Side Mirror: Flow, purpose and growing people.

In this episode I share some concepts and experiences that have been absolutely huge to me during the last 10 years or so.  

I talk about the concepts of flow and purpose and give you an example of how a skilful leader can use them to foster engagement and grow people. 

I hope that you find some useful points to reflect on that can help you with your own journey or that of those you lead parent and mentor. 

I’d love to hear what resonates with you. 

This episode of CAREER-VIEW MIRROR is brought to you by Aquilae. 

Mobility businesses are all about people, processes and technology. We leverage our Aquilae Academy for people development and Aquilae Consulting for those wider business topics. 

If you're looking for some help with people or business topics and you like the idea of having some additional very experienced, resources who can work flexibly alongside you. Please get in touch with me for a conversation. You can email me directly at andy@aquilae.co.uk 

For details of our forthcoming guests follow us on Instagram @careerviewmirror 

Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk 

Episode recorded on 14 January, 2023 

Transcript

Ed Eppley: 0:00

I am sitting in lovely Siesta Key Florida.

Sherene Redelinghuys: 0:03

I'm coming from Bangkok in Thailand,

Daniel van Treeck: 0:05

Prague in the Czech Republic,

Osman Abdelmoneim: 0:07

Cairo in Egypt,

Holger Drott: 0:08

Auckland, New Zealand,

Shannon Faulkner: 0:09

London, England.

Andy Follows: 0:10

Welcome to Career-view Mirror, the automotive podcast that goes behind the scenes with key players in the industry. Looking back over their careers so far, sharing insights to help you with your own journey. I'm your host, Andy Follows Hello, listeners, and welcome to this Side Mirror episode of Career-view Mirror. If you're a regular listener, thank you. You'll be aware that most of our episodes feature interviews with people in the automotive industry who kindly share their life and career journeys with us. We celebrate their careers, listen to their stories and learn from their experiences. From time to time, we also publish these Side Mirror episodes, which are usually an opportunity for me to share some content with you related to careers or developing ourselves or people we lead parent or mentor that I hope you'll find valuable. In this episode I'm going to share some concepts and experiences that have been absolutely huge to me during the last 10 years or so. I'm going to talk to you about the concepts of flow and purpose and give you an example of how a skilful leader can use them to foster engagement and grow people. Last summer we hired a villa in the Spanish island of Menorca, and spent a week there with our grown up kids and their partners. One day in the middle of the holiday, I sat down by the pool in the shade with my journal and started writing. I broke off for occasional chats with my family, stopped for a little while to have lunch and when I finally felt that I'd done enough writing for the day, I noticed that I passed five hours, very happily indeed. I felt a little tired, but content and fulfilled. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, was a Hungarian-American psychologist who recognised and named the psychological concept of flow. Flow is a highly focused mental state, that unleashes productivity. I really hope that you're familiar with it yourself, because it's absolutely wonderful. If you're not or you want to experience it more, doing some work to identify your strengths with a tool like the Clifton 34 assessment can really help. And I'll go into that in more detail another time. When you're in a state of flow, you might not be aware of it at the time, because you'll be so focused on whatever it is you're doing, you'll most likely lose track of time. You'll emerge from the flow state and realise that a few hours have gone by when it felt like a lot less time. You may feel tired, but in a happy, contented way. And once you've had a break, you'll be more than happy to throw yourself into some more of the same activity. Because you find that activity so absorbing and can engage deeply with it, your levels of input, the time you spend doing it, will be high, and as a result, your output will be high. That's why it's a state that unleashes productivity. If you spend lots of time doing it repeatedly, chances are high that you'll become good at whatever it is and the quality of your output will improve too. Because you find it engaging and rewarding, you'll spend time learning about it, whether it's writing, painting, fixing engines, woodworking, baking bread, coding, gardening, creating business models in Excel, bodybuilding, or whatever activity it happens to be that opens the door to this wonderful state for you. You're most likely to maintain a state of flow when the level of challenge that you're undertaking aligns appropriately with your capability. If the challenge is too great, you'll be overwhelmed. And if your capability exceeds the level of challenge by too high a margin, there's a risk you'll be bored. So tco maintain a state of flow, the task needs to be hard enough to keep you engaged, but not so hard that it defeats you. Capability is one of the four fundamental drivers of Fulfilling Performance. Think of the four fundamentals like the four legs of a chair, you need them all to be balanced. I'm on a mission to enable Fulfilling Performance, and I explain what that means, and how to apply it in Episodes 60 to 62. Another of the fundamental drivers of Fulfilling Performance is purpose. Purpose is the answer to the question why or what for? Whether that's why are we having this meeting? Or why do I exist? What have I been put on this earth for? Whether or not they're a religious person or a spiritual person? I think you'll agree that everyone benefits from having a greater sense of what they're here for on this planet or in that meeting. Finding our personal purpose is hard. It can take a good deal of self awareness and time invested in reflection. One approach we can take when seeking our purpose is to view being in the state of flow as an indicator or clue we are acting in line with our purpose. For example, you might say, I can't yet put my purpose into words, but I do know that I often experience being in flow when I'm engaged in the following activities... That combination of activities will be unique to you. If you can find a way to harness some or all of that unique combination to make your own contribution, I don't think you'll be far from living your purpose. So how does this relate to leveraging purpose and flow to lead and grow people? In previous episodes, I mentioned my journey with the Seven Habits, and I mentioned meeting Ed Eppley, who was my guest for episode 50. At some point along the way, after seeing it in action, the penny dropped that I wanted to be a trusted adviser to CEOs and senior leaders and help them develop cohesive teams of purpose driven individuals. This evolved into me recognising my mission is to enable Fulfilling Performance for individuals, teams and organisations. Whether I'm meeting with leaders to understand their challenges, coaching and mentoring individuals, designing programmes, creating content, facilitating leadership development sessions, writing up and sharing thoughts to help others on their journey, whatever it is, when I'm engaged in work related to that mission, I often experience the state of flow, and feel that I'm acting in line with my purpose. But that didn't happen overnight. And I was fortunate to have Ed Eppley and my then boss now mentor, Alan Crookes, in my corner, helping me to develop in the right direction. I want to share one example of how this played out so you might reflect on it and consider how to apply it with those you lead, parent or mentor. If you've listened to Episode 98, you'll know about my relationship with the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and the role that had in helping me to find my mission and purpose. This time, I want to explain the role that Alan played as a leader and mentor to me whilst I was on that journey. As you know, if you listen to the episode, I completed the Seven Habits Signature programme, I completed the facilitators programme and I delivered my first three day programme in Melbourne, Australia clutching my iPad, with all the facilitators notes very tightly. With a few more sessions under my belt, I gradually put down the iPad added my own stories and lessons and became more competent and comfortable at delivering the programme. I was loving what I was doing and I was experiencing a state of flow when I was in the room with the participants helping them to experience the insights that I'd found so valuable from practising the Seven Habits. My capability was increasing with repeated practice. I said earlier that to maintain flow, you need to align the level of challenge with your capability. Alan inherently understood this. And in my case, he was a master of continually raising the bar without overdoing it, which might cause me to be overwhelmed. After I delivered the three day programme five or six times in Melbourne, he said to me, I've got another gig for you, I want you to run a Seven Habits session at the dealer conference. Instead of the usual 16 participants. This was a three hour slot in front of about 120 people from the BMW dealer network across Australia. There wouldn't be a facilitator guide for this, I'd have to work it out myself. I'd got comfortable delivering the signature programme and now I was feeling my stomach flip again, as I thought about this different challenge. I prepared like hell for it, as I had originally done for the first signature programme. My birthday was a couple of days before the event and I'd booked a days holiday. I spent it writing a script and rehearsing. The conference was held on Hamilton Island in the Whitsunday Islands, which is an idyllic holiday resort location. I can't say I was able to enjoy it. I was feeling decidedly out of my comfort zone. I called my wife Julia. And she said, this is exactly what you wanted and you're making it happen. I spent some time visualising me up there on stage, turning the event into a great success. And I tried to conjure up a feeling of me nailing it. I wrote in my diary about how great I'd be feeling after I pulled it off successfully. It went well. And my comfort zone now included talking to larger groups. Alan raised the bar again. He said, I've got you a gig in Tokyo. He was loving playing the role of my agent. Apparently the CEO of BMW Financial Services in Japan, Joe Hall, was keen to have me come over and roll out the Seven Habits to his team. I'd be back to groups of 16 but with a high proportion of Japanese participants and I had no idea whether I could pull this off in another culture. After Japan came Thailand, then India, Hong Kong and Korea. Between the Seven Habits gigs in Bangkok and Delhi came another variation to up the ante again. My friend and colleague Dr. Peter Dry and I had created our own Authentic Leadership programme from scratch. We started delivering it to the leadership and management teams in Australia. The additional challenge here came from the fact that we were delivering our own material and not leaning on the proven and highly polished material from Stephen Covey's organisation. It went down well, and Alan was keen that I take it to China to help the rapid development of our business there. I've talked before about how I delivered a half day taster session of Authentic Leadership in Beijing, on my way to Munich in 2014. In Munich, the bar was raised yet again when I was delivering a day long workshop, this time to the Asia Pacific CEOs. On this occasion, it was the seniority and experience level of the audience that created the new challenge. About three months after I delivered the last of the Seven Habits programmes in Seoul, I handed in my resignation. As Peter Dry put it, I was running out of runway. I had invested so much time over a period of years reflecting and even agonising about what I wanted to do with my life, what I was here for, and it was becoming increasingly clear to me that my future lay outside of the BMW Group. I'd done a lot of hard work to identify my strengths and those activities that caused me to experience flow. Critically, as well as thinking about it, I'd been prepared to take action and get out of my comfort zone, always moving in the direction of my strengths. In doing so I'd come a long way towards identifying my purpose. Alan had skillfully managed the level of challenge to keep me engaged. I'd have a success, he'd raised the bar. I'd be nervous again, and I'd lean into practising. I'd have another success and he'd raise the bar again, each time, my comfort zone grew a bit more. This started well before the Seven Habits example that I've shared here. He did this for the eight years that I was in his You been listening to Career-view Mirror with me, Andy region, until eventually I recognised that it was time for me to move on. There's more that happened after that, but you've been very patient in listening this far and so I'll stop the story here for now. I wanted to talk about the psychological concept of flow, and how wonderful it is to experience and exploit. I wanted to suggest how we can use knowledge of those activities that put us into a flow state to provide clues to our individual purpose. I wanted to point out how purpose is one of the four fundamentals of Fulfilling Performance, and what a powerful difference it can make to our lives when we identify our own purpose. I wanted to give you a practical example from my own experience of how Alan kept raising the bar with me, how he kept increasing the level of challenge, making me sweat without overwhelming me, keeping me engaged, not allowing me to get bored, pushing me out of my comfort zone and making sure that I was growing every year. I'll be forever grateful for his leadership as I am for his continued mentoring and friendship. I hope that you found some useful points to reflect on that can help you with your own journey, or that of those who lead parent and mentor. I'd love to hear your thoughts and what resonates with you. Thanks for listening. Follows. If you enjoy listening to our episode, please could you do me a huge favour and share them with someone you think will also appreciate them? Thank you.

Unknown: 13:34

No matter how hard you try, no matter how hard working you are, you're never going to be able to do it on your own. It's just not possible. You know, at the end of the day, you're steering your own destiny. So if it's not happening for you, and you're seeing what you want out there, then go out there and connect. Don't rely on others. You you have to do it yourself. You have to take on a trial. If you've got an idea if you've got a thought about something that might be successful. If you've got a passion to do something yourself. You just haven't quite got do it. Take a risk. Take a chance stick your neck out what's the worst that can happen? You fall down okay, you pick yourself up and you try again.