When The Flow Finds You

If you have to force yourself to focus on a project and it feels like you’re swimming against the current in order to make any progress, perhaps you need to set it aside for a little bit and see where the flow wants to take you.

Doing important work is challenging enough without fighting against your own ability to focus on the task at hand. Your wandering attention could be a sign that you’re tired and need a break, it might be your subconscious trying to get you to realize an error was made and needs to be addressed, or it could be your intuition trying to get you to notice something else out in the world that could prove useful to the very project on which you are working.

When the flow finds you, set aside some time to see what it wants to show you.

Instead of trudging head-down into a gale-force wind, why not spread out your wings and find out where the flow wants you to go? You don’t have to allow yourself to be completely swept away — you can just allocate a fixed amount of time to do a little exploration in order to determine if this detour might work better than continuing going down the road you’re on.

You may find that a lot of your energy is being wasted trying to force yourself to keep your nose to the grindstone instead of lifting up your eyes to sky to see what’s flying by. If you deny the call to follow the flow when it whispers your name, it will continue to rush right by you and you may miss an important opportunity attempting to get your attention, or a new revelation that could improve your work not only on this project, but on all future work your create as well.

You don’t have to go out and find your flow — it will find you.