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“Flow State” is that feeling you get when you’re doing what you were born to do. You’re fully in the moment; you’re hyper-focused, and everything else fades away. You’re thriving.
It can happen when you’re feeling highly skilled and highly challenged at the same time.
The place where I regularly experience flow state is in an airplane cockpit. Flying, to me, is the epitome of total freedom, achieved through a deep and hard-earned confluence of skills and knowledge.
But how can Flow State benefit us on the ground?
In the events industry, most of us experience stress more than we experience flow. And then – if we’re lucky – we get a break. We shut down, disconnect, recharge, and then dive back in.
This cycle can be sustainable – and for many of us, it’s our reality – but it will never get us into flow state. Instead, we crave relaxation as a way to offset anxiety, and as we alternate between the two, we run into other toxic feelings like worry, apathy, and boredom.
So how do we avoid those, and intentionally pursue the good stuff? This is the question that led me to a professional revolution: How could I make work feel more like airplanes?
One option, of course, would be to pursue a career in aviation. In 2020 (while the events industry was not in great shape), I became a licensed commercial pilot, flight instructor, and advanced ground instructor. It made me a better pilot, and it’s good to have a backup plan – but I chose to keep aviation as my hobby.
But I wanted to bring that flow state into my life on the ground. I wanted to feel the way pilots sound when they make announcements: relaxed, cool, focused…. Badass.
And when you think about it, that cliche pilot persona makes total sense: during a routine flight, they’re relaxed and in control; they’re highly skilled but not particularly challenged – and that’s probably a good thing for the passengers. When challenges do arise, pilots shift into that magical mind space: Flow state. They tackle problems that they know how to solve, and they get us back on track and safely to our destination.
Aviation is an extremely specialized field – less than 0.1% of people are licensed pilots – and this specialization is the key. Staying focused on what you’re good at is the best way to avoid those toxic feelings that bring us down.
This is what made my events business… wait for it… take off.
As a company, we needed to be extremely clear on what we were good at. We needed to be specific about our mission and market. We needed to illustrate our expertise, and tell the world.
We needed to define our lane – and stay in it at all costs.
In an industry where broad versatility has always seemed so common, this felt backwards, but I’ve found that it’s essential. Rather than being a jack of all trades, we needed to be a virtuoso.
Once our specialty was established, we began to elevate it. We began to stand out among our peers. And when we needed to incorporate products or services from other lanes, we learned to look for the specialists there, too.
Our best events happen when we have all the right people and organizations, each empowered to focus on what they are GREAT at, intentionally combined to create something legendary.
My day-to-day life transformed, too. It became crystal clear which tasks were pulling me into flow state, and which ones were pushing me away from it. The negative ones were things that I had always done, by necessity, even though I wasn’t particularly drawn to them. (For me, those were things like taxes, administrative work, etc.) Those still need to get done of course, but I started to look for ways to get those off my plate – and onto the plate of someone who was BORN to focus on that stuff – and they’re out there!
The focus started to happen more regularly. The anxiety started to fall away. The business got stronger. The team got happier.
I found my flow.
Bobby Dutton is a professional speaker and business owner. For more info, visit www.thinklikeapilot.com, or find him on LinkedIn.
Further Reading:
Flow: The Secret to Happiness: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Ted Talk
