The WAY to WOW Shows
Have WOW Relationships with Your Family
August 31, 2021
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[0:00] we're going to watch a several short segments of a long video that professor chick sent me high uh did on this concept of flow and i'll stop it periodically to talk about what i think this means and how we can use it [Music] who are you and where are you going what do you want together we'll find the ideal path on the way to wow show with your host kevin bemel

[0:35] this week on the way to wow show i want to talk about one of my favorite books by one of the most outstanding thinkers on how to find your way to wow it's a book called flow by professor mihai chiksen mihai and while you might think that with a name like that we're going to deal in the mindset realm i'm actually going to deal in the family realm of the spiritual pillar and show how we can take this concept of flow and use it to improve

[1:10] our relationships with our spouse our children other members of our family and for that matter close friends but first bryn smith is gonna mix up a cocktail yes i am hello everybody i'm so happy to be here my name is brynn and today i wanted to share one of my favorite classic cocktails it's a pre-prohibition era cocktail called the last word and it is fabulous the cocktail actually originated at the detroit athletic club and so it's one of those cocktails that you know over time has just gained a lot of popularity again

[1:45] so we're going to make one so what are you going to what you're going to want to do is get your shaker tin out the best thing about this cocktail is that the ingredients are all three-quarter ounce measurements so it's really easy to remember today we do not have one in the ingredients just because it wasn't kosher compliant but we do have another delicious thing to put in it which is luxardo amaro abano so let's start making the drink but let's start first with our citrus we are going to be putting in like i said all the same measurements four different times uh so we're going to do three quarter ounces of lime so let's do that

[2:21] so here we go perfect and the next ingredient we're going to do is luxardo maraschino liqueur this gives you like a nice balance to the cocktail but keeps it keeps it being dry so it's not overly sweet which is great and then another product for them is their amaro these products originally originated on the dalmatian coast but now they're actually from a in padua italy move too so there we go this is going to give it that herbaceousness that we want

[2:57] in the cocktail to give it a nice rounded flavor and then lastly we're going to do gin another three quarter ounce of that [Music] next we're going to add make sure we add a lot of ice to this because we want to make sure our cocktail gets diluted quickly and it's super cold make sure we add a good amount of ice here okay and then we're gonna shake it up the most fun part

[3:33] i would shake really hard for a good 10 seconds and you'll know that the shaker is frosty that your cocktail is ready there you go let's see that frost there all righty a nice froth action perfect let me strain that out so yeah this one has a little bit more brown color because we're not using the chartreuse in it but this is a great variation so here you go here you go kevin this looks terrific yes enjoy

[4:10] mmm has a wonderful smell right very aromatic and herbaceous oh yeah and refreshing delicious but not overly sweet no no not at all lots lots of nice layers i love cocktails like that yay perfect thank you so much cheers so as i mentioned in the intro if we really want to find our way to wow we have to get ever more experiences that deepen our lives

[4:46] so i want to share with you someone who's i've read several of his books he's a professor of psychology by the name of mihai chiksen mihai not an easy name to pronounce or for that matter remember let me let me just read you a little bit about his biography so mihai chiksen mihai is a psychologist and a claremont graduate university's distinguished professor of psychology and management he's also the founder and co-director of the quality of life research center doesn't this sound like someone who is interested in helping us find our way to wow

[5:22] he is known for his research on the experience of flow a psychological concept he introduced in his best-selling book flow the psychology of the optimal experience in fact here's here's a copy of the book the book came out in 1990 so it's been around quite a while now but it remains one of the seminal works on helping us develop a happier life so i if you haven't read this book before i highly highly recommend it i'll put a link to it in the show notes and you want to check this out for people who are working on this issue

[5:58] of happiness and having a good life you will find almost all of them refer back to to professor mihai's book on flow so numerous oh and that's that that's really the that's really the end of the biography so we're gonna watch several short segments of a long video that professor chiksen mihai did on this concept of flow and i'll stop it periodically to talk about what i think this means and how we can use it okay so let's take a look at the first one we can't really tell you nobody can

[6:35] tell you what how to reach happiness except yourself and happiness doesn't exist as an entity that somehow we are chasing and trying to reach because there is no happiness except for what's inside of yourself and that and nobody can really make you happy so i think this is a core idea for us to understand right off the bat happiness isn't a point we reach

[7:10] it's something inside of us that in essence we revisit hopefully as often as possible and no one is going to make us happy especially not permanently we may be happy to see people we may be happy to have them in our lives but we can't count on our spouses or somebody like that to make us happy all right so let's let's go on to the next segment flow is this is a kind of a summary of what i tried to say in the past few minutes that you can

[7:45] uh live either as uh a pawn of external forces or you can live uh you can master your own destiny to a certain extent and this act of living under your own control rather than being pulled by the strengths of fortune and faith that's what i call flow so professor chiksen maylie developed this concept of flow over a four decade period

[8:20] and he he came up with the definition that you you see in the video it's this is the state we get into he's going to go into that more later later in his uh presentation and you'll see the individual aspects of it and then we'll talk about how you get into this this state of flow but i want to just quickly summarize the the the three aspects so we're in harmony with our environment and as a result i'm sorry we we feel involved first of all concentratedly involved

[8:56] and we're working through stages of ever deeper involvement until we feel like we're in harmony with our environment and then as a result we feel fully alive so when you when you think about you know artists who are so consumed by what they're creating oftentimes they're in this state of flow okay and and professor chick sent maylie he would define or he defines happiness as being in that flow state right so then

[9:31] you know how do we get there so you think about an experience you've had where you trained very very hard to get good at something right and and you you probably had setbacks along the way in your learning um but you may have gained you know some some basic competency okay and that that probably made you happy and then as you worked harder and got ever closer to gaining mastery you probably felt ever more happy and stayed in that happiness state for longer

[10:06] right so when you get to that peak state that's what flow is okay and that's what much of the rest of the video is going to talk about more in depth on that and how you get there okay so let's let's look at the next segment now the interesting part is not about flow is that that you can do it when you separate yourself from everyday life and you do something artistic or athletic but you can do flow when you're studying when you're working when you're at home and with the family and that's really the um

[10:42] the best application of flow is how you can use it in everyday life so again this is another i think another key point most of us are not going to be professional artists we're not going to be professional athletes where those are two of the areas where you see flow most often so we need to figure out how do we bring flow into our everyday activities right and it's it's it's it's much more difficult because there's far more distractions in everyday life so what i'm going to talk about going forward is how we can bring flow into our relationships with our family members

[11:19] let's go to the next one the first conditional flow is that you are focusing your attention on a very restricted field of stimuli until you you get fully concentrated and completely involved so if we're thinking about improving our relationships with our family members think about are we really concentrating on those relationships and and more importantly when we're interacting with our spouse and our children are we really paying

[11:56] attention are we focused on being involved with them that's the first step so to give you an example this is one of things that i'm working on and so earlier actually about a month ago or maybe a month and a half ago i went through my calendar and i looked at all the commitments that i had and i i dropped several of them that frankly just weren't as important as my relationships with my family members my wife and my daughter frankly a couple of people were pretty

[12:31] annoyed at me that i dropped those commitments but what it but what emptying out my calendar did was give me the time i needed to really be able to feel like i could concentrate on my wife and daughter without the distractions of thinking oh gosh i've got to be doing this thing or i've got to be getting getting ready for this other thing okay so the first thing we need to do there is bring greater concentration to whatever aspect of our daily life we really want to be focused on okay

[13:07] oh you know what and this this is important so um when i was able to do that and and when i sit down now with my wife for example and we're having a conversation especially if it's an important conversation without all the distractions of these other things i've started seeing her in a completely different light so honestly things that used to annoy me about her

[13:42] actually i find really pleasant about her now and i think it's because i'm really engaged with her i'm really working to understand her because i've given myself the room to do that without all the other distractions and i she's feeling that as well okay so this is something we really need to work at it it's it's hard believe me i'm in the midst of it it's it's really hard but but if we decide what's

[14:17] important to us then we'll get through the hard times and and as we do it'll become more automatic to do these kind of things then you get to the point where your attention is so taken by what you're doing that you really start forgetting yourself as a separate uh person okay so this this is the end state where self-consciousness disappears you're so engaged you're so connected to the person that you lose track of time you you you lose almost track of self

[14:54] so again using the example of a relationship with with your spouse do you remember maybe early on when you were dating you had a a time where you know you're out on a date or maybe you know you went over to her house and you started talking and you just got into this conversation and it flowed and flowed and flowed and the next thing you knew you talked all night and the only reason you knew that is because all of a sudden was getting light outside and when you got there it was dark right you don't even realize

[15:30] how much time has passed that's that's the flow state so imagine being able to be in that connected state far more often than you are currently in your relationship imagine doing that with your children imagine doing it with you know your close friends it's obviously possible because we've i probably most if not all of us have had that experience of talking through the night and not really thinking wow i i thought we'd only been talking for you know an hour or something like that so we can do it

[16:06] the question is are we going to bring the self-discipline to bring the concentration and and ever deepening that and really work on it together with the other person to bring it about that that's really the challenge and when all of these conditions are present you uh the activity becomes auto italic and the authentic means that uh the big word two words autumn means self and talos is goal auto telling the goal is just to do the

[16:41] activity you're not concerned about even succeeding or getting paid or any of those things can you imagine you're engaging with your spouse purely for the pleasure of engaging with your spouse not to problem solve not to um you know be engaged with your spouse just because it's part of being marriage a part of being married you're not engaging with your spouse to you know trying to convince your spouse

[17:16] hey it's time to have sex you know for none of those reasons you're engaged purely for the pleasure of connecting with that other person i mean it's i i have i have no idea what the statistics are but i would bet you it's it's pretty low the number of spouses who who connect that way on a regular basis and even the ones who connect that way once in a while right but that i think that that that ought to be the goal um if we really value those relationships

[17:51] and and when you think about it that's what value relationship is it's saying i want to be so connected with you this other person i have no ulterior motive for doing so this is not a this is not a business relationship where there may be some kind of quid pro quo going on right this is this is for the people we care most about it maybe our family members it could be close friends where there's a mutuality of involvement that transcends anything else that's going on so if we can bring the kind of ever deepening focus

[18:28] that will get us into a flow state with that other person it will materially improve those relationships and hence our own life so and it's really it's really just this slide that i want you to see the conditions of the flow experience there's really there's really three of them i'm going to just read them off here there are clear goals every step of the way that's number one number two there's immediate immediate feedback to one's actions and then number three there's a balance between challenges and skills so these are the three things we need

[19:03] in order to create that flow state so let's let's look at this from the standpoint of a relationship with with our with our spouse right so in in my case my wife we've we've begun this process so we're we're looking at really what are our goals in terms of our marriage what are we trying to make it about and we're being as clear as we can possibly be about that so that we both understand it we both know what we're trying to accomplish okay so that's step number one

[19:38] step number two is we give each other feedback and we give each other feedback as we're moving along and and honestly that's the hard part it's it's the really hard part because there's all kinds of history and not just history in our marriage i've been married over 18 years but there's we're discovering all of our family history from when we grew up as kids that's been impacting the way we communicate for all these years that's really been hampering the way we've been doing it

[20:13] it's really fascinating but we've got to be able to overcome how we're used to interacting so that when we give feedback the other person can really hear the feedback we have to give it in a positive way that the person that you know that i say something my wife won't get insulted or my wife says something to me and i won't be offended right that's so crucial in relationships right and the reason we're able to do that and we'll probably talk about this in another segment is we're putting the

[20:49] bond in our relationship that's that's first that's number one so if we're if the number one goal in the relationship is maintaining that bond then we'll be much more willing to do the hard work that's necessary to give each other feedback to improve how we communicate and we'll be much more willing to listen to that feedback than we would be if if we weren't so focused on building that bond okay so that's step number two and then step number two three there's there has to be a balance between challenges and skills

[21:25] i think one of the things that kills marriages most often is boredom right if you've ever been divorced that may have been the reason so we've got to keep growing both both spouses need to keep growing they need to keep looking for new challenges and building new skills especially in the realm of interacting within the relationship right one spouse cannot keep the relationship going

[22:00] it's got to be both of both people working together both people dedicated committed to building their skills within the relationship and always keeping their challenges slightly ahead of their skills you we need that to pull us into that flow state because we need to feel the challenge otherwise boredom sets in but we don't want to have such a huge challenge that it's so frustrating that either we give up or or you know we we we fall into anger or or something like

[22:36] that so it's got to hit that balance point and again it's very very difficult especially in the beginning to figure that out right so it's going to take some some trial and error you're going to make mistakes but if you keep at it you'll you'll find that sweet spot and hopefully then you and your spouse can grow together so this is the essence of the flow concept that professor chiksen mihai developed over all those decades right and an involvement where we're in harmony with our

[23:12] environment and and we get to it through these three steps having clear goals every step of the way getting immediate feedback and hitting that balance point between challenge and and our skill level i cannot recommend this book highly enough it's it's really an easily read book and and i it will make a material difference in your life we can find our way to wow through flow and professor chick sent me chicks at me

[23:49] high can help us do that courage at all times my friends and marie you're still my bell darling [Music]

[24:32] [Music] you