How to maintain a healthy flow in your career & life

Making a success of any career, business or project is dependant upon establishing and maintaining a healthy flow towards your goals. But sometimes when you’re in full flow, a brick wall may suddenly appear – without you quite understanding why that’s happened.

In this article, we provide some tips on:

how to recognise when and why you might be getting out of flow; and
how to regain your flow,

so that you can achieve what you want in life.

The connection between how you think and how you flow

When you’re in full flow, life and work feels easy, effortless and enjoyable. Conversations with others leave you in a positive mood, you learn and grow throughout your career and you don’t feel guilty about enjoying your free time or using it to pursue your life-long dreams.

But take away that healthy flow to life and things can start to feel hard, difficult and miserable. So let’s face it, the more that we’re all in good flow, the more we can all thrive.

Let’s pause a moment.

A pause for thought

When things feel difficult and you’re out of flow, do you ever stop to think about why that is and how you can overcome those difficulties and get back on the right track again?

Without doubt, the way that you think and how your life & work flow are all connected. Therefore, understanding what affects flow can help you to remove the obstacles which prevent you from achieving better health and success.

What affects flow?

There are several barriers that can affect your ability to create healthy flow in your life and career. By becoming aware of how they arise and influence you, steps can be taken to remove these barriers to your goals. You will also start to notice them more quickly if they begin to affect your flow in the future.

Let’s take a look at four areas that can affect your flow and how you can avoid them permanently blocking the path to your goals.

1. How fear affects flow

Understanding the impact of fear on flow is critical to maintaining a clear path to your goals. When you’re in flow, the path between you and your goal feels natural and easy:

*In flow – no obstacles between you and your goal*

But the minute that you become afraid or fearful of something, that fear creates an obstacle to reaching your goal and breaks your flow:

*Out of flow – fear gets in the way between you and your goal*

It gets worse. Once fear takes hold, it can start to surround both you and all of your goals:

*Fear* *starts to stand between you and all of your goals, whichever way you turn*

Symptoms of fear and overcoming them

To avoid fear from blocking your flow, it’s important to recognise that in the context of reaching your life, work or business goals, feeling doubtful, worrying and procrastinating over reaching a goal, or feeling inferior or self-consciousness about the product of what you might achieve, are all symptoms of fear.

Furthermore, it’s also important to recognise that these symptoms often arise from our exposure to, and how we process, other peoples’ negative attitudes, comments, actions or opinions. If you allow the negativity of others to create the symptoms that lead to fear and then allow that to build into any sort of habit, the more likely it is that you will stop yourself from reaching the goals you want to achieve.

Instead, it is healthier to acknowledge that other peoples’ negative and unhelpful attitudes, comments, actions and opinions are the result of how they think and not how you think. If you mirror someone else’s negative mindset, you will find it difficult to build flow back into your life and work because you will start to doubt yourself and put needless worry between you and your goals.

But if you acknowledge that negative and unhelpful words need to go down the drain with the rest of the used bath water, you will protect yourself from them and avoid them from creating symptoms that manifest themselves in unnecessary fear – and allow flow and success back into your life and work.

2. How distractions affect flow

Life can be full of distractions. Some are unavoidable, but there are many that you can control if you really want to.

Reaching life and career goals requires knowing what you want to achieve, planning how you are going to go about achieving it, persistence and some learning along the way. But what happens if you allow too many distractions into your life?

*Non-goal achieving distractions make you turn your back on your goals*

Whilst social media can be a useful way of keeping in touch with friends and work connections, the more that you use it in a way that doesn’t help you to reach your goals, the more likely it and other non-goal achieving distractions will prevent you from achieving what you want in life.

Are you distracting yourself from thinking?

The more daily distractions that you have, the harder it becomes to stay focused on the steps you need to take to reach your goals – until you get to the stage where achieving your goals feels impossible. But it is no coincidence that a synonym of ‘impossible’ is the word ‘unthought’. And if you allow yourself to be constantly distracted, that’s going to reduce the time you have each day to give careful thought to your career and life goals. Consequently, those distractions will also take away the flow you need in order to achieve them.

We all need the space to relax and spend time with friends & family, or enjoy some sport, a concert or our favourite TV programme, but by recognising how distractions can become unhelpful habits, it gives you the possibility of ensuring that life’s seemingly little distractions don’t overwhelm and restrict your ability to achieve what you want in life.

3. How lack of support affects flow

To become successful and maintain your health and happiness, you need a good support network around you, no matter how young or old you are. A good support network will help you to strive to improve and get the most out of life – and in the process, it will allow you to work more effortlessly and help others too.

*A good support network can help you to stay on track with your goals*

If you’re struggling to develop or maintain enough flow in your life and career, it may be because you are lacking people who will help to support you with achieving your goals, or that your support network contains people who are struggling with achieving their own goals and therefore, aren’t capable of giving you the positive and other appropriate support that you need.

What’s the quality of your support network?

Just as gardens need a bit of landscaping from time to time to help the grass grow greener, regularly assessing the quality of your own support network and how it is helping and supporting you to achieve your goals is important.

Doing so will ensure that you have the support that you need to develop the awareness and skills necessary to maintain your flow and achieve your goals. If you don’t have that support, don’t be afraid of seeking it. Everyone has obstacles that they need to overcome in life from time to time and reading about people that you admire or reaching out to them is another way of finding out how they successfully maintained their flow during difficult times.

4. Things that are outside of your control

There will always be things that are outside of your control which could affect your ability to maintain flow and put obstacles in the way of achieving your goals. For example:

suffering injury or illness;
being made redundant;
your business becoming obsolete due to new technology;
not getting the promotion you wanted at work despite creating new opportunities; or
a global pandemic.

When things outside of your control happen that impact the path to your goals, fear can quickly hit. At such times, taking comfort in distractions to avoid the pain that fear can cause may feel a lot easier than addressing the work needed to get you back on track. But as we saw earlier, fear and distractions are ultimately just goal blocks.

To get back on the right track, it’s important to recognise how fear and distractions affect your focus. To turn away from fear and distraction and move back towards reaching your goals, work on building a support network containing people of a positive mindset who will help you to re-focus your thinking on taking the baby steps necessary to get you back into full flow.

If you’re really struggling, re-assess whether you have the right support and seek it elsewhere if necessary. You should never, ever, feel ashamed about asking for help if you’re struggling to set, achieve or re-assess your goals after a setback.

Positive thinking creates positive flow

Spending the time studying, training and working to develop a career that you love can be really rewarding, but inevitably, life is never a straight road and it has bumps along the way that can get in the way of your goals. Maintaining a positive ‘can do’ mindset is one of the best ways of achieving success and happiness, but to do so requires an understanding of how and why roadblocks to your goals can arise.

Allowing fear and distraction to block the path to your goals can be overcome once you can visualise & recognise that the two are self-perpetuating and drive one another forward in the form of unhelpful habits. Furthermore, understanding what is outside of your control gives you the opportunity to not blame yourself for the unavoidable obstacles that may come your way from time to time as part and parcel of life.

Just like a river in a John Constable landscape painting meandering gently through the English countryside, good flow creates the canvas from which you can build a happy and healthy career & life. And ultimately, the more that all humans can blend, live and work together harmoniously, the more flow we will all have across the whole of our precious planet.