27 Oct Find Your Flow: When Did You Last Feel It?
When was the last time you were so absorbed in your work, your art, or whatever gives your life meaning that you hardly wanted to stop? Maybe you were writing, painting, or speaking. Maybe you were simply moving through a workday, fully engaged and enjoying the pace.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave this experience a name: flow. It’s the sense of floating, with your energy moving in whatever direction you choose.
I remember feeling this way in one of the first workshops I ever gave. I knew the material, but I was nervous about my delivery. Then I walked into the room and the team I was working with was so warm, engaged, and fun that my nerves melted. Every joke landed. Every exercise worked. Participants gave me steady, immediate feedback, and on the drive back to the office, my co-worker praised my facilitation. The whole session simply flowed.
Life has seasons like that. It also has seasons when flow feels out of reach: after a major loss, a serious illness, having children, menopause, or burnout, to name just a few. Life ebbs and flows. So how do you find your way back when it’s gone? How do you meet your work and relationships in a healthy way without losing yourself in the process?
Why flow is worth finding
Csikszentmihalyi found that flow brings real benefits. It builds self-confidence, it enriches how we experience life, and it helps us grow into more complex people, doing something that is uniquely ours.
How to find it again
His advice for regaining flow is to systematically restore the conditions that created your engagement in the first place. Start by asking what your original goals were. Sometimes the answer is that the goal itself has changed. For me, after cancer, that meant discovering what my new direction would be. Partly, that came through reading the book Picking Up the Pieces: Moving Forward After Surviving Cancer and working with a wonderful post-cancer counsellor.
Then look for your “flow channel,” the space where the challenge is just slightly beyond your current skill. Too much challenge overwhelms you, and too little bores you. The sweet spot is in between.
A few other ingredients help:
- Seek feedback—find someone to run your ideas by.
- Eliminate distractions—limit your time on social media and emails. And do like I like to do—go to a coffee shop somewhere to get away from your normal workspace, or work in a library.
- Give yourself permission to make mistakes or create/write that “imperfect first draft.”
Pause, Renew, Rise Differently
That’s the heart of our upcoming retreat in March. Find Your Flow: Pause, Renew, Rise gives you the chance to step away to more than a coffee shop. We’ll be meeting at a phenomenal ocean-front retreat centre in Costa Rica. With the most beautiful grounds and beach as your backdrop, what might you see more clearly?
You’ll renew through rest, restorative scenery, yoga, meditation, Pilates, cold plunge, movement, time in nature, and ocean air. The colours you will see are almost indescribable. You’ll rise differently through workshops that explore research-based rituals, practices, and skills, including how to:
- Calm your nervous system and cultivate inner peace and self-compassion
- Practice mindfulness and presence
- Build sustainable performance and set healthy boundaries
- Use gratitude, journaling, and visualization
- Strengthen resilience and positive emotion
Is This Retreat For You?
This one is for women. It’s for you if:
- You’ve achieved a lot, but your old ways of working are no longer serving you.
- You take care of others but feel depleted on the inside.
- You’ve built a successful career and learned to navigate environments that weren’t designed for women. It is taking its toll.
- You’re tired of being the one to hold it all together for everyone.
- You’ve earned your place at the table, but you wonder if success must feel this exhausting.
- You’re an emerging leader and you want to do things differently than the generation ahead of you did.
If you recognized yourself in even one of these, this retreat is for you.
When and where: March 14-20, 2027, at an ocean-front retreat centre in Costa Rica.
Spaces are limited to 20 women. The first 10 women to register save $1000 off, or register by November 30th, whichever comes first.
Have questions? Email me at deb@deborahconnors.com.
Find your flow with us in Costa Rica.
It will change you.
Pause. Renew. Rise Differently.
