Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It's Alan Robinson here from Vet Dynamics. Welcome to this month's, episode of the webinar Vet practise Management series.
Good to have you all on board. Now, this is, a little bit strange in that I'm having to introduce myself this evening. We don't seem to have a host, but I'm also the presenter.
Just while we're there, just to let To thank our sponsors for making all this, series possible. Saint Francis Group, 8 Legal and simply Health Professionals, all very good sponsors of the practise management series and make this whole thing possible. So thank you very much to them.
So tonight, I I better introduce myself, Alan Robson from Bet Dynamics. So, for those that know me, it's, Bet Dynamics is a business consult working with independent veterinary practises across the UK. Spreading our wings a little bit.
I'm actually speaking to you tonight from Australia, so it's actually 5:30 in the morning over here, and we're, Over here visiting family, etc. And when I booked this, I didn't realise that to be here, but so hopefully the whole internet thing will work, Luke and Peter in the background looking after us, so hopefully that will work. I'm going to Have a look at this idea of flow or actually how we are managing in practises and that's really independent practise, corporate practise, a whole range of things that we're looking at.
So this is not going to be a particularly definitive, webinar in actually coming up with many answers, it's probably gonna raise a lot more questions than anything else. It's something I'm intrigued by as we, work with practises in the UK, work with independent practises, also seeing practises transition across to the corporate world, equally when in an environment of changing economy, changing demographics, changing technology, and there's a lot of, disconnection, I would say, going on in the market. We're seeing that as symptoms of, Discontent in the, particularly the veterinary profession, but all the professions, and I don't think this is unique to veterinary, but we all seem to see this disengagement from work, this inability for people to really find the joy and the pleasure back at work and to be honest, that surprises me because I do feel veterinary medicine is one of those jobs that is, Intrinsically, purposeful, intrinsically something we get our teeth into and enjoy, and I think most of us joined up with a, a full intention of of that.
And we're seeing ongoing, levels of mental health, we're seeing, Leakage from the, from the whole practise system, retention problems, keeping people in the profession, we're seeing, statistics bandied around by, New graduates within 3 to 5 years that we've lost 30 or 40% of those from the profession, not staying in, or either staying in the profession, but not staying in the clinical side. It seems particularly the clinical part of the business is the hardest for people to cope with. And even at the top end of the, the business, because of the corporate buyouts, a lot of people are then leaving the profession earlier than perhaps they were.
So we see a missing out of mentorship at the top. We see some disengagement. Bottom, and for some reason we just don't be able to find vets or nurses for that matter, in the middle stages of this, and so there is sort of this ongoing, Situation, if you analyse it and try and get down to what are some of the reasons, it's very hard to tease out, particularly, and there is a lot of work being done by a lot of different people in it.
Now, my concern is that there's almost a normalisation of the problem. Well, with vets, it's a stressful job, so sort of get used to it. There's a level of medicalization of anxiety because we live in a, an ambiguous business.
We live in a difficult business dealing with people, dealing with the emotions of pets. We're particularly privileged to be able to, manage pet suffering through things like euthanasia. And of course, that has a reflection on the whole mental models of things that we're doing.
. Now working with practises, we work with those to really give them leadership and management skills, mainly, and we see as a basic tenet of driving good business, and that's what we're here to do. But businesses are teams of people, and those teams of people. And not just employed, but not, not engaged with the business.
That just makes the whole business proposition down. So we see a lot of the fixes, a lot of the information, of the, the materials coming, available to practises, you must do this, you should do that. Really not applicable, because they don't actually make sense from a team engagement level.
. And this comes back to a management and a leadership problem of vets finding it difficult to manage employee. And one of the things is, is vet's having to do a very multifaceted, multi-functional job, multi-skilled job, and a lot of them are really not, . Trained up or flexible enough to manage those changes, as we go.
Add to that just the stresses of overwork, and I'll come back to some of these symptoms in a bit in that some of the analysis done is very much around overwork. One of the terms that we talk about in practise is the busy trap of just the continuously, churn of being able to work and then compound that with, recruitment and retention problems. We're seeing a massive burn out and, rust out of people in the profession as well.
Now it's easy now to talk about all these symptoms, get a bit negative about it, and Worry about that and I'm, I'm not really going to go onto that. What I am sort of a little bit concerned about, and this is a theory I want to develop, and this is where it'd be interesting to get some feedback on the some people on the webinar this evening, is I'm gonna sort of present a few ideas, the newer novel, but there is a way of thinking about this, this issue that may actually give us a new way. There's a huge amount of wellness initiatives out there.
EBA, there are royal colleges, there's a vet life, there's a whole load of people sort of advocating ways and means management, and I think last week or the week before was Mental Health Week. Even that I find strange in that we're told we have a mental health problem. So it's almost saying mental health, the good, the positive side, is the problem when it's actually mental ill health seems to be the problem.
It's like walking through a supermarket and you're walking down all the aisles and you come to one aisle that says health food. By definition, what does that mean about everything else in the store if that's where the health food is. It's a strange view of, our state of being, our innate wellness, our innate wisdom, our innate resilience.
And there is a tendency to assume. That we're all damaged goods, we're actually not, in a well state, therefore, we've got to do our best within the within the environment, and that's where meditation or medication or, wellness initiatives or mindfulness or, build a resilient practise or find the toxic factors in, in the situation. All fairly negative, so I want to sort of make a shift here and sort of shift it across, Very much like Martin Seligman did with psychology in the, in the 80s, is focus on the positive side of our capability.
Look at what we are, capable of doing in terms of our innate well-being, our innate resilience and wellness, and possibly the reasons why that isn't in place. The, the picture here is, the story is management tends to, or these, these initiatives tend to take a frog from the swamp. Wash the frog off, but drop the frog back into the swamp.
So unless we either clean the swamp up, the frog will never be clean, and then the question is does the frog want to be clean. In fact, the frog loves the environment again. Now, I'm not gonna have a go at anyone too much, but the other thing I see is that a lot of the initiatives, and believe me, there is far, far, far more support for graduates and vets now than ever, things like webinar vet, but also the CPD that's available for helping, but all of it, nearly all of it is focused on skill improvement, particularly clinical skill, a little bit bit around management and commerciality.
Etc. And he's just one example of those, which is great, but I really don't think it addresses the basic problem of the ability for vets to be, have a growth mindset, to be able to develop, their skills and see things as a challenge, as an opportunity, which is our natural state. Just we actually have a natural inborn resilience and bounce back ability that I think we all naturally have.
Which is taken away from and really very much addressing the balance of clinical versus commerciality, which I think is at the root of much of that angst and anxiety in practise in the consulting room, they, and that's not just new grads, that's all the way through the profession. Now, I've talked about those things before, I'm not gonna talk about them again, but what I'm just saying is, I think there is a different model here. The other thing that we address, we we're looking at is That everything that we do runs in cycles and has the flow all of its own, and that's equally the seasons come and go, the, the, .
Different economies come and go, different, abilities come and go. And in veterinary business, we have a cycle as well, a natural cycle of businesses working through startup to getting break even to actually become successful. But what we see when dealing with practises from a commercial point of view and also from an emotional point of view of where vets get stuck, there's a bottom piece here where they Not making quite enough money.
They're working really hard. They're caught up in this busy trap. They seem to just get caught up in almost, a point of success and regress into so if there's a problem in practise, if there's, a recruitment problem, or there's an illness problem, or even just, you know, normal things like pregnancies happening, these practises start to struggle, and I think we're seeing an awful lot of that, which is contributing to the problem.
And When we look at these cycles, and we look at this in many from a personal perspective, which I'm not gonna go into too much tonight, but also a team perspective and then a, a, a business and a customer perspective, these cycles are getting blocked and they're not functioning as they should be. So I just want a helicopter back out of the, the process, probably start at a, a reasonably basic level. And review some of this again I I invite people to make comment on it, so if people want to put comments in the comment box of Q and A.
Luke will pick those up as we go and we'll say take some questions and have some discussion towards the end of this. But I just want to introduce. A sort of three levels that we're not going to talk all about tonight, and I probably will bring it, bring it to bear and some other one.
Essentially, we're looking for these results. We've got a business, we've got these, vets and nurses, we've got people in practise trying to deliver results, productivity. Of course, corporates are gonna be facing this big time, because they're gonna have masses of practises, they're all gonna be driven by financial results if nothing else in clinical results, and they want to drive this productivity.
And they're going to struggle with this more so than others because they've got the double whammy of dealing with veteran practises and then dealing with multiple practises on a grand scale, something like 30-400 practises. So, and I see. And we see this with independence as well.
People have looked at the results, they're driving worlds, we can do KPIs, we can do figures, we can do measures, we can do finance, etc. And then we can bang on around, well, vets don't charge properly, bets aren't pricing properly, bets aren't invoicing properly, that's doing the work presented to them. And that's the productivity problem.
I want to go a little bit deeper beyond that and start at the other end. I think there's 3 levels, that are affecting us here that we probably need to, to address. One is the, the swap, the swamp, the basic environment.
Where in, I think is counterproductive to a sense of flow, and I'll come to that in a minute. I don't think we use the talents available to us, well, I think we're expecting people to be multi-talented, multitasking, doing a whole range of jobs, whereas if we could just focus people on their strengths, obviate their weaknesses or what. They're not good at and actually put teams together that are much more fun.
There is a tendency in veterinary practise to, aggregate similar sorts of people, so we tend to think and act in the same way, which is very much geared around safety and security. We're not great change agents, we're not that innovative in taking things forward. So bringing in some outside talent for us and some appreciation of that talent is very important.
And then, can we get that talent within that environment, flowing and trusting each other to work really well. So what I want to sort of focus on tonight is that flow factor. What is flow, what's it look like?
How can we do that? And I want to sort of pitch the idea that, the flow state. That levels of higher performance, the levels of, innate wisdom, innate performance, innate resilience, which are characteristics of the flow state, are innate within all of us, but it's just the things around us prevent us from doing that.
So we can get back to that core, And I'd be interested in people's experience of this is, it's easier to talk about these things in terms of elite athletes, in terms of artists, in terms of composers, say, of people who are doing these very creative jobs. But is it possible within the more mundane activity of veterinary practise of doing a job is, and I would argue it is highly Available to us in this situation. If we understand the genesis of it, and we understand where those opportunities of flow are.
And equally, what I want to explain to people is the cycle of flow itself of how it's created. And if we can find more of that, it has distinct. And, dramatic advantages to your ability to be productive and, and, productive member of the team.
So that's kind of the, the, the premise there. The, the background of this, as I've already mentioned, there's a psychological distress factor at work that's, and it's been, you know, analysed and looked at by people at MetLife and other such things. Common things is just work intensity, the busy trap, too much, too often, no breaks coming in that, long working hours, .
Not time spent with family, not time work, spent relaxing, out of work, a constant barrage, and the higher up the, the veterinary tree in terms of management, you go, the more this is so. We deal with these managers day in, day out, and it's a relentless ongoing situation. And they cope, but they don't cope well feel.
And then for employees and people lower down feeling undervalued by those stressed out senior staff members or management. And I can certainly see this is an issue that the corporates will have to manage, and they have the group managers, etc. There's a skill set to this and there's a mentality to this, but the one thing that makes it work is this sense of flow and how people are, .
Able to, to get into a situation that releases an innate well-being that makes them perform. And of course, we've got new grads who work on the constant skill versus challenge paradox of and they create and they either fall into a a state of anxiety, performance anxiety. Of how are they doing, comparing themselves.
They have this relentless inner critic in their own heads. They have their own worst critics, often, and then if you put management, and other expectations, and that can be parental expectations, can be management expectations, can be personal, it can be their peer expectations if a young grads comes into a group of like . Bigger group of of working vets, they could be under pressure that way.
Generally it's quite good, but we do see this in a crick at work. So they're sort of sort of basic, and they're the symptoms, not the causes in my view. I mean they do contribute, but there's a, a lack of flow in this here.
So here's some questions for people. That maybe want to just put some of these into the, the comment boxes. All those things we see, and this is some work done by a group who look to flow in the workplace, the, the workflow genome project.
They see three symptoms of that, or 3 things that you think. One is that relentless in the Critics. So these things, all of us will have experience experience, but some of them will be more prevalent to us in the work situation, and it could be other situations as well if if we're in that sort of state.
For most of us, work takes up the majority of our time. Practise. So I said, is it that constant voice on the side of your head on your shoulder that's sitting there, that is the relentless, telling you, you should do better, you could do better.
Now, this is particularly prevalent with AA type personalities, as vets tend to be, they're driven by performance, they're driven by their own perfectionism, technical excellence is a key driver for us, ethical and moral standards are very important for us, and these create a very cognitive. Head tour in us that is telling us, where we need to. So we don't need anyone else criticising.
We've got enough of that our own. So we're constantly harried by our own inner critic. How does that go for people?
Obviously, as we're already stressed, and we're not, and what stress does, it kicks us out of the presence. And of course, this is the whole, Context for mindfulness and meditation, etc. Is to keep us in the present.
Now I see that as a As a remedy, but I don't, just on its own right. So there's other things here. So, if you're constantly in that stress zone, you're either guilty about the past for stuff you haven't done or you have done, or you're anxious about the future.
And these are the two past and future states that we end up in, and both are in a fairly negative emotional context. Consequences of that. So that's the other one is how do you feel around fear, obligation, and guilt, with those things sort of innately in it and they take a little bit of sitting and thinking that to do that.
And the third one is that we're just discontented. With where we are, is this really it? Is this all there is to it?
Is this what I've got to, and that this can happen. I see this in the early graduate stage, and their single goal in life was to get to be a vet, how I've made it. I've graduate.
I am now the vet I want to be. And then they step into a work situation, and that changes dramatically as to. This isn't quite what I thought it was gonna be like, and they have to then re-establish a set of life goals, with not always the skills to do so.
And therefore their current realities like bills leaves a fairly broad gap. So if there's any comments come through on any of those, pick any of those currently at play, in people's minds, has anyone got any comment on those? Because that's kind of a start point.
This is the negative end of it. I want to sort of kick this around to show the positive point of it. Nothing coming through Luke.
If not, I'll carry on. No, no, . OK.
You crack on. OK, good, good. OK, so here's here's what I'm, I'm suggesting, here's my sort of hypothesis.
It seems that life actually is better than ever, and actually we're feeling worse than ever. Why is that so? We're neurotic, stressed, unmotivated, and it's killing some of us, and that's not good, all over.
So that's the downside. What I think we need to do is really upgrade how we approach performance, how we approach wellness, how we approach resilience and wisdom for that matter. From, and, and look at some of the science, I don't want this to the older woo woo, that's feel good tree hugging situation.
I think there's some psychological models, there's some neuroscience here that works, and I think there's a positive conscious state that we can naturally. Be in that I think the veterinary profession prevents us from getting to from our own volition, environmental volition, and team volition. And I think if we can actually start to look at some of those things, we can start to alter some of those, and we can naturally come back.
It's like holding a, a, a, a basketball under. Water, it takes a lot of work to keep down there, but if you let it go, it will naturally rise to the top. So what I'm gonna propose that everybody has a capacity and the right to experience those flow states, is what we're going to do.
So what is flow? What are we talking about here? Lots of definitions, a lot of work done by, psychology on this.
It is basically a state between the anxiety and boredom in a skill challenge situation. So just imagine you're skiing down one of your favourite ski slopes. Powdery snow flies up from both sides, and it's like fine white sand.
Conditions are perfect for those of you that have skied. You're entirely focused on skiing as well as you can. You'll know exactly how to move and you know exactly what each movement entails.
There's no future, there's no past, and there's only the present. You feel the snow, your skis, your body, and your consciousness united in a single entity. You're completely immersed in the experience, not thinking about or distracted by anything else.
Your ego dissolves and you become part of what you're doing. This is the kind of experience that Bruce Lee described in his famous the Water, my friend. We've all felt our sense of time vanish when we lose ourselves in activity we enjoy, we start operating, and before we know it, several hours have passed, we spend an afternoon with a book or a friend and forget about the world going by until we notice it's sunset and we haven't eaten our dinner yet.
We go, doing some exercise or riding a bike or surfing, and we don't realise how many hours we've spent. Until the next day when our muscles ache. So it's that total getting lost in the moment.
So this is the, the, the, the sort of classic example of flow, and I'm saying this is to say what we achieve at work, but there's some elements of this we need to figure out. The opposite can also happen, when we have to complete a task we don't want to do. Every minute feels like a lifetime, we can't stop looking at our watch, if the time drags for us.
As the attributed to Einstein goes, put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.
The funny thing is, sometimes, that someone else might really enjoy the same task, but we want to get it over and done with as quickly as possible. So there's an element in here that we are all different in the way we experience flow, and I think this is the key thing I want to want to point out. We just because we've been pointed elite athletes and sort of.
Bunngee jumpers or, you know, base jumpers or high performance skiers say, well, that's flow, they, it's all right for them, but I'm at work. I think there is a state of work that we can get to. What makes us enjoy something so much that we forget about whatever worries we have and while we do it, .
When we, when we the happiest? This is the, the questions we need to ask if we're gonna find out flow. So I just want to delve into that a little bit, and give some, so the person who's done most work on this is, Doctor Mihai Chik Sent Maha, who has the sort of privilege of one of Coolest names on the planet, and almost impossible to spell.
But, he's a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, and he spent a lot of time looking at peak flow experience, particularly in high-performing individuals, such as athletes, such as composers, such as actors, etc. But what he came up with is with key insights into the whole idea, but he Its key one was that, in many ways that the whole effort of humankind through millennia of history has been to recapture or refine these fleeting moments of fulfilment and make them part of everyday existence. It's a basic human drive.
And so it, I think it bears some study and some look at to understand what we're doing here. So I'm gonna sort of refer to some of his work and also some more modern work. Key things he found about flow, flow creates a powerful, intrinsic motivation, not extrinsic mind, it's not about money, it's not about wealth, it's not about achievement, it's an intrinsic motivation.
And it does that through neurochemistry. Actually, it's the chemicals in our brain that actually are, the prime drivers of motivation. Now those intrinsic motivators are purpose.
We're doing something purposeful. It's connection, we're doing it with other people. It's autonomy.
We have some choice and volition in what we do. That's mastery. We're actually getting better at what we're doing.
When it comes to mastery, There is a theory that it takes 10,000 hours to master things. The point about flow and what Chient Mahai found is people who get into flow and spend more time in flow, and it's not a constant state, it's an in and out situation. Can actually perform up to 500% better.
They can master skills so much quicker. And of course, this is absolutely essential for us as vets in a changing world, changing technology, and particularly our graduates who are desperate to master the skills, of veterinary medicine that surgery quickly. And it's a struggle, it's a real hard struggle, and of course, if they're under stress, under under anxiety, their performance is just handicapped and that you can't do it.
So this is really important to get people in. The third factor, and this is really the key one, that he found in his study, and this is a, you can read the books, etc. People with the most flow in their lives are the happiest people on earth.
These people are realising their potential in a normal, natural situation. So this is Kind of important we seep into that. And now flow is one of the terms we can use, but it's it's an easy one to work with and we'll work on that.
So let's see how we go with that. So here's another question for you. There's, as I sort of already mentioned, there seem to be different types of flow, and different ways we can get there.
We tend to think of the hard driven, What we call the hard charger, the adrenaline junkie, which is actually a dopamine junkie in reality, who is driven by performance of getting better, doing better, and this is your, your hardcore sports people, your hardcore skiers and boarders, your base jumpers, the people who are constantly seeking that next high, next thrill, driving themselves, particularly in the sporting arena to do it. And I know some of you are out there probably of that ilk, maybe quite as harsh and that, but you. Take your sport very seriously.
You'll take you, you're a, a driven individual. You're driven by perfectionism often, which is a harsh in a critic at work trying to get you to perform at your very best. And that's one way you get that dopamine release, and take that forward.
I'll talk about that. There are others. So there's also the deep thinker.
These are your more cognitive types. These are people who live in their head, they probably tend to be more introverted. They're usually more creative.
So this might then go into your Composers, your artists, to be honest, it's probably my innate style. I'm probably, very much a deep thinker in terms of the way I get into it. So, just over the last couple of days, putting this presentation together, I've spent a lot of time working through this and adapting and changing it.
Hopefully, I've done the struggle, I'm now in the flow of presenting it to you, and you're just getting sort of more of a stream of consciousness here. And that is me and my flow. That's not for everybody, but there's certain people like that.
The other one is the, the flow, what we call flow go. These are people who find flow in more meditative states, so either in nature, they love their walking, they love being in nature, they love mountains, they love the sea, very much environmental, . The circumstances are important for them, or they could also actually be more your, Wonderers, as in searches, they could be on a spiritual journey, they could be on an intellectual journey, they could have a, a view about the world.
And they live, again, in nature, very, tactile, very kinesthetic in terms of their enjoyment comes from the natural environment. And so meditation is important, yoga is important, and other such, disciplines like that can be ways for these people to get into the flow. And they equally find flow in that way.
The fourth one is what we call crowd pleaser. These are people who need the social context to find flow. They find flow working and, and talking to and interacting with other people, tend to be more extroverted, more gregarious.
They mix and merge with the crowd, they can take the crowd with them. So there's sort of 4 different ways. So again, maybe just in the box, you just mentioned what your flow fia type is, how do you naturally get into flow, because this is important when it comes back to the work situation.
Let's work with our strengths in where we are quite good at actually finding flow. So we don't have to go and find flow where it's not because it's not there for us. So be the hard charge adrenaline junkie.
Like sport I quite like this, but I'm not gonna really push myself like that. But think of the flowgoer, yeah, that's stuff I can get engaged with. But now, how do I bring that to a work situation that I can actually use for my personal, ability to stay in the zone of keeping that right?
For me. So just interesting how people pan out with those. I have the theory that we as vets in vet practise will gravitate towards one or two of these, generally, and therefore we need taxes.
Find out, how we can apply that to a typical veterinary working situation. And the other thing about flow is, it's, we can find our flow, but it's other people that keep us there. So we need to work this in a team environment as well.
Luke, did anyone come up with any comments yet? Yeah, we've got we've got one flowgoer, we've got someone who's come in and said. They are 40% hard charger, 25% deep thinker, 25% flowgoer, and 10% crowd pleaser.
Cool, OK, excellent, and that's, that's very true, we're never one or the other, but we tend to have a tendency towards one or two, in this situation. But that, yeah, very good point. OK, so we're seeing people are identifying that, and of course the trick is, so.
What's the circumstances within which that happens, and that which generally it could be in work, but don't forget, we spend 60%, 80% of their time at work, so it's really important to find this in a work situation. So thanks for those people who contributed to that. We'll see how it gets.
Let me just walk you through the flow state. What generally happens when we're in a state of flow, now we know where it is geography wise, we want to actually find it. So there's 4 key elements of the state of flow, and it's under the acronym of STERSTER.
So number one is stillness or selflessness. This is a state where time flow slows down, the self vanishes, the, the ego collapses around us, and there's a very good reason, and this is important to understand because it's often not what we think it is in terms of how action and awareness merge together. As, as one entity, so we lose past and future.
So in stillness or selflessness, Key thing that happens in our brain, as, and this is really important for us as vets, as vets, we're highly cognitively driven people where we, we think our way through problems, we're problem fixing units, therefore, we have a high logical cognitive input, and of course we're, we're controlled essentially by two things, our amygdala, which is our emotional centre, and two, our prefrontal cortex, which is cognitive centre. In in flow, we actually have a disconnect from our prefrontal cortex. It's called transient hypofrontality, for want of a better term.
It's where we actually disconnect from the thinking and we go into the flow state, which is a natural innate. We actually tap into a higher level of consciousness and thinking. And it's our thinking that actually is dissolved out here, because our thinking is the is the basis of our ego and who we are.
Now we tend to think as highly rational human beings, we can think our way in and out of problems, and therefore sometimes we get a bit frightened. By disconnecting from our prefrontal cortex, because it is the thing that defines us as vets in many ways. So it's kind of an important distinction to know, that that is what's gonna happen and be comfortable living in that space.
And I am sure that people do feel, can get into the flow, feel it as a bit of a strange place because I've stopped thinking, basically. I'm now living on more intuitive baseline, which we're not overly used to. That disconnection kills the inner critic, stops that voice in their head, and that's the most important part of it, no longer ruled by that, voice in that critic, and says it ditches the monkey suit our ego collapses basically.
The suit we wear to present to the world, the way we're viewed, the way we're seen is actually taken out we come, . More objective observers of our self. We lose that subjectivity of being self-conscious, self-aware, etc.
And we become just aware that there's a broader view out here. So that stillness stillness and selflessness is a key part of that. And so I just want people to reflect this, is this something that happens?
Second part of it is timelessness, what we call the deep now is, is, The feeling we have. So it's that loss of past and future. It's actually bringing ourselves into the present, because this is one of the tenets of meditation or, or mindfulness, etc.
Is what it's meant to do, the eating, the raising, the exercise, etc. But what actually happens here, this is a natural state that happens, and I'll explain the biochemistry or the neurochemistry in a bit. Our arousal, And this is an aroused state, not a, not a relaxed state, our attention, so we become highly focused, on a particular settle, and our re reward factors, the things our intrinsic reward factors become very present and they become very natural for us.
We're not hunting for external things. This is all internal stuff. We also become access a huge amount of accurate real-time data.
We can actually. Intuitively make connections, that aren't readily available to us when we're thinking about stuff on focus. So although it's a focused situation, we're focused on a single task, the information around that task is vastly greater, than it was.
Therefore, we have better solutions come out of it. And the key essence is we're not anxious about the future. And we're not guilty or obligated to the past, we can let go of that.
We're actually untethered from the constraints of our emotional values that goes with that stuff as well. So that timelessness is important, and that can last 5 seconds, 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days, depending on how much you spend on spending this, . 4th third part of it is this effortlessness.
It's the, tapping into a higher level of knowledge and consciousness. This is our innate wisdom. I don't want to make this a religious context, particularly, but where it is, there is a higher level of thinking.
We probably use about 5% of our brains. There is another 95% that we're not using most of the time. And this opens up, so it's a bit like the Matrix, really, it's when Neo finds he can actually access the information broadly with him.
So feel the force, you want to go into a Star Wars, but this is a neurochemical flush of . Anandamide, it's dopamine particularly, and endorphins that actually free up our, mental capabilities. And when they do, MRI scans of brains, we're actually flashing our brains across a very much broader, part of our brain, and our prefrontal cortex is actually the least functional in this process.
OK, so it's opened up and made connections to other parts of our brain. Whereas normally in our prefrontal cortex mode, we are dependent on Willpower or the guilt and anxiety to motivate it. They're the things that keep us moving in that state, and they're not particularly useful because they close us down too much.
So we get past having to do it, making ourselves, working hard so that hard charging is OK at one point, but when it comes down to pure grit and willpower, they don't always work so well. And of course, it gives us that access to. This intrinsic motivators, as I mentioned earlier, purpose, connection, or time and mastery, are natural, highly productive, highly useful states of actually, being able to perform their jobs, perform our work, connect with other people, and drive what we do, and take on new skills and mastery is really the key part of this place as well.
And the fourth one is, as a result of those other 3, this vast richness of information that becomes available to us, we are actually far, far more intelligent, intuitively, we're far, far more resilient, and we're far, far more, In a state of, of, of wellness. There is a, what happens in our bodies is that our brains, our hearts, in our guts, our intestines, all have huge neural networks, and they align and become coherent with each other. We spend most of our times this coherent in our thinking, in our heart, .
Neurology and this is why people have heart attacks. This is why the stress gets to people for that. And then they gut and this is why gut problems happen as well.
And there is a coherence that we can actually develop, and that is the truth what meditation is trying to get us to. But the flow state is that natural place of our brain waves, our heart rhythms, our gut processes. And don't forget our guts actually produce more serotonin than our brain does.
The serotonin, that factor that keeps us in our well-being state is actually driven from our intestines and our microbiome. So there's a, a, a, a physical connection with all this stuff as well. So that richness gives us and what we use called an amesis, it reminds us of what we already know.
So we have an innate knowledge, we've just forgotten. We're not using it, and that innate knowledge can keep us forward. Our senses go sharp.
At the moment you're listening to me, you're probably using up about 60 bits per second to just to listen to what I'm saying, and you have another 60 available to drink your coffee and have a cup of tea or whatever you're doing. In this state, it opens us up to millions and millions of bits per second. We can actually intuitively make connections and intuitively become far, far more creative as we go, because the philtres collapse.
Our attention and focus broadened out. Our brains start to fire and make connections across both hemispheres, highly active corpus callosum driving stuff. And we start to see patterns and connections, and that brings the inspiration, the learning, and of course, the, the accelerated mastery that goes with that, because these are hardwired and into the systems, long-term, skill sets and capabilities that we can work with, in the system.
So these, these are the things that come with it. So. The important thing to remember with flow is that it is not a constant state.
I'm in flow, I'm in the zone, and that's great. It's something we weave in and out of, and we've got to get used to that journey as well. So it's a high energy, highly attentive process.
But the, the flow zone as determined by Chient high is this sort of, zone between the challenge and the skill set. So if you. Low skilled but high challenge, you'll get anxious if you're Low challenge but highly skilled, you'll just get bored, but somewhere in the two, those two things meet up and become.
A flow state, and we can stay in there. And as you can see, as the line goes, we, as we extend out the challenge, it pushes us into the anxiety state. So what do we do there?
Well, if we get anxiety, we regress, we slow things down, we get some advice, we make connections, we simplify, we focus on, can we chunk it down to a smaller focus, we, we look at our technique, but we need to be able to slow down. And redefine the outcome and re-chunk it down. That's how we move back into the flow state from an anxiety state.
And then if we actually get the, the skill set, it picks up, but we're not then pushing our challenge base, we'll actually get too easy. So we need to then up the ante when we're feeling that we, we can do this too easy, because this isn't always necessarily a problem with new grads, but it can be as we get older. Or more, more experienced vets, it becomes too easy.
This is just how do we up the ante, mix things up a bit, we self-handicap gives ourselves to challenges, take on new or or new and existing challenges, go and learn a new skills that's what we pick these things up, etc. If you're inflow, that's great, and we should then keep. Focusing on being attentive to that flow state and saying it, but like I said, we go into it, we go out of it, we go into it, and sometimes we just need downtime to stay out of that.
So if the if has anyone got any reflection of how that actually works in veterinary practise, where is it, is it doing surgery, doing consulting, doing specific skills, it's doing CPD, where do we find that because we've got to find these mechanisms to embed in the system that gives people this capability, remembering we all have different skill sets, different capabilities. So what works for us will not necessarily work for somebody else. They have to find their own path in this.
So let me just show you how this flow cycle works in terms of neurochemistry, because it's really quite interesting and this is kind of the key to where we fail to get it. The key thing to the flow cycle. It's around struggle.
We need to actually be challenging ourselves to get it. When we're in struggle, we're in beta wave, which is a fairly high frequency wave. It will naturally produce cortisol and not epinephrine or adrenaline, basically, as drivers for us to focus, .
On that, on what we're trying to achieve, and also give us the, the energy to drive that forward, now that should be a, Over a period of time, we shouldn't be exhausting ourselves. The trouble is, as a new graduate or in a difficult management situation or dealing with people issues or dealing with overwork, etc. We end up in permanent struggle.
We end up in permanent cortisol, adrenaline-driven, process that exhausts this process, and we get caught in the struggle phase, and we don't see ourselves out of it, and we can't actually move on from that. And the, the . What we need to do is find a way.
So here's what getting caught up, that seems to be the trouble with the mental health issue, how we get caught out of struggle. So understanding the cycling point. Stage two of that is we need to break the struggle cycle.
We need to go into what's called the relief release phase. And that's when we kick in a slower wavelength of alpha waves. And this can be a fairly short thing, it could be a longer thing, it could be, how do we take down times?
What happens neurochemically is that we release nitric oxide, nitrous oxide, nitric oxide it's an internal, Biochemical factor that we produce in the hip. When we breathe well, when we breathe properly, we take in oxygen and nitrogen. And you think, well, I need the oxygen.
What's the nitrogen for the nitrogen is actually what forms nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is like a flushing mechanism. It comes in and it flushes the cortisol and the norepinephrine out of the system and reduces those dreadlocks.
So you get a drop off of cortisol, drop off of norepinephrine or adrenaline, and the nitric oxide creates a flush. Now, we need to go into release phase, and I'm gonna talk about release triggers in a bit, but this is often the Parking it and leaving it, having a good night's sleep, it's going for a walk, it's things that happen in the shower when you have a bright idea. It's taking the dog for a walk, it's doing that bit of now television is not one of those things, I would say, but it's those release triggers.
Where you go and do something almost completely different if you ever had the experience, and you come and wow, the problem is solved, in your head somewhere else. So that is a brainwave shift. And I would say one of the key mechanisms here is breathing.
Just purely breathing exercise. So this is where meditation again kicks in. This is where things like box breathing kicks in, this is where Wim Hof breathing kicks in, this is where yoga kicks in, because most of those, if you look at any of these sort of Mechanisms for finding a way to a conscious meditative state is often based on purely breathing, and I would suggest to all of you to have a look at it, nice little app on your phones is called Box Breathing, BOX Breathing, have a look at that, and it's about inhaling, holding, exhaling, holding.
And it's a simple thing. And it's, it's, you don't need the app to do it. You can actually teach stuff quite easy.
But it's a, it's a really powerful piece, because what it does, it actually builds up the nitric oxide in the system, and often that's been exhausted and you don't get through it. And it's single nostril breathing, there's all sorts of different ways of doing it. Just find something that suits yourself.
But equally, in a stress situation, stopping, focusing your breathing, taking 10 deep breaths through your nose, into your chest, and then Focusing on positive emotional state, gratitude and humility are the two best ones. Do that for 10 seconds, do it for 5 minutes. It will radically change your state and put you into a release state quite quickly.
Now, I'm not saying that will guarantee put you into a flow state, but you've quite often got that. Now flow state is the natural response to the course of of flush, the nitric oxide takes all that out. And the next thing that appears, if the conditions are right, is we get a huge flush of dopamine.
Endorphins and anandamide. Now, dopamine is the, addictive drug. It brings very clear focus.
It reduces the noise, it creates the hypofrontality, it lowers the inner critic, it stops that thinking, it increases our pattern recognition, it actually expands the thinking across our brain to those multiple, hemispheres and across our corpus callosum. And then theide creates lateral thinking that he uses more of our brain, and that he gives us more access to the resources and the riches, and endorphins, of course, are painkillers. They're pain relief.
They're the things released, through drug-induced, flow states. So if, if people using microdoses of LSD and other such things are trying to mimic these things, but it's quite a natural process. These are theta gamma rays.
This is typically you'll experience these just before you go to sleep. But unfortunately we fall asleep then and we miss out on the process. So this is the conscious level of arousal, it's not relaxation, it's quite an aroused state, we're using lots of our brain but in a very calm state.
Now the thing about the flow state. Is driven by dopamine, and dopamine is the same thing that is released when you smoke and when you gamble, and when you use drugs, etc. So it and and alcohol in particular.
So it is a highly addictive state, which is why our hard charger types are constantly trying to find that next big buzz, etc. So used in moderation is what we need to do, but we don't stay there forever because we can't. Our brains wouldn't cope with it, so we go in and out of phosates but in.
No more often we do that, more often we cross that threshold, the more productive we become. Now, here's a really critical piece. There's a recovery phase, which is Delta brain wave, which is the really slow brain waves, the slowest of them all.
And this is in the struggle phase, you're in a highly sympathetic state. So your sympathetic nervous system was on fire. It's driving hard, it's getting.
Driving the cortisol, we release that. The flow state is a lovely balance, a lovely perfect, coherent balance between parasympthetic and sympathetic, slightly on the parasympathetic side. We're sort of in a relaxed state, doing well, but see, working both sides of our autonomic nervous system.
The recovery phase is the, parasympathetic phase, deep parasympathetic. We're dropping the full recovery here. Now, this is where serotonin and oxytocin become available.
The, the dopamine reduces the serotonin picks up, that's the well-being drug, that's what makes feel better. This is what Prozac's based on is actually maintaining your serotonin levels so you feel OK about life. But of course, it's not a flow state, it is actually a recovery state, and therefore staying in a serotonin state isn't good because the Other things happen, we feel good, but we've got to come down off that as well.
So often this is an emotional roller coaster of recovery, when we're feeling a bit down, and this is where the anxiety kicks in. I think this is where people mistake mental health problems for purely a normal natural state of recovery from. High performance, high levels, that we do get at work but don't recognise.
So the recovery is absolutely important with this, and I think the key problem we have, we don't give ourselves recovery phase. One, it's difficult going to, and two, it's, we, we find it awkward. We find it difficult because of the emotional roller coaster goes with it.
It's you feeling down for a day or two after or a couple of hours after you've had a good time. It's often the post-holiday blues, it's often the Sunday night dread, it can be the Friday. Or sometimes on a on a weekend you just crash and burn and don't want to do anything and that's really when you should be doing in public.
This is where measuring your coherence is really important. One way of doing that is through heart rate, variability is a key way of actually looking at your either sympathetic or parasymptic state. If anyone's interested, to contact me and I'll talk more about it.
But that's the cycle, that you need to go, and it is a cycle that has to go around the full way. You can't shortcut it. You can't jump from one to the other.
You have to move through that. So. Key things in here, flow is an outcome of elegant struggle and going into struggle with an attitude of moving stuff forward.
It is reliant on having good recovery. We can't struggle until we recover, and I think this is where we miss out. We, we don't go through the recovery phase of finding those recovery moments in life, and that can be hard when you're under understaffed and overworked and everything else, but this is important for yourselves as leaders and managers, but also for your teams as a leader and manager of teams.
You've got to build that stuff in. It's not just drive, drive, drive, you're fine. But everyone's recovery phase is different as well.
This is the key thing. You can't be predictive about what they do. The most important part of this is, how do we find these release triggers, to get out of the struggle and break that through, OK.
And it's kind of this triad of activity that if we get those right, flow states will naturally happen. And that's really the point I want to get to. We're missing out environmentally, team level, and personally of actually focusing on those elegantly struggling and seeing struggle as an important, this is a growth mindset factor.
Making sure the recovery process is fully engaged and we do know what our recovery phases are and where we are at it, it's a bit like exercise, you need to recovery to build muscle, etc. But these release triggers from the struggle of not just saying go at it, go at it, go, go find some break from that sort of thing as well. So it's incredibly important that we do do this, and I'm not, but there's a lot of other information we can cover around this, but people in flow are 6 times more likely to be engaged at work, 8% more productive and 15%.
Quit your job. This is what we're looking for in terms of, working, in teams. This is what we want to happen and re-engage with people at work.
And that's really why I think this is an important piece. Now, that was sort of a through this is some research I'm doing, in practises looking at how this works and how we can find this game. I haven't got all the answers yet.
I really don't know what's going on. But this is what I want you to think about, what are your particular, and they will be individual to you and now we can give you some more information around this in another webinar, your flow generating activities. You know, you're focused and energised, so this is reflecting on, on times when this is happening.
They will concentrate on the activity without interruption. Now, that's a biggie as well, having this ability not to be pulled and pushed across. And as a manager, that's just what happens all the time.
It's actually protecting your time. So in our platinum groups, we spend a lot of time on time management and time protection of how do we keep Your mental state, without interruptions of key important. Aligned engaged with the task at hand, so focusing on one thing, having one task, you say, well, that's just impossible.
This doesn't happen at work like that. I appreciate that, but there's a mental state of that and like I said, it's not you who keeps you in a flow state, it's your team that allows you to be in a flow state. So this is a team effort, and I'd be happy to talk about that in another webinar as we go on.
Knowing what your strengths are, knowing what you're good at, knowing what your natural energies are, and those energies are creative or people or. Connections or systems, and then we're all different in that way. And that's another thing we can look at is your natural strength state of where you actually, the territory you'll find flow in, more naturally.
You feel that you're in control, have autonomy over an activity, of choices within that, and choices come from either, the task you do. The time you do it, the team you work with, or the technique you use. So we have different ways of granting and different people need different, Views of autonomy as well, immersion in the task and being in the moment.
So again, this is a lack of distractions. And of course, what you will notice is that you no longer are under subjective scrutiny of your own thinking process. You're actually now free to lose track of that and what you let go of is probably most important, in this process in those ways and means.
So like I said, I haven't come with too many answers here, but we're, I think we're on the right track. So here's my final question of the evening, . Thinking about you at work for the last, say, 2 or 3 months, you've had holidays, well, that's slightly different, but at work for the last 2 or 3 months, out of 100%, 100% being totally in flow, totally on fire, really loving what you're doing, totally engaged with work, and being highly productive.
To 0, which means totally out of it, burnt out and really ready to throw in the whole thing at 0%. What's your percentage of inflow, so if you could just shove a percent. Each in the comment box out of 100, just put it in there.
What's your state of flow over the last 3 months? What did that look like? We've got somebody who comes straight in with 85%.
Well done. 75% got people who. That was 65.
Let's go. OK. And the danger of this is those that aren't gonna think it's going, oh, I should be higher than this, so we naturally start to kick it up.
But it is just an interesting question. There is actually a we can do a questionnaire and actually assess this. We can do it a little bit more scientifically, but what we found in this pure gut reaction, to what and understand how and where am I, is as good an indicator.
And what you should do is once a week, ask yourself that question. How's My flow being this week. Equally, if you're managing a team, ask them the same question.
Because if you're achieving what you're achieving now with that, say, 65% flow, what could you achieve with 75%? What difference would that make? And if you, if you ask your team and they're scoring 50 and 60%, if you could push them up to 160 and 70, what difference would that make to your business?
What difference would that make to your productivity? And I'm just talking about money, I'm talking about the client care, I'm talking about the patient care, the whole thing. So it's a really important concept.
So it's worth sharing some of this with your team and just asking this question. So in, once we, at least our monthly meetings, we say, what's our flow factor for this month? How are we doing?
And everyone's very honest about it, and they'll tell us why they're in and out of the flow, and this is an important factor. Any others coming in, Luke? OK, so just background, now these flow triggers are important, I won't go through in any in any detail, but you can see that.
I believe that there is opportunity in the work environment that we can actually engage more flow triggers. Now, these will vary from people to people, something more important matter. So focused attention, clear goals, immediate feedback.
What's all that about? Talking to people, having a clear sense of where people are going, have some thing for people to aim for, setting goals for people, particularly new grads, love structure, and then giving them good quality feedback. The challenge skill ratio, so helping people manage the challenge but also upskilling, so this confidence, confidence things high consequences.
Now that doesn't mean life and death, but high emotional consequences, high social consequences, high physical consequences can be part of that rich environment, give people mix up but get people in and out of the building, have different sort of ways deep embodiment that that means about using your physicality to do things, so skiers and parachutists, all these things use deep embodiment because they're using highly physical and environmental things, but we do that as well. Surgery is a deep embodiment process. It's the physical capability of actually manipulating instruments and, and, and tissue, etc.
And that involves serious concentration. Those share clear goals again, come back in. And that's shared goal.
So this is a group of people now having a common set of goals. So it's really just setting up your business goals and purpose and vision statements for your business. Communication comes into that, broad terms there, familiarity.
I say we've been doing something you're comfortable with, and doing it repeatedly, but doing better each time. Dissipation, risk is actually a flow factor of actually some people are driven by hard charges like a degree of risk or danger on the edge of, I'm not saying you take that too far since the control listening now always say yes doesn't mean always say yes, it just means saying yes to the moment. And say let's have a go, see how we go, and then creativity.
So I'm working on how do we put those low triggers in place. What do they look like in practise, in a busy veterinary practise, and then who do they apply to because it's not the same thing for everyone's you. So that's kind of it.
What I am looking at is this flowing practise, and I'm looking at lots of different levels. I see the current economy in a safe state of flow and a dramatic transient change of the economy moving into a very much accumulated phase of the corporatization and consolidation of the business, industry flow changes all that market. So everything has a flow, cash flow, team flow, personal flow.
It is predicated upon individual personal flow. That's how why I've started with this particular webinar. I want to sort of expand this, theme as we go on and take a little bit further and work that out.
So things are gonna look it blocks the flow. Why don't we stay in this state? Why don't we have this, and I think it's a key thing for us, and that's I think where the positive point of this is, we're all there, we all have this, we don't have to go looking for it, we have it.
What's in the way, what's blocking our view of this and what's blocking it for our teams, and if we can actually release that, we have unlimited potential to take these things forward. And I would say this to you as managers, leaders of people, leaders of teams, it's probably the branch you're hanging on to at the moment. There's probably a fixedness around your thinking of what the way things work, and this is you getting into some sense, finding new creative options, working with.
Yeah, people like us or other people who can help you find that state, and we've got lots of tools that can diagnose your personal flow, your team flow, and your industry flow. We've got some diagnostics that work with that, which we're finding really quite interesting to to make those shifts. And that's our promise for things.
I will be presenting more of this at our annual conference for vet dynamics in September. So if anyone's interested in that, it's for independent practises particularly, but if people want to come along that, we're gonna be sharing some of these skills, . Our platinum practise programme is now 10 years old, and we're going to be celebrating that and actually looking at the progress and changes we've made over the 10 years and take that forward.
So on that note, I'd like to say thanks for listening guys. I'd be really interested in any questions or feedback, and thank you to our sponsors in particular, for, putting that forward. So Luke, I'll open it up and if anyone's got any comments, if they'd like to put those forward, that'd be great.
Thank you, Adam. That's very interesting. Whilst waiting for people to put questions in, I definitely think I'm somewhere between hard charger and deep thinker myself.
OK, good. How does that manifest? I mean, you, you're obviously doing this sort of work, so you're highly technical in some ways.
Yeah, well, that's as well. Yeah, yeah, I run half marathons and marathons. Hobby and then I can't conceive anyone having a hobby like that.
Yeah, and then a day job as anyone don't know webinar I'm the accountant here, so my job is, yeah, I'm not, I'm not an extrovert, you know, I sit there and I think about things and get get absorbed in modelling fancy spreadsheets. So and then yeah I mean and that's a different sort of job from from the vets we're talking to, but in any job, if you know that you can actually work your. Life balance around those two polarities to keep yourself most of the time, in a good state, I'd imagine.
Yeah, 11 of the things I thought when you were, when, when you're going through about identifying what your flow percentage was, is I thought it was quite difficult for myself to work out when I'm in the flow or not. Are there any, is there any benefit or tools for managers to be able to recognise when the team is in flow, rather than asking them, are you in your flow or what percentage? Being able to sit there and go, OK, they're in their flow zone, you could say, and being able to say, OK, that's when they, that's when they hit their best to increase team productivity and be able to recognise it in their employees without having to ask, is there anything out there?
Well, we, we use a very short questionnaire and look in the last sort of 3 or 4 questions around personal flow. It asks 3 or 4 questions around team flow because it is a contextual thing. I can be in flow, but if the rest of the team around me are not, that's gonna disrupt my capability.
And then also life flow where you've got a bit of sense of purpose and direction as well, and that's sort of slightly bigger context. So they're relatively simple questions, you score them 1 to 10 and you've kind of To get a view of where you are, that gives you a score out of 100, basically. And that's more slightly scientific way of doing it.
And we've done that. But it's, it, it's really interesting. People's intuitive guess is usually pretty good.
It is actually tapping into the exactly the same intelligence we've been talking about. Yes, it's interesting. We've got a couple of comments, .
Kiev says thank you Alan, enjoy Australia. Su says thank you very much, it's been very absorbing. I thought king tonight.
Excellent. And the Dooley has said. They're gonna try and stay in the flow, breaking habits, being able to break habits, it's gonna be so powerful to get your head around the flow and be able to change habits unless you try and improve productivity and to keep keep revisiting.
But yeah, yeah, good come out. I would suggest focus on the flow, the productivity will come out of it. Yeah, will be the, the product of or the outcome of, get yourself in a personal state of.
If people want any help with that discussion, just get in, get in touch with us or speak to one of our coaches. I've said we've got tools that can actually start to define your own. Territory of flow and where a good place for you to start would be a lot of some of the clients out there would have done our talent dynamics profiles, etc.
What I would hope to do 100% I present a lot of this conference, but also on hopefully another webinar, I'll take this to the next step as well. So thank you for that. Mark said he thinks he needs to work from home a bit more to improve his flow.
Exactly. Well, that's a great one because often. And we, we don't do that as vets because we feel guilty.
They all just think I'm starving. But home is a great place to stay in the zone when you've got some deep thinking to do or if you want that lack of inter interruption. That is absolutely essential.
And if you're going to stay home to do it, do it for sure. And in that sort of zone, we're talking about being in an environment, do you think the industry consolidation and everyone being forced into sort of different, people being forced into different specialisms or fitting in a sort of corporate structure is is preventing people's flow because they having to fit by the book almost or fit that specialism specifically so it's not so. People can't fit, they have to fit a box.
OK, yeah, interesting question. I don't think it's corporatization per se that will exacerbate innate problems. The innate problem is that we were never very good at working to our strengths in the first place.
People select specialisms, and I'm not sure what criteria they picked that, and that could be management criteria, management specialism, that's just clinical specialisms, etc. And there is a massive amount, a massive amount of the wrong people doing the wrong jobs. Because they think they have to.
We think we're omnicompetent or that's, well, no one else would do it, so I'll do it. And they just shouldn't be doing these jobs. It's a massive problem, independent corporate, etc.
And we're expected to do a whole range of jobs that really we're not suited to. And if that's where team comes in, because within a team, you can cover a lot more of that work and, and people can end up in their right zone of work. Interesting.
Charlotte said, she often finds her brain solves problems when she stops trying too hard or or she's coming too bored or frustrated. Yeah, classic example, if you've got a problem, take the dog for a walk. And and there is always a positive .
Piece of this, and it's a letting go technique of sleeping or not or defining your issue as clearly as possible in your head and asking the universal to say, here's my problem, I needn't ask that, and then forgetting about it, going and doing something completely different. And that we've all had the experience of having a thought to shower or you know, you're going out for a walk, etc. And it comes out, but you can actually make that process happen by pitching the question.
Often it's just serendipitous that we get an answer, but we can actually force that process, and that's to sleep on it overnight, take the dog for a walk, etc. So there's lots of positive things we can actually enact in this process, because that innate wisdom is there that Charlotte's talking about. She's got access to it at any time.
She's just got to ask. Mina says in California, productivity. It can afford it, there's definitely a lot of productivity, .
The, yeah, there's, yeah, I think Crusade there's there's definitely there, there's not much productivity in California apart, apart from when they're surfing on the waves. Surfs up, so we'll get more done. OK, I like the idea.
That can be, again, that's a lovely release mechanism. So we should honour our time, you know, work-life balance. I don't think exists.
It's, it's sort of, it's just stuff. And the way of staying in flow and being productive in that is, is how we find that. I know we're going to turn up to work.
I know there's animals and people we've seen and all that sort of stuff. So how do we adapt that? How do we take that back to practise?
So thanks for that really good comment. And then I've got, I've got one other question, . What did you showed your graph of the coming in and out of flow going from anxiety to boredom in and out, do you think all a range of different media and social media and everything that's around?
It's aggravating and reducing people's flow or ability to stay in flow because they're constantly too, too distracted all the time. OK, well, do you want another webinar? Absolutely, yes, I would say it is, it is, it is the external harsh critic is social media because it's we're comparing, comparing ourselves totally with that, it doesn't, it's constant, constant interruption, never lets us off the hook.
And I would suggest to people, have a techno-free day once a week. Put your phone in the drawer and put it away. I know that's almost impossible for some people, it's impossible for my, my children, they can't do that, because they live on their phones.
But that whole interference of technology, social media, email, and most of us struggle with emails at best of times, even I'm guilty of that, even holidays, I've had my phone off until the last two days, but I've had this to, to, to put on, so I've had my phone back on. In bed last night or just this morning, at 3 o'clock in the morning, if you just don't get a break from it and you've got to force that break and make that break from technology and from social media, and all the things that go with it. We need to put some trauma because that is the constant, constant harsh critic, interrupters that keep us totally out of float.
I think it's a huge, huge improvement. OK, I I think we're done. OK.
Thank you very much, Alan. That was very interesting and thank you to your team at Vet Dynamics, so as far as Group 8 Legal and Simply Health, for sponsoring it, so that's great. Thank you very much.
We see you again soon. OK, see you next month. Take care, bye.