[Neurons] 2021 Neurons #8 NEURO-SEMANTIC SYNERGY: The Secret of Flow

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2021 Neurons #8

February 22, 2021

The Flow State #2

 

NEURO-SEMANTIC SYNERGY

The Secret of Flow for Developing Expertise

 

Who doesn't want to be his or her best self?  This drive for excellence
comes with being human.  You can see it in the raw in small children.  You
can see it in professional athletes, in professional people in every field.
It drives people to keep searching for excellence.  It's natural and it is
inevitable.  Although I should add, it can be distorted and even
extinguished, if we're not careful.

 

What's normal is to want to step up, take on the challenge of living fully,
and strive for mastery.  That is an expression of being alive.  But how?
That has always been the big question.  How do we unleash our potentials and
make what is potential actual?  We now know how.  In the past 50 years,
research from many different areas have identified the process.  And in
Neuro-Semantics, the Meaning- Performance Axes defines the
Self-Actualization Quadrants and the synergy zone, that is, the flow zone. 

 

Yet how many people live in that zone?  How many have learned how to access
it and live there?  The problem is that there are some other zones.  There
is the Panic Zone, the Drone Zone and the Dead Zone.  And we find ourselves
in these other zones depending on failing to create a synergy of meaning and
performance, challenge and skill.  When the ratio is on, we're in "the flow
zone," when the ratio is off, we're thrown out of it and into one of the
other zones.

 

The Dead Zone is the place where you live when you do not have significant
meanings and challenges informing and inspiring your life.  And without an
internally significant value, vision, or meaning, then you will also be
failing to take effective action to a meaning real in your life.  We all
start here in the undeveloped quadrant (I) and we leave it when we start
constructing positive and inspirational meaning. 

 

The Drone Zone is quadrant II where a person focuses primarily on doing.
Here you are active and energized and involved, but what you may be doing
lacks the quality and richness of significant meanings.  You do what is
required and what is conventional.  You follow the rules and do what you
should do, must do, need to do, etc.  You are busy, you look busy, you stay
busy, you confuse busy with doing something significant.  You have far
enough skill to do what you do- so you're bored, uninspired.  You strive,
but for what?

 

The Panic Zone is quadrant III where the dreamers live.  They take flights
of imagination into the stratifield, dreaming and imagining, creating
wonderful ideas and meaningful concepts.  But they are less likely to act on
their dreams, innovate what they have created.  They tend to always be
waiting until it is perfect and/or as soon as they finish one dream, they
are off onto other adventures of the imagination.  Here panic arises when it
comes to acting on a dream.  It's one thing to dream, it's a very different
thing to act on it.  Now things are getting scary.  That's because there is
too little competency.

 

The Synergy Zone is quadrant IV and is characterized by a balance ratio of
meaning and performance, challenge and skill.  And most amazingly, it begins
just at the edge of quadrant I so that to enter into the flow zone and to
create synergy does not require a high level of either meaning or
performance.  It only requires that you combine the two.  A heuristic for
this zone is: "Do what you can with what you know."  That puts you in the
synergy zone, the flow zone, and now you're off and running.  Another
heuristic is: "Whatever you're doing, add some meaning or challenge to it."
When you add doing, you also add risk.  Now there are things at stake.  When
you add meanings, you add inspiration.

 

The synergy zone explains why it is so absolutely critical to close the
knowing-doing gap.  That gap is the very gap that stops you from being "in
the zone."  It keeps you in the dreamer's Quadrant III, the panic zone where
there is plenteous of meaning but not enough skill to handle things, hence
panic.  Or it keeps you in the drone zone of doing when you are in danger of
burning out because there's insufficient meaning.

 

With meaning you are challenged to rise up to access your values and vision.
With performance you are challenged to translate the meaning into the world
in your behaviors.  Do both in a synergistic way and you close the
knowing-doing gap and actualize a little bit more of your potentials.  You
become more fully alive, more fully human.

 

 

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, Neuro-Semantics

P.O. Box 8

Clifton CO. 81520 USA

www.neurosemantics.com  

 

To subscribe or unsubscribe to Neurons, send request to meta at acsol.net 

 

Making smart decisions is not easy--- many, many cognitive biases work
against us and it is far too easy to default to pseudo-decisions: emotions,
gut feelings, intuitions, circumstances, others.  Executive Decisions (2021)
offers a way to decide intelligently and wisely.

 

130969 Neuro Semantics Executive Decisions Book Cover

 

 

 

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