How to Build a Personal Curriculum for More Flow
Deep Dive On More Skills, Practices, and Experiments
The idea of creating your personal curriculum is trending but most people are using it to learn random things that tickle their curiosity instead of learning deeply about one topic. If instead we chose to learn about flow deeply first, it would enhance the learning and the experience of flow state with those curiosities afterwards.
A personal curriculum should ask 3 questions when building it:
who am I trying to become?
what skills, knowledge, and habits, support that?
what am I practicing right now?
These questions guide you towards what topics and interests you explore, but an important consideration for a personal curriculum is that it’s not just knowledge; it also consists of creating a plan around:
skills
practices
experiments
reflection
The video on building a personal curriculum for flow was formed around knowledge, with the 4 books that I’d start with if just beginning to understand flow and peak performance.
The good news is that if you read these books and pay attention to the details, they are all highly practical to give you the answers to what types of skills, practices, and experiments will help you to find more flow.
I figured that’s what we could dive into deeper today as well, so that if you’re building a personal curriculum around flow, you not only have the books to start with but also the skills, practices, experiments, and reflection questions to help you.
Skills
There are a few that make up experiencing more flow and living a high flow lifestyle. These are the pillars of flow. The practices below are what develop the flow skills through repeatedly doing and forming habits around.
Focus
Flow demands intense concentration and focus. Building up your ability to focus better is one of the first steps to finding deeper and more satisfying flow states.
Mastery
Knowing how to master any craft is a skill in itself. This doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to master everything you try to do, but you will know what it takes, through having grit and the skills to accelerate learning.
Flow
Understanding the flow state is a skill that makes flow more accessible everywhere in your life. This meta-flow skill is the importance of studying the cycle of flow state, the conditions and triggers that lead to flow, so that you can have the awareness of when you are in flow or not.
Recovery
Why is recovery a skill? Because most people don’t take recovery very seriously and if you want to experience flow long-term you have to learn what it takes to recover well to perform repeatedly without burning out.
Practices
These are just some of the practices that will help to strengthen the skills of flow.
Deep work sessions
Using personal flow triggers
Time blocking for productive use of time
Mindfulness sessions to hone focus
Evaluating your experience of flow afterwards to identify conditions and triggers that helped you
Schedule an hour to do recovery this week.
Do deliberate practice on the skill you’re building
Experiments
To satisfy that curiosity itch and know what works best for you, experiments are a part of the personal curriculum that keeps us motivated and engaged with the self learning.
Test all the flow triggers and conditions to identify what works best for you
Try out different recovery modalities
Schedule focus time for different periods of the day to see when you focus best
Test your peak performance with challenges based on your activity to push you past your comfort zone.
Reflections
In self-directed learning, you need to hold yourself accountable. A personal curriculum becomes more satisfying when there’s a clear sense of progress in what you’re learning and doing. Set up a cadence of accountability for yourself by checking in regularly to see how you’re progressing. I suggest doing weekly, but biweekly or monthly can also work.
Ask yourself the questions related to the curriculum and work you’ve been doing on building skills and practices.
What has resonated with you from each book you’ve read?
What did you learn about your own flow state this week?
What’s the next bread crumb to follow to deepen your flow state?
How often did you stick to the practices you committed to this week?
So consider the road to where you want your life to take you when creating your personal curriculum. If you’re learning about flow, what can you practice from the books you’re reading to make the information stick? You have to take ownership of your own development.
The knowledge we gather from great books is one thing, but to take action on it is how you start to see real growth and progress.