The "Flow" of Talent Development

by Sam Whalen, PhD

Have you ever become so wrapped up in a book or puzzle that you lost track of time? Or worked through the intricacies of a piece of music to the point that you knew it "by heart," finally getting a feel for just how you wanted it performed? Or spent hours at a computer screen, skipping dinner so you could crack the code and reach the next level of play? These are experiences that we sometimes take for granted, especially if we have a taste for challenges or a need to stay active. But recent research with people from all walks of life is showing that the capacity to enjoy such "flow experiences" is critical both to happiness and creativity.

For the last two years, CTD researchers have been exploring ways to measure flow experiences in order to understand how CTD students can take on the challenges of Shakespeare or calculus more enjoyably. Building on research described in the volume Talented Teenagers: The Roots of Success and Failure (Cambridge University Press, 1993), co-authored by CTD's previous Research Director Sam Whalen with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Kevin Rathonde, CTD has been trying to construct a "Flow Activities Assessment" that reveals how frequently our students experience flow, what activities provide flow, and how intensely flow occurs in areas of special talent. This is one of the surveys that we have asked our summer students to complete before arriving at the Northwestern campus [when? this year? over the past how many years?]. With their help, we are beginning to appreciate the range of interests our students bring to our programs, as well as the difficulties some students encounter in engaging their areas of talent more enjoyably.

Early research into flow experiences began with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's studies of creativity and motivation. Csikszentmihalyi, a professor at the University of Chicago, began with a fundamental question: What is it about art, athletics, music, science and other disciplines that causes some people to forego life's usual rewards and pleasuresóthings like sex, money, food and sleep? In a book entitled Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (Jossey-Bass, 1975), Csikszentmihalyi wrote that highly engaged people in disciplines from basketball to brain surgery report the same pattern of experience: an altered sense of time, deep involvement, acute concentration on the task at hand, and a sense of easy "give-and-take" between the demands of the activity and the person's capacity to meet those demands. While people in his study employed many terms to describe this experience, one word emerged particularly often: the sense that one was "flowing" within the challenges of the moment. Thus the term "flow" was adopted to capture this unusual fluidity between person and activity.

CTD's new Flow Activities Assessment builds on this research and may eventually broaden our understanding of how flow experiences link to talent development. The first part of the assessment lists six experiences that research has linked both to flow and talent development:

• Losing track of time
• The personal need to do the activity well
• The sense of skillfulness
• High personal interest
• High challenge
• Sense that the activity offers opportunities for self-expression
  

We ask our students to list activities that provide each of these experiences, both during or outside of school. The second part of the assessment asks students to reflect on which activities in their lives pull all or most of these perceptions together into one experience, then to tell us how much time they spend in each such activity in an average week. These are the activities we believe furnish the most powerful periods of flow. Finally, we ask students to tell us which conditions in their daily lives disrupt flow experiences, as well as what strategies they may have learned to sustain enjoyable concentration.

Part of the process of developing any assessment is determining its validity of that is, the degree to which it really measures what it claims to measure. In this case, we are now investigating two questions: do the survey responses yield activities with the properties associated with flow; and does the survey really distinguish people according to whether they experience flow more frequently or in more activities? Our preliminary results have been encouraging. First, as we would hope, we find high correspondence between the activities listed under specific experiences and those activities listed as pulling these experiences together. Second, the activities listed under specific experiences are consistent with earlier research using the self-reports of talented teenagers. For example, school subjects like math and science tend to be seen as very important but low in self-expression, while music and art reverse this pattern.

The survey reveals great variation among our students in how many activities they report as flow-like, as well as the variety of activities that produce flow. This doesn't surprise us, knowing our students; but it has given us a clearer appreciation for the diversity of experiences they bring each summer to our programs. Especially important, the reports of the activities seen as combining the six experiences are very predictive about our students' commitment to their talents. For example, those students in our 1995 sample who reported math as a "combined" flow activity also reported significantly higher interest in math, were significantly more likely to prefer math over verbal subjects, and had stronger career aspirations in math and engineering, as assessed with independent instruments.

While we are excited about the research potential of this survey, we are even more hopeful that it can be developed as a tool for career and personal counseling. For example, some students who come to our summer programs indicate that they become deeply involved only in school-related activities. Others indicate just the opposite: their lives are filled with "important" activities, while they report few pastimes or school courses that inspire intense interest or allow for self-expression. Some students report such a wealth of flow experiences that it is hard to imagine when they have time to relax. Whatever the specific pattern, we think counselors can use this assessment to talk with gifted students about personal choices and career paths that build on their strengths and promise both success and deep satisfaction in adult life.

Dr. Whalen presented the early findings of CTD's assessment at the 1996 Rosen Symposium on Gifted Child Development at the University of Kansas and at the American Educational Research Association convention in March 1997 in Chicago. We are especially eager to understand how some students learn to enjoy flow in school subjects like math and English literature, and whether those lessons can be "taught" to others who have the talent but not yet the "feel" for those disciplines.