One night, I was about twenty years old at the time, I was driving from my home in Central Pennsylvania to school in New England. I was driving my rescued-from-a-field-and-restored 1961 Studebaker Hawk. I know you’ve probably never seen or heard of those but they were a thing once and I had one. It was a beauty. 289 cubic inch V8 engine with a four-barrel carburetor, manual four-speed stick shift on the floor, bucket seats in the front, dual exhausts, raised up in the back a bit to accommodate the clearly-not-stock wide tires. It was a beauty that would get up and boogie when asked.

Anyway, I’d left home late and I was driving the Hawk northeast through Eastern Pennsylvania on PA Route 209 which was (and still is) a notoriously bad road…lots of crashes, particularly at night.

Around 10:00 pm, just starting my drive on Route 209, I fell in behind a Corvette a few years more recent than my Hawk. I was driving about 5 seconds behind it. After we’d been driving for a while… there weren’t many other cars out at that time of night… I noticed that, mile after mile after mile, the Corvette barely changed speed. So consistent…and careful. We would both slow down to navigate difficult curves and deal with the usual traffic hazards, but in between those, the ‘Vette driver never varied more than about half a click and I stayed, locked in, 5 seconds behind.

We didn’t so much DRIVE together up Route 209… we floated. For me, almost everything else in the world disappeared. I felt peaceful… safe… completely in control. No fatigue, even ‘though it was late… No wandering mind… No strain… No sense of passing time…. Just driving the road I saw lit up by Corvette headlights almost like I was IN the Corvette looking through that windshield rather than my own.

That night, I experienced the “intense experiential engagement” that psychologists now call “flow” or “being in the zone” although nobody had invented those concepts at the time. “Flow” wasn’t a condition you knew you could have. Turns out, once you’ve had it, you want more of it.

Recently, I’ve not been feeling much flow. More-or-less randomly, I wondered: What happened that night in my Studebaker? Why have I experienced flow working in my consulting practice or playing my guitars? How do I get back into flow again?

I found a few papers about “flow” on line. One of them described requirements for achieving flow, among them: Clear goals, immediate feedback on progress, and focus.

I liked this paper, particularly, because the author ended the discussion of “flow” this way: “Today, more than ever, when our minds are relentlessly bombarded with multiple and competing demands for our attention, the questions where we place our attention, what we choose to focus on, and how to spend our time are crucial for our well-being, and in particular for our functioning.”

Nick Miller and Clarity train banks and bankers to attract and develop deeper relationships with small businesses. Many more Sales Thoughts like this and a host of other articles and resources at https://clarityadvantage.com/knowledge-center/ .