B. Repair
Disable damage
This same flow strategy will not only provide temporary relief, but it can also permanently repair your system, Kevin. Neuroplasticity disables little-used pathways in the brain. If your toxic emotions cannot exist in flow, and you increase your time in flow, then the neural pathways to your emotional outbursts will disappear. Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to form new nerve connections, networks, and pathways to adapt, upgrade and protect.
Further, in flow, new more nourishing and productive neural pathways will be strengthened by neuroplasticity. The more time you spend in top-talent flow, the faster you’ll heal. Today’s cognitive rehabilitation strategies use the same mechanisms. They require practicing better emotional responses to enable neuroplasticity to construct healthier replacement neural pathways.
My flow strategy has the added benefits of (a) not requiring you to take time away from your work to do repetitive exercises you won’t want to do; (b) improving your work performance, and (c) upgrading the context of your life to reflect and sustain your new wholeness.
Unshackled, the addictive drives and biochemical rewards of peak-performance flow may pull you to your greatest work. A life that might otherwise have been wasted through psychological complications may achieve its most meaningful contribution.
C. Renew and Resume
Grow between flows
Top-talent flow is a mechanism for instant maximization. However, it’s short-lived because the biochemicals generating it run out. However, by examining the theme behind the pattern of your top-talent flows, you’ll learn your route to maximization. If you can stay on that path between flow episodes, you can continue to remove the pathways to your emotional outbursts.
Studies conducted by Harvard’s Teresa M. Amabile[2] show that the heightened creativity in flow may be sustained for a few days after the flow episode. This phenomenon is part of the maximizing machinery we’ve evolved. Staying on the path of your top-talent-flow theme will ensure you’re in the best position to reenter flow when its depleted biochemicals have been replaced.
This is why I’m defining both your career path and wholeness solution as a single integrated methodology. Is this strategy to your liking, Kevin?
KEVIN:
Yes, absolutely. This would be a level of freedom, safety, and achievement, I thought I’d lost. For the first time in months, the taut muscles across my shoulders and neck have relaxed.
D. Reassess
Discover the causes of your outbursts
LAUREN:
Wonderful, Kevin. Now, let me explain what I think is going on right now in your career that has brought on your current emotional problems. I’m not convinced that the stress of new seniority is at fault as you suspect. You thrive on the increasing challenges. Rather, I think the causes of your outbursts are three ways your job is interfering with mechanisms we’ve evolved to maximize us.
1. Interrupted creativity
Maximizing mechanisms are pulling you to do the creative and strategic technology work which maximize your talents. However, you’re constantly being interrupted by the daily operational and administrative demands of your current job description.
This makes it impossible to do the deep analytical thinking and the more impactful and meaningful work that you now prefer. You can’t get back into a top-talent flow state with all of its addictive biochemical highs. Imagine going through a drug addict’s withdrawal with each interruption and you’ll know what’s causing your emotional outbursts.
2. Talent growth outpaced job
As I described in “The Growth Path” section of my Lead from Full Power article, serial top-talent flows will lead to narrowing to more precisely use your strongest talents while expanding their impact.
Even without my strategy, Kevin, you’ve been slipping into top-talent flow and growing and transforming as a result. You’ve simply outgrown your current job. You can’t do the operational and administrative work anymore. Your new strategic work is just too thrilling.
3. Biochemical withdrawal from periods of self-actualization
Evolution has ensured we have many drives and biochemical draws to keep us perpetually maximized. Once you’ve been doing the work to which you are biologically predisposed, it’s impossible to go back. Experiencing self-actualization or bio-maximization is like discovering “home.” Once experienced, nothing else will satisfy.
Once you’ve had a taste of this level of performance, creation, meaning, growth, and contribution, the addiction is compelling. The same drug-addict withdrawal will occur if you try to do something else. Irritability will ensue.
This is the reason why I advised leaders in Lead from Full Power to develop a naturalized leadership style based on what they experience in top-talent flow. Otherwise, you’ll be fighting upstream against the biochemistry and mechanisms committed to maximizing you.
E. Release
Find ways to eliminate or buffer toxicity triggers
Obviously, we need to restructure your job to increase the tasks that will trigger top-talent flow and address your craving for technology analysis and invention. This will enable brain neuroplasticity to overwrite the old toxic pathways with the nourishing ones being generated in top-talent flow.
- Therefore, if there are people, tasks, or events which trigger your emotional outbursts, Kevin, you’ll want to exclude them from your day. If they can’t be excluded, perhaps there are ways to buffer their impact on you.
- I notice that you have ten reporting managers, Kevin. I reviewed their work and education histories. I think Tom and Jake could each take over five units to relieve you from most of your daily operational and administrative interruptions.
- Then you could promote yourself to the work you love as the company’s self-appointed Chief Technology Officer. Let everyone see that this is who you are now and what you do. You’ll want to be politically tactful about this, Kevin. Let your good work at executive levels convince the C-Suite that you belong with them – that they routinely need your advice on the work of their meetings.
- Perform the same new CTO role in industry organizations so that industry recognition also helps convince the C-
- This industry recognition will undoubtedly lead recruiters to try to entice you to CTO roles for other employers. If you get an external offer first, Kevin, you can use it as leverage to negotiate for what you want at your current employer. Alternatively, you’ll want to negotiate a significant signing bonus with your new employer.
- The more time you’re doing this new job in flow, Kevin, the faster your functionality and talents will be growing. You’ll want to read the Lead from Expanded Consciousness Learn how you can capitalize on your expanding consciousness from flow to improve your environmental scanning for patterns and trends in technology.
Expanded consciousness will also provide you with additional information to re-combine to create breakthrough novel systems to enhance your industry and company leadership and life-time achievements.
Feeling in an optimal emotional state involves enjoying solid confidence based on healthy self-esteem. If one feels this personal power, then he knows what it’s worth, he knows his true personality and he knows he doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone.
When a person enjoys good emotional emancipation, he knows that in his hands he has a wide range of possibilities.
However, emotional emancipation is not an easy path.
So true, Aldo. My heart goes out to those facing any type of emotional toxicity including fear, depression, overwhelm, bipolar disorder, and so on. I invited Kevin to offer his reaction to “Lead from Wholeness” and he reminded me of something I didn’t include. In addition to flow states being free of toxic emotions, they are egoless states. There is no sense of self.
Not only does Kevin not have to think about the threat of emotional outbursts, he doesn’t even have to think about himself at all. He can exist in the powerful, confident state you describe, Aldo. He finds top-talent flow state not only egoless but restorative. It re-centers him to his natural core and his maximum.
In top-talent flow, all that Kevin experiences is pure creation or discovery. Now, whenever he feels any emotional issues coming on, he escapes into flow as quickly as possible. It’s his panacea.
His “Kevin talent science” for maximizing his strongest talents (see “Lead from Full Power”) is now quite advanced and the projects in his creativity domain (see “Lead from your Creativity Domain,” Study 10) are “thrillingly groundbreaking.” Consequently, his addiction to flow is quite strong. There are lots of exciting tasks in his world that will incite him to enter flow instantly.
Hopefully, the path to emotional emancipation is now easier than you might have anticipated, Aldo.