3 Ways to Unlock the Flow State

Novak Djokovic might be the greatest tennis player of all time. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and I’ll just say he is. I think there’s a big debate within the tennis community that if you’re not part of the tennis community, I’ll share just a little bit here. There’s this conversation between who’s the best? Is it Roger Federer, is it Rafael Nadal? Is it Novak Djokovic? And these days, I think it’s pretty unequivocal that Novak Djokovic is the greatest just based off of the number of championships that he’s won. He has broken all the records and held the most weeks at number one. And all these things, all these objective measures by which we can measure the goat conversation. But there’s one aspect of Novak’s game which I think sets him so far above and beyond the other two, Roger and Rafa. And I’m a big rafa fan.

He’s my number one in my heart. But there is one trait of Novak’s that is very, very hard to identify. It’s very ephemeral, but it’s clear that he is perhaps the best in any sport at this aspect, which is his mental fortitude, his mental discipline, his ability to stay focused and stay in the zone in the midst of a match. And I was watching an interview the other day with him, the person who was asking the questions, he was saying, one of your special talents or your gifts seems to be. And then Djokovic cuts him off and he goes, wait, I’d just like to correct you real quickly. It’s not a gift. It’s not a gift. I’ve worked really hard at this and this bore, this conversation then around how do we work on mental discipline and fortitude and willpower those aspects that are so ephemeral and hard to quantify in his game.

But it’s so clear to see it in the results, and you can see how he maintains it through a match. And one of the things that he shared was that he’s human and he feels all the same things that every other human feels when it comes to those high pressure moments. He feels the anxiety, he feels the annoyance, the frustrations. He feels these things in the same way that other people do. His ability isn’t that he doesn’t feel them. He said his gift is that he is very good at identifying the feeling, acknowledging it, and then letting it go. And so that might take the form of an emotional outburst. Maybe he’ll smash a racket or something like that.

Which we from the outside would look at and be like, tis, tis tissue. Can’t control himself. But for him, he knows that is the expression that he needs to have in that moment to release that energy, and then he’s able to reset and go right back. Whereas a lot of people, they’ll break the racket, they’ll get frustrated, and that will only serve to make them more and more frustrated. And so that got me thinking. I was like, how do we manage that? How do we let go of those negative feelings, those emotions, those things that are inside of us in the moment, so that we can focus on the thing that’s calling us in that moment? And I have experienced this a lot over the years of coaching rock climbers and national level Olympic caliber rock climbers. And one of the things I observed in those people is that the ones that are absolutely the best at the sport, they tend to have the most amount of poise, which is the ability to move with precision, calm, collected mindset, to problem solve in the midst of anxiety and stress, they’re able to keep a cool, calm head. And so much of this, for me at least, really boils down to understanding that we are, at our core, just a biological machine.

We are a brain having a biological experience. Our bodies and our mind are intricately linked. And a lot of times when we’re feeling the frustration, we’re feeling the stress. We think it’s a psychological thing that needs to be managed up here. But a lot of times what I found is that it’s the physical release, that the mind follows the body more often than not. And that in those situations, like with Novak breaking the racket, it’s not, you have to overpower it inside your mind and say, I’m going to be fine now, I’m going to be calm, I’m going to be poised. It’s having some physical release, some physical manifestation. And what I call, I refer to this as state management.

I’m not saying you need to have, like an explosive outburst of energy, but understanding what are those things that you can do to manage your state, to put you into that optimal state of consciousness so that you can perform at your best in whatever the moment is. And I’ve been thinking a lot about this because over the next three months, I have just a lot of traveling, a lot of speaking engagements, and speaking always causes me a lot of stress because I want to do the best that I can. And you only really get one shot in the moment to deliver. And so you don’t get to delete and rerecord it or anything like that. And so there’s pressure there. And so I think a lot about how do I walk into it to make sure that on that day, at that moment, I’ve done everything that I can to prepare myself physically and mentally, but I can also do everything in my power in that moment to show up in the right state. And so state management, here’s three things I just want to share with you to think about, that you can manipulate when it comes to your own biology, that if you’re psychologically not where you want to be in a particular moment, then you might explore these three options. Because if you can feel bad for no reason, we all just sometimes have a bad mood, right? Like, we wake up on the wrong side of the bed.
If you can feel that way for absolutely no reason, then there’s no reason that you can’t flip that switch and feel good for no reason right now. These are the impulses, the levers that you can pull within your own biology that will allow you to do that. So, number one, I think of these actually in threes. And so it’s scent, sound, vision. So, really thinking about our physical senses, number one is scent. Your olfactory sense of smell is just so powerfully linked with your biology, and it’s something that we don’t, I think, spend a lot of time actively manipulating. We might do it to a small degree when we want to have a nice smelling house, a fresh home, and we’ll light a candle and those things. But really getting intentional about linking scents with particular states of consciousness that you want to fall into at a moment’s notice, I found to be really powerful.
And one of the tools that I use for this is obviously candles, but I also use a product called boom boom, which is just a stick full of scents. And so you can have cinnamon, you could have mint, and I can use these to elicit a particular state. So if I need to calm down, if I’m too elevated, my heart is racing. I can smell the peppermint, and that will bring down my state. If I need to, maybe animate. I’m sorry, I did that wrong. If I want to bring down my state, I use cinnamon. If I want to bring up my state, if I want to elevate, I use the peppermint.

That kind of, like, stimulates you a little bit more. But really thinking about how can I change my state through smell. If you’re feeling down in the doldrums at this particular moment or any moment in the future, and you’re like, what can I do right now to change this? Think about your smell. What could you do to artificially control that environment? Number two is sound. I’m always astounded by how profoundly music affects me. Certain music have a very strong, visceral, emotional reaction for me, and this can be both a good thing. It can be a bad thing. If you’ve ever found yourself going through a breakup and you’re going through a depressive episode and you find yourself listening to sad, sappy songs, and you’re kind of like going into that negative spiraling loop.

And the sad songs make you feel kind of cathartic, but they also kind of make you still feel bad. And then when you start to come out of that, you start to listen to happy music, upbeat. And the ability to manipulate your physiological state through sound and what you’re inputting into your ears, I find to be very, very powerful. So if you want to get into the zone, having your own soundtrack that you associate with. I’m getting amped up now. I’m getting ready. Or if you need to calm down, having that soundtrack that helps bring you down. When I go for a run, I have a very particular soundtrack that I listen to because it gets me into this instant state of optimal being for that activity.

So try that out too. Number three is vision. Vision. It dominates for most of us what we perceive in the world. It’s our primary sense, and we don’t often think about what can I do to manipulate my vision right now to help manage my state? But two things that I’ve been experimenting with, not recently at least, but one I have been is this tool called Mendy. It’s this focus trainer. I did a podcast on it recently. It’s really just this headband sits on your forehead, and then it measures the blood flow going to the frontal lobe, and then you use it to train your focus with this app.

But one of the side benefits I found really interesting with it is that it’s helping me visually lock in on a object, and that is causing me to go into, like, a tunnel vision type focus. And if you’ve been with me for a while and you’ve listened to some other episodes where I’ve talked about my focus ritual, one of my focus rituals is I take a pen just like this one that I’m holding up on the video. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can go to amplified impact and see. Just hold the pen at arm’s length, and then I stare at the point of it at the very very point of it for 30 seconds. And something very interesting starts to happen at around 30 seconds is that your mind starts to block out everything and you start to go into deep focus. And now you can take that focus and transfer it from one activity to the next. And so how can we manipulate our state with our vision? Well, you can stare at the point of a pen. You could get a tool like this mendy.

But just thinking about what could I do visually to control and manipulate my state is actually quite powerful. So these are just three things to think about. I’ve been noodling on them and experimenting with them as I go into this next streak of a couple of months of these making engagements. And so I will report back and let you know I’m trying some things, but I don’t want to talk about them quite yet until I’ve got a little bit more data to work with. And I’ll bring them to you to show you what worked and what didn’t work. So hope this brings you guys some value. I’ll catch you in the next episode. Bye.