for progress, the Master enjoys (in the Flow sense of enjoyment leading to greater complexity) practice and understands its necessity in increasing skill.
   
   
3. Surrender - Csikszentmihalyi describes a loss of self-consciousness as being one of the seven characteristics of a flow activity, but Leonard uses it in more of a meta-sense. Here, we see the Master say, "I'm going to do this thing...it requires certain thing and I'm going to let it tell me what I need to do to get better."
   
   
4. Intentionality - Leonard discusses this in terms of visualization and aligning what some call the "inner game" with the outer.
   
   
5. The Edge - Really, being at the edges of the flow channel. Sometimes you will need to set more complex goals and hang out at the upper bound to give yourself something to work towards, but you risk anxiety. Sometimes you need to increase your skills before you take on the harder challenges and risk boredom at the lower bound. The Master knows that he will have to

To be sure, not everyone can be in the flow channel all the time. Different factors will result in ending up anxious or bored, but the Master will stick with their practice to ride these out and get back on the Path of Mastery.

Review: Flow The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

One-Liner: If they taught a class on "life," this would be required reading.

Overview:

Flow discusses what an "optimal experience" (aka "flow state" or "being in flow") is, how to know when you're in one and how to figure out how to get there again (and again, and again). The flow state is, among other things, where time seems to slow down and your entire focus is on the task at hand and everything seems to "just work."This flow state is hopefully familiar to everyone, but strangely, it can pop up in unfamiliar places and getting there is somewhat counter-intuitive, especially if you've been hanging out with crystal dolphin types who tell you to "just be" and etc.

There are a couple surprises in this book - one of which is that flow states occur in some strange places - Mihaly's rather extensive research found that people more often entered a flow state at work than at home and left to their own devices. By the same token, the research shows that flow states are available in many places you might not expect and as a side effect, examining your own life to figure out where you regularly enter them is a fascinating exercise.*

So, how does one get to the flow state? The short version is that you get to it when you are working on a task whose difficulty matches your skill level (and some additional requirements are met). Czikeszentmihalyi notes that what constitutes the flow state is going to be different form person to person and different even depending on what activities you're performing. As your skill increases, you will need to increase the difficulty of the tasks to remain in the "flow channel" or else you risk boredom. Conversely, if you take on tasks that are greater than your skill level, you may find yourself in anxiety territory.

Given that flow is highly dependent on the situation, the book certainly isn't (and can't be) a "how to" in the sense that it offers instruction on how to achieve the state, but it will tell you how to structure your activities to maximize your ability to experience the flow state. And structure is very important - Mihaly describes the necessity of ordering your experience to engage in activities that are likely to promote the flow state - this takes planning. Fortunately, it's fairly simple and many examples of how other people enter the flow state will show you that there are many opportunities for you to find and establish flow each day and probably without changing your routines too much.

The ultimate aim of flow is to increase complexity, both of the task's difficulty and your skill. If you're doing it right, you should end up with a greater appreciation of what you're doing which should increase your enjoyment of the activity. In fact, enjoyment comes into play as a flow term, being what you get when you accomplish something and manage to go "beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected...." On one hand, you've created complexity now that you need to increase the difficulty level, but on the other hand, you benefit because you have a more...complex (for lack of a better word) understanding of whatever it is you choose to do.

Flow is an extremely powerful idea and we'll discuss it in the context of martial arts in some future articles. This book works compliments Mastery and using both together should really give you a good sense of how to approach martial arts in terms of getting the most out of them.

The Good:

• Excellent description of what the flow state is and the different areas in your life where it can be applied - not just to big, important events, but also to more mundane tasks.
  
  
• Rather than being a "how to" book, Flow is composed of the findings of 25 years of research over tens of thousands of subjects. In effect, the results of what make people "happy" have been reverse-engineered from experience - thus, we know what works in practice, rather than theory.

The Bad:

• Someone will complain that this book doesn't offer a strict formula ("7 Ways to Be In Flow All The Time," etc.) despite Czikeszentmihalyi saying that such a formula is not only impossible but useless.
  
  
• The martial arts get are described in one section (shared with yoga) but the actual text ends up saying, "yeah, you can get into flow by doing martial arts."
  
  
• The Experience Sampling Method gets described several times throughout the book, but there is no copy of the form!

Recommendation:

Definitely read this one.

* For instance, I spend more time in flow as a percentage of time spent on the bags than I do doing mitt drills and more time in flow doing mitt drills than I do sparring. Though this might seem to be an exercise in nerdery, it's really given me a lot to think about and a lot of ideas on how to better structure my time. The big wildcard was thinking how much time I spend in flow while riding my bike to and from class.... compared to how much time I spend in flow in class.

Joint Mobility - pretty cool stuff

Joint mobility exercises are a little different than typical stretching. Steve Maxwell describes it thusly:

Mobility, or joint mobility, is the ability to move a limb through the full range of motion--with control. Mobility is based on voluntary movement while flexibility involves static holds and is often dependent upon gravity or passive forces.

Scott Sonnon has a very good set of videos on what he calls "Intu-Flow" up on YouTube where he describes the main exercises in the joint mobility program:



The first two videos discuss the ideas and philosophy behind the system (the actual exercises start in part three). There are a lot of exercises, so you might want to take notes.

I'm currently incorporating this into my own training as a "pre-warmup." It's certainly made a big difference getting all the little bits ready for training and also serves as a "checklist" to make sure everything's doing what it's supposed to be and cut down on the number of surprises you run into later in the session.

While the entire series of videos is fairly long, once you learn the movements, the actual sequence takes about fifteen minutes to work through. As mentioned before, it's time well spent.

A general note about buying equipment

For gloves, pads, etc., pay the extra few bucks and get leather.

There is of course good quality gear and bad quality gear that's made of leather, but in my experience, when offered a choice between vinyl and leather versions, the leather is superior. Vinyl rips, gets slippery, cracks, stretches out and the sewing sometimes comes loose. Leather takes stress much better and I suspect requires more powerful machinery to cut and stitch than vinyl, which implies a better manufacturing process. Leather deals with sweat much more gracefully. And when leather does fail, it's much less dangerous than having bits of vinyl with whatever backing they use sticking out like little knives.

As the old saying goes, "you only need to pay for quality once...."

Ringside IMF training Gloves

These things were so bad, they
took away the picture!

Ringside IMF Tech Training Gloves

One-Liner: Crap, crap, crap.

Overview:

My all-time favorite pair of sparring gloves was the Ringside International Gloves. They fit perfectly right out of the box, the fist was curved so you'd land with the knuckles and the additional padding on the back of the glove saved me from a few kicks I probably couldn't have withstood otherwise.

But, after holding on to those gloves until they started to wear down, I needed a new pair and took a look at the Ringside IMF tech gloves. Supposedly the next generation tech with one piece of foam rather than multiple layers, they would experience less wear and provide you with better protection than traditional gloves, these gloves turned out to be pretty awful from the get go.

First off, the silkscreened logos and etc. on the gloves started flaking off after a couple uses. Whenever I noticed another part of the gloves flaking off, I had to stop and rip off that lettering to keep from potentially throwing some cast-off branding into someone's eye.

Next, the one-piece foam sounds like a good idea until you realize that it's positioned so that it puts an odd bulge into the glove. Which ends up being at a place you don't necessarily want to punch with - imagine that bulge between the knuckles you'd normally punch with and the next set towards your fingers. Instead of punching with your knuckles, you end up punching with the "flat" of your fist. Terrible mechanics come out of that.

The one-piece foam also had two other disadvantages, one that I suspect in inherent in the design and the other was bad luck: these gloves are very difficult to make a fist in. Even after dozens of rounds of sparring in these, they didn't loosen up. As one gets tired, one may start to throw not-entirely-closed-fist strikes which causes a number of problems in and of itself.

This seemed to be another manufacturing defect, but one I didn't discover until long after I'd tossed them in my bag and decided to go back to the International gloves - the thumbs are in a really bad position - when making a fist, the thumbs tend to rest on top of the first knuckle of your pointer finger, much higher than you would ever want to throw. To compensate for this, there's a lot of padding on top of the thumbs, which makes it even more difficult to try to move around.

Now, I'll admit that the design of boxing gloves in general makes it difficult to make a 100% perfect fist, but in every other pair I've tried, I was at least able to pull my thumbs down so I don't jam them while punching. The solution to not being able to get your gloves in the right position with the IMF gloves seems to be "hardening" them. Which is not ideal, but workable.

Unless, the gloves are mis-sewn and the top of your thumb sticks out to get jammed every time you throw a punch - whether you land on the weird padding or on your thumb. The weird way the thumb is attached the strange way you end up holding your fist causes you to crunch your fist together when you land a shot. I got so fed up with that, that I finally just cut the webbing (using the Kershaw Ken Onion Leek, it was kind of scary how well the thing cut through the leather), so while the thumb is still not where I'd want it to be, I can actually punch with them again.

But, one shouldn't have to modify their gear to get it to work properly. While I was examining the gloves to figure out what was going on, I realized that the left thumb was sewn in differently than the right thumb. Another manufacturing defect.

Apropos of nothing, I had a freak occurrence with this pair. I used a parry-by-opposition to defend a fouette tet from a man who I'm pretty sure has concrete blocks hidden in his Savate shoes and however I blocked the kick, he literally knocked the padding off-kilter inside the glove. I had to stop, take the gloves off and spend a couple minutes to get the padding back into a position where I could use the glove to get through the rest of the seminar and then spend several more minutes afterward to get it back in place. I'd be willing to write it off as a freak occurrence if it wasn't for all the other oddities with these gloves.

The Good:

• They are nicely padded, but that might also just be because these gloves make it difficult to make a proper fist, so you have a built-in crumple zone in your punches.

The Bad:

• As mentioned above, there seem to have been at least two manufacturing errors in my glove - poor quality control is inexcusable, especially for how much these things cost.
  
• The general design of the gloves makes hitting with your knuckles and making a fist difficult. The weird position of the thumb is also disconcerting.

Recommendation:

These gloves get one jammed thumb down and one regular thumb down and I consider never ordering Ringside gloves again. What happened to the International gloves? I'd write a glowing review of those, but they don't make them anymore....

26 Grip breaks - Nearly an hour of video [Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu]

Jason Scully of the Grapplers Guide [sic] posted a very interesting and thorough set of videos about detailing methods for breaking grips in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

He's got grips from standing, the closed and open guards; lapel, sleeve and pants. 26 grips and breaks in all. He moves fast, but provides good detail and clear explanation.

The videos are over at Grapplers Guide.