How to get into a state of Flow? Interview with Raúl Ballesta

Interview with the author of "Be water, my friend: strategies to flow in sport and in life".

Raúl Ballesta Barrera is a Sport and Organizational Psychologist oriented towards Positive Psychology, a current that focuses on the potential of human beings.

Considering that in the world of sports, attention management is a large part of what leads us to excel, it is normal that the state of Flow, a state of consciousness first described in the 70s, generates interest in him. But Ballesta believes that knowing this psychological phenomenon and the methods to enter it can help us not only in sports, but in many other facets of life.

Strategies to get into Flow: the testimony of Raúl Ballesta

"Be water, my friend: strategies to flow in sport and in life", written by Raúl Ballesta and his colleagues Marta Román, Juan Carlos Domínguez, Marta Ocaña and Juan Arza Mondelo, is the first book that deals with strategies to develop the state of Flow from the current of Positive Psychology, and counting with testimonies of elite athletes such as David Meca, Ruth Beitia or Jordi Villacampa.

Bertrand Regader: Your story highlights your experience as a swimmer. How do you think that what you know now about sport and life fits with what you knew in your years in the pool? I'm referring to knowledge that appears in the book that you might have known at a more intuitive level back then, for example.

Raúl Ballesta: As you say, when you compete the learning you can have, especially mentally, is very intuitive. When I was swimming there were many things that I did not know and that if I had known them could have helped me to overcome situations that at that time were very difficult for me. For example, overcoming competitive anxiety, learning to focus my attention and, most importantly, learning to get into Flow.

Sometimes we think about what we need to know how to face challenges effectively and only accumulative resources that can help us come to mind: having more knowledge, more means, more money, more contacts... However, the book gives a lot of importance to something that escapes this accumulative logic: attention. How do you think this element affects our well-being?

The proper control of attention is a very powerful tool to improve our quality of life in any field. We only need to become aware of our thoughts and how they affect us to realize the importance they have on our well-being and health in general. Controlling the automatic thoughts we generate is a very important step to improve our emotional well-being and we can only achieve this by learning to focus our attention.

In the book there is a chapter on self-confidence, do you think it is an aspect that we tend to underestimate when we think about solving day-to-day problems?

It is possible. Realistic self-confidence helps people to be more successful in the projects they undertake. It has been shown that people with greater self-confidence have what we call "presence" which is in turn perceived by other people. They can express without hesitation points of view different from what is expected, they are persistent in defending what they deeply believe in, they are decisive and capable of making decisions under pressure. People with high self-confidence believe that they can take the helm of their lives and surely for this reason they do so.

A good part of this work is also dedicated to talk about the importance of attention management and, in general, of states of consciousness. The state of Flow, for example, involves both a special state of consciousness and an almost instinctive and natural form of problem solving. How would you summarize these experiences?

Entering Flow is an automatic thing that happens when the right circumstances occur. When you enter Flow you act without thinking, automatically feeling a special connection with the task you are carrying out and executing it in the best way you are capable of. When you enter Flow you give the best of yourself, of what you are capable of. The main problem is that if only one of the aspects that make up the state of Flow fails, entering Flow is impossible. That is why you have to work previously and constantly on these aspects so that it ends up happening instinctively. Something similar would be when you learn to drive. At the beginning you have to think down to the smallest detail and focus your attention in the right way to those aspects relevant to drive a car and not crash at the first lamppost. With constant practice (especially in the beginning) and time, the brain automates the correct steps and it becomes very easy to drive a car.

Managing expectations is also important. In the pages of the book there is a point in which you expressly talk about the need to be realistic, to find a balance between what we want and what we can do. Do you have any advice on how to get this kind of forecast right?

Finding a balance between the challenge and our abilities to face it deserves some time of reflection beforehand. The objective knowledge of oneself is key to know if we have these skills or if on the contrary we have to work first on some deficiency to face the challenge with guarantees. Having said that, we should not be afraid of failure because we can learn a lot from mistakes and defeats. When should we stop pursuing it? When it is no longer exciting to try again.

It is interesting that the book has the participation of several elite athletes. Why do you think their perspective is inspiring to many people who are not involved in sports and what do you think they can teach us?

It is a way to capture the reader's attention on psychological aspects with which they will surely feel identified. I remember how I got goose bumps when David Meca told me how he felt the sensation of Flow while he was swimming from Jativa to Ibiza. I understood that that moment had been very special for him and that it was worth all the effort.

The contributions of the other athletes are equally inspiring and teach you that behind the success there are feelings that in many cases are more important to them than the medal itself. Maybe we cannot aspire to win any Olympic medal but we can aspire to feel the same Flow sensations that they have felt.

Within the pages of the book, topics such as the relationship between the states of the mind and the states of the rest of the body are discussed. This is seen, for example, in the sections devoted to relaxation and breathing exercises. Do you think we tend to think of these two areas as totally separate?

That may very well be the case. We tend to compartmentalize everything because our Western thinking is focused on it, to break things down into their parts and work on them separately. The mind-body concept tends to become more and more holistic as Eastern thinking takes hold in our society. In India, for example, they have been practicing meditation for more than two thousand years. New trends in positive psychology and Mindfulness teach us that what we think has a physical effect on our body and emphasize the benefits of daily meditation practice on our emotional and physical health.