3 Keys to Unlocking Constant Flow in Every Area of Your Life!
Understanding the energy sources that power your ability to flow with ease
I have this belief about business and life:
To achieve greatness in your professional or personal life you need to be operating in an optimized state. A state of flow. A place where challenges don’t feel challenging, fear is abolished and your whole being is working as one to accomplish something with zero doubt about the outcome.
When I refer to the “whole being” I’m referring to the three main energy sources in the body: the brain, the heart and the gut. And when I’m referring to “optimized” I mean constantly fuelling each source, working to better manage each source and reviewing each source regularly to make sure it is operating correctly.
When your brain, your heart and your gut are working together cohesively it creates this communion of self that leads to a higher functioning state that achieves incredible results. Not only that but you can understand and react to your emotions better, attract more positivity in your life and feel, act, see and live more clearly.
Can you imagine the possibilities if you could tap into this “oneness” state more frequently?
You’ve been there before; you’re shooting lights out in your high school basketball playoff game, your absolutely crushing the $100k client pitch, or you’re feeling 100% whole and yourself on an important date with a really special person. That’s flow state.
I know what flow state feels like, but what is involved, what is happening while I’m in it and what lead me to that state of flow has always been a mystery to me. It’s rarely broken down in an accessible way that helps me truly understand how it works.
Now, I’m no scientist, this is just the best explanation I could come up with for me, in order to make more sense of that state of flow, so that maybe I can tap into it more often.
Here goes nothing…
Years ago, business was all about the brain. You needed to be smart to get the job done. From there it moved to ability-what tangible skills enabled you to get the job done? Today business is all about creativity. How can you creatively solve a problem to get the job done. But where does creativity come from?
It comes from the heart…
When we think of the heart centre we think of feelings, emotions and personal depths. What we don’t typically understand is how the heart drives the mind to create. And since we’re all creative beings (at heart 😉), we’re all constantly communicating with our hearts to help us build, achieve and construct our lives, we just aren’t accepting that the heart as a role in it at all. Once we understand the messages we can use that communication from the heart to channel an insane amount of energy to achieve whatever it is we’re moved to create.
So, Why Do We Need Flow?
With over 600,000 company start-ups a year we are inundated with content, products and messaging. And if everyone is operating under a similar MO, trying to pump out the next innovative creative product or service then we’re in for a tough ride.
So, how can you gain an edge so you’re operating at the highest level, giving you more of an opportunity to achieve that greatness you long for? By powering your brain, heart and gut into that state of oneness. Manifesting that communion of self that will help guide you to finding truth, worth and purpose within and around you and clearly identify what is important, why it’s important and how to get it done.
Merging your three energies leads to greater life and personal satisfaction. The happier and more fulfilled you are, the more your creative-juices flow into your professional life. This spillover will give your career the edge you’ve been looking for and give you reason to succeed.
But this whole idea of “channeling the 3 energy sources” seems a bit esoteric doesn’t it?
It does, but the truth is it is happening to us in every waking moment, in every decision we make, but we tend to ignore it because we’ve been conditioned to only use our brains to guide us. Once that changes, once you start to understand how your heart and gut are involved in every move you make, you can tap into that flow and turn it on and off with ease.
Let me explain this a little more from my point of view…
Understanding the Power of these 3 Energy Sources To Channel Constant Flow
If you want to reach your highest potential, unlocking hidden creativity reserves and achieving greatness across all facets of your life, then it’s imperative to get into the zone and tap into the 3 main energy sources of your being. These 3 energy sources are really knowledge sources. They each contain intelligent pathways that guide our day-to-day lives. Each of these sources are almost like individual brains that contain information to help us not only survive, but if understood, thrive! Let’s dive into each one to see how they work.
The Cognitive Brain
We all know the role the brain plays in achieving greatness. It’s the library of your life, cataloguing all that you’ve learned, your skills, your consciousness, your language centre and your thoughts. The brain is largely responsible for cognitive thinking and analytical thinking. When it comes to making sense of the world, the brain is your guide to understanding what’s going on around you. Drawing in information from the senses and other sources of intelligence within your body (heart and gut brains) to form a rational conclusion.
Your brain has a separate relationship with your heart and your gut. It’s not a one-sided dictatorship as we once thought, where the brain governs over your internal organs. There is the heart-brain and gut-brain connection. Like all relationships, cultivating them is the secret to strengthening the ties. Your brain is crucial to achieving success; it’s the whiteboard for your ideas and thoughts. While your heart brings the creativity and passion to the table and your gut brings the courage and motivation you’ll need to get sh*t done, whether that job is finding life satisfaction or coming up with the next big idea. Training your brain to understand the signals your heart and gut are sending takes a bit of work, but can really transform you and keep you in a state of complete awareness (or flow) more consistently.
Follow Your Heart Brain
Whenever someone talks about the heart, it’s always linked to your emotional centre. We refer to the heart as both a physical beating organ and as our emotional epicenter. Only now, science is beginning to prove that the heart is more than just a pump. The heart has a brain of its own with a cluster of 40 thousand neurons, forming what’s known as your ‘brain heart’. Your heart is intelligent and can sense, make decisions, process information, learn and store memories. This is in addition to its primary role of detecting hormonal or chemical changes in the body so it can transmit information to the brain. This is important because the quality of the emotions (negative, positive or chaotic) will dictate what chemicals the brain releases.
An amazing example of this is in one study, a room full of people were shown either a negative gory image or a positive image that invoked happiness. Participants had their heart beat measured while they were shown each image. Throughout the process they were shown variations of positive and negative and what’s incredible is that the heart responded to the image, ahead of it actually being shown in every scenario. Demonstrating a level of precognition — a level of knowledge or understanding before an event takes place. Part of why this happens is because the heart absorbs vibrations outside of the body, interprets them, then sends this information to the brain.
This precognition can be used to anyone’s advantage; you just have to recognize your heart is capable of more than just beating and practice reading your heart’s intelligence. You could walk into a boardroom, read the room’s interest before even beginning your pitch and tweak your delivery based on the emotional level of the room. Just be aware that your heart also produces an electromagnetic field capable of transmitting your emotions; based on your heartbeat rhythm. Anger is erratic, appreciation is steady, as an example. So if you’re feeling nervous, your heartbeat will be off its usual cadence and your body will mimic your emotions; sweaty palms, nervous tells. That is your heart trying to tell you something. People around you can see it and feel it too (whether they acknowledge it or not). Your emotions are contagious, that’s why one person’s foul mood can bring down even the sunniest of dispositions.
If you want to operate at your peak, you’ll need to achieve a state of psychophysiological coherence, a level of complete mind-body-heart harmony fuelled by positivity, gratitude and love. Sustained positive emotions increase your productivity by removing mental blocks for clearer thinking and levelling out emotions so you can achieve your goals. This is because when you feel good, it synchronizes with your bodily functions so you can accomplish more. As you can see this is more than just ‘faking it ‘till you make it’, you actually have to be completely in charge of your emotions from your heart so you’re constantly channelling that energy source to guide your brain to make the best decisions possible, consciously and sub-consciously.
Trust Your ‘Gut’ Brain
Physically speaking the gut-brain axis is the way your gut communicates with the brain. Your brain has 100 billion neurons while the gut contains 500 million that utilize your nervous system to transmit information. The vagus nerve, is the longest nerve connection. Interestingly, people that suffer from gastrointestinal problems like Crohn’s Disease, have decreased vagus functioning. The healthiest athletes on the world have strong vagus function. The healthiest athletes also talk about the flow state constantly, and can seemingly channel flow at will. There’s a reason for that.
New groundbreaking research has revealed that the gut-brain is actually far more connected than we originally thought. In less than a blink of an eye your gut sends info to your brain via your neural highway — way faster than we imagined. The gut is the base of our identity, it’s responsible for self-preservation by supporting immune function and it mobilizes you so you muster up the courage or ‘guts’ to do something. Things like intestinal permeability or ‘leaky gut’ cause severe communication breakdown between the three energy sources, impacting your emotions, ability to think clearly and can even cause drastic issues to your health and well being. We tend to ignore the symptoms (gassy stomach, stomach pain, etc.), but all of this is a signal that something is wrong in your environment.
The gut-brain connection is rooted in our collective narrative, in that making decisions based on gut feelings or intuitive impulses are a neurobiological response to interoceptive or gut memories on past experiences. Your intuition is shaped by personal experiences. In other words, your gut feelings are a real phenomenon based on the past. Think about those times when your gut tightens uncharacteristically; it’s trying to get your attention, it’s trying to tell you that you’ve been here before, so “watch out”, or in other cases, “GO ON!”. Your intuition has registered something ahead of it happening, for better or worse.
The trouble with intuitive pulls is society doesn’t endorse it, it isn’t really taught, it isn’t really accepted as truth, so how can you develop or learn to trust your intuition if it isn’t taught or accepted? The first step is not being afraid of the unknown and not be afraid of what others might think. The next step is to learn all you can about it, work on trusting your intuition more, and understand what your gut is trying to tell you so you can embrace it.
The Power of Your ‘3 Brains’
Your brain, heart and gut all come equipped with brains, identities and separate functions of their own. The head is rational thinking, the heart is emotional awareness while the gut is more about self-preservation and mobilization. Sure individually each brain may offer many benefits but together, this state of oneness is like turning on a light switch — it brings an insane amount of power to any situation.
In business, the conventional approach is the reliance on the brain — logic, fact and reason; there is no room for messy emotions or gut instincts. But in today’s day and age nothing is black and white so by engaging all 3 sources, you’re actually promoting better productivity and a healthier workplace. You also become hyper aware and extremely emotionally intelligent, so instead of leading with irrational emotional outbursts, you can channel the lessons to make rational, composed decisions. The same is true when dealing with an unruly client, a disgruntled employee or a hypersensitive boss.
Broadly speaking if you want to be “successful” or lead a fulfilling life, it’s very evident that you need the assistance of your whole self. It takes more than just your head to generate ideas. It takes heart to spark your passion to paint and your gut to mobilize the efforts to pick up the brush and paint your life’s masterpiece.
If we limit ourselves to the use of only one brain we also limit our potential.
So it’s my belief that to achieve greatness, you need a harmonious mind-heart-gut connection because together you can have it all.
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