Salepage link: At HERE. Archive: http://archive.is/KztPv
$497 $44 – Flow Fundamentals Online Training – Flow Genome Project
Flow Fundamentals, updated for 2016, now includes over 25 new videos, a fully interactive app, wearables integration, automated calendar reminders and a social community!
For many of us, the biggest challenge in life is getting ahead while still enjoying the ride. Too often, life, work and responsibility weigh us down, and we lose track of what makes us come most alive. When we do go looking for more meaning, we have to wade through the hucksters, hype-sters and the plain old gullible. So we usually come back to what we’ve been doing all along, a little more jaded each time. It doesn’t seem like we’re asking for all that much—just a simple, reasonable method to play at the top of our game, to experience deep satisfaction, and not have to give up our critical perspective or common sense to get there. That doesn’t sound so far fetched, does it?
It’s like a “Zero to Hero” training program, but for your whole life. It’s practical, experimental and experiential. You learn a new idea about training Flow, you apply it in your life, you see what happens, and you make it your own.
Unfortunately, most of our schooling, workplaces and social lives seem expressly designed to wring the Flow right out of us. From open office plans, to constant digital distractions to over scheduled family calendars, we’re constantly getting dragged away from the effortless focus and deep satisfaction of being lost in the moment. It’s crazy to think we stand a chance of performing at our best while taking our lead from people who will never get there. It’s time to get beyond Self Help and New Year’s Resolutions and unlock the source code to your intrinsic motivation…
Training with us isn’t for folks looking for quick fixes or blanket solutions to life’s problems. In fact, we’re pretty suspicious of anyone who’d peddle that in the first place. It’s not quite as sexy this way—you have to actually pay attention to your own life, motivations and outcomes, and you don’t get to pin all of your hopes on some “sage on the stage” who’s gonna promise everything in your life will be forever changed if you only sign up for their next platinum program.
When it comes down to it, we believe that life is ultimately more tragic and more magic than most of us ever allow ourselves to experience. And that’s not just ok, it’s kind of unavoidably beautiful too. It’s like the dad says in Old Yeller “Life’s not all bad. A lot of it’s mighty fine, and you can’t afford to waste the good part fretting about the bad. That makes it all bad.” So we believe it’s worth training our games to bring more Flow into our lives, not so it will make us millions in our pajamas, or attract the sexy new boyfriend or fancy new car. We believe it’s worth spending more time in Flow because it let’s us set down our load for a little while, to step outside our normal waking selves, and get some information and inspiration to keep us going on the road ahead. We believe experiencing Flow is our birthright, and no one should die wondering if there’s “more” to life than they’ve been living.
Hi. My name is Jamie Wheal, and along with Steven Kotler, I founded the Flow Genome Project. From mountain guiding, surf rescue and wilderness medicine, where lives and limb are on the line, to advising Fortune 1000 executives and top ranked business schools, I’ve always been fascinated by the upper limits of focus and performing.
My biggest fear was always that I’d end up sucked into a painfully dull life, phoning in a job I hated, and getting beaten down by the grind. So wherever I could, I’ve tried to push things to the edges. For some people, that might sound kind of stressful. For me, it was the only place I could ever relax and know for sure that what I was doing in that moment actually mattered.
For more than a decade, I have been researching, writing about and teaching high performance leadership. I’ve spoken about these topics at conferences like TEDx, Summit Series and Cisco’s Future of Work, taught them to the founders of Google, Richard Branson, the officers of the U.S. Naval War College, the CEOs of Young Presidents’ Organization and the athletes of RedBull.
And through all that time, here’s what I’ve figured out. Change is hard. Really hard. And most of us, despite the workshop highs and New Year’s resolutions, don’t stick with what we know would make us better.
So I came to two conclusions.
Conclusion 1: I am a lazy and undisciplined bastard (and suspect that most of us are)
Conclusion 2: Except when I am doing things that put me into Flow. Then, I am an unstoppable, fired up, focused machine.
So that’s what this program, Flow Fundamentals is really about. Years of trial and error and gritty reality testing boiled down to what sticks in the thick of it. We’ve tried to distill all of the research, all of the science, psychology, and physiology surrounding peak experience and accelerated development into the simplest, most practical program to get you started leading a life with more Flow (and the meaning and satisfaction that inevitably come with it).
And after well over a decade testing this on ourselves at the Flow Genome Project, we know hacking Flow works. That’s not even the question really. What’s much more important than that, is:
Because taking the Flow Fundamentals course is just a first step on an endless road. Once you’ve completed it, you’ve earned your “yellow belt” and are eligible to take our more advanced online and in person trainings at amazing locations around the world. We meet up in beautiful mountain retreats, oceanside surf spots, and forested lodges, we go deep into theory and practice, and we share a community that is filled with absolutely awesome people. Doctors, athletes, world-class trainers, authors, dancers, executives, entrepreneurs. And even better, when you become part of Flow Hacker Nation, we’re all contributing to the largest citizen science project on optimal psychology ever conducted (25,000 subject and going strong)
So jump in, there’s much more that comes after this initial training, but this is definitely the place to start.
As written in Outside Magazine: I’d long wondered if I could prolong the feeling, so I decided to try Flow Fundamentals, a course designed by Steven Kotler, author of the book The Rise of Superman, about how adventure athletes like Dean Potter and Laird Hamilton have used flow states to push the boundaries of what’s possible. The six-week program revolved around webisodes outlining the principles of flow and ways to hack into it. Sitting in my office and watching the videos, only to have a coworker burst in and say “Sorry, are you flowing?” is very un-flowy. But the webisodes weren’t designed to induce the state; there was homework for that. Each week, my classmates and I were given a to-do list that included everything from using smartphone apps to monitor our heart rate and sleeping patterns to going bungee jumping. But my favorite assignment involved caffeine and alcohol. Kotler and his cohost, Jamie Wheal, encouraged us to down two shots of espresso and two shots of vodka, then watch a video of surf and snowboard porn set to a dubstep soundtrack, with tones that stimulate alpha brainwaves (the ones that bring on relaxation). Put it on full screen and turn it up to 11, they said. To be honest, I didn’t need a reason to do that, but Kotler and Wheal gave me one anyway. Flow, the thinking goes, is a product of deep embodiment, high consequence, and a rich environment. The delicious cocktail of stimulants was designed to use hedonic engineering (their phrase) to get me deeply embodied. The science on flow, while ongoing, is kind of murky. While in flow, parts of our prefrontal cortex, the section of the brain that deals with most of our higher cognitive function, all but shut down. Which might be why things feel so effortless. In addition, that state produces dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins, serotonin, and anandamide in your brain. The neurochemicals increase attention, speed up heart rate and respiration, ease pain, and inhibit our ability to feel fear. But every person has different triggers. Early on in the course, we were tasked with figuring out what those were. According to the questionnaire I filled out, mine are surfing and running in the mountains. Other people were set off by painting or jamming on the sax. The next step was to perform those trigger activities more often. So I did. I was training for the race in Marin the entire time I took the program. One of the problems with flow states is that staying in them can be as difficult as achieving them in the first place. At the race, I went out faster than I should have. Somewhere around mile 24, I came abruptly back to earth with the biggest physical and mental explosion I’ve ever experienced in five years of racing. I was at flow’s polar opposite: the pain cave. I hobbled to the finish line. Does that mean my search is over? Far from it. The pursuit of flow is nearly as gratifying as the feeling itself. Before I was able to walk normally again after the race, I’d already begun scheming about how to get my next fix—time for a surf trip.
Written by Matt Skenazy, Outside Magazine
$497 $44 – Flow Fundamentals Online Training – Flow Genome Project