How to Coach Yourself and Others Essential Knowledge For Coaching | Seite 104

and developing personal characteristics to increase experiences
of flow. Applying these methods in the workplace, such as
Csikszentmihalyi did with Swedish police officers, can improve
morale by fostering a sense of greater happiness and
accomplishment, and in correlated to increased performance. In
his review of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book “Good Business:
Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning,” Coert Vissar
introduces the ideas presented by Csikszentmihalyi, including
“good work” in which one “enjoys doing your best while at the
same time contributing to something beyond yourself.” He then
provides tools by which managers and employees can create an
atmosphere that encourages good work. First, Csikszentmihalyi
explains that experiencing flow, in which a task requires full
involvement, and the challenge of a task matches one’s ability.
In order to achieve flow,
Csikszentmihalyi lays out the following eight conditions:
1. goals are clear
2. feedback is immediate
3. a balance between opportunity and capacity
4. concentration deepens
5. the present is what matters
6. control is no problem
7. the sense of time is altered
8. the loss of ego
Csikszentmihalyi argues that with increased experiences of flow,
people experience “growth towards complexity,” in which people
flourish as their achievements grow and with that comes
development of increasing “emotional, cognitive, and social
complexity” (Vissar). By creating a workplace atmosphere that
allows for flow and growth, Csikszentmihalyi argues, can
increase the happiness and achievement of employees. There
are, however, barriers to achieving flow in the workplace. In his
chapter “Why Flow Doesn’t Happen on the Job,” Csikszentmihalyi
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