What a two-year old and a puzzle can teach us about flow
Yesterday I wrote a blog post about the possibility of using well crafted movement challenges to help people. Today while sitting on the floor playing with my 21 month old daughter I realised that I was, in effect, already crafting challenges for her in much the same way as I envisaged at the end of that recent blog, although without much conscious awareness of it. It then occurred to me just how regularly I already do this with clients at the gym by creating movement scenarios for them to try/ play with/ solve. And so I decided to write about it.
This blog post isn't like the last in that its not me postulating a grand idea to work on. Today what I'm doing is writing about what I'm already doing as a way to draw my attention to it, bringing it into my conscious mind so that I can further refine it.
Note - While this blog post was written the day after the previous one as mentioned above, scheduling means that it’s being posted a few days later. (just to explain, in case anyone is confused!)
MY DAUGHTER’S PUZZLE
Some weeks ago I found this puzzle on my daughter's bookshelf. It turns out that some time ago some friends gave it to us, but as my daughter wasn't ready for it yet, my wife stored it on the shelf.
My daughter loves puzzles, but this is her first puzzle where the pieces fit together. All.her previous puzzles look like this, where the pieces each have their own hole, and its more about matching the piece to the hole than creating an overall image.
The puzzle has 12 large pieces, and as a whole is too tough for her. Initially I just started doing it with her, but pretty quickly I started putting in most pieces (10 perhaps) and leaving her the last two to do herself. She would work with trial and error and eventually get them in. Over time though, I began setting harder challenges.
Three pieces left to put in.
Four pieces left.
Four pieces but all near each other so as to create a large hole.
Five.
Six.
Different arrangements of where the six were missing. Middle pieces missing. Corners missing. Corners not missing.
Seven.
And so on. Each time she got comfortable with one arrangement I tried another that was slightly harder. In the language of yesterday's post about flow, I was fine tuning the challenge skill ratio to make it just the right level of difficulty. As we went, I noticed some interesting things.
Firstly, I noticed how deeply she could focus. Remember, she's not yet 2 years old. Focus isn't exactly a strong point for toddlers. But if I got the challenge skill ratio right she would get lost in the puzzle and try and try and try.
Next though, I noticed that I could build her into focus and bigger challenges by increasing the challenge gradually in a session. Early this afternoon for example she grabbed the puzzle to play. I didn’t expect it to last long. She's teething and she was tired (she's asleep as I write this) so I started her out with three missing pieces. I figured that was the right challenge for a tired teething afternoon. She did it and asked for more, so I set four. She did it and was loving it and focusing great so we went 5, then 6, then 7. I then set 8, a new record and she did it. She asked for more so I set 9.
Now 9 pieces missing is a big jump up for this puzzle because without going into the detail of it, the 4 x 3 arrangement of the board means that no matter which 9 pieces you leave out, there are going to be some big blank chunks.
Anyhow I set a single column of three, leaving one blank column to the right and two blank columns next to each other to the left.
She worked and worked at it before eventually becoming stuck with 3 pieces left. Now lets be clear, the 3 pieces left were logically easy for her, but I guess we'd reached the limit.of her focus. She stood up and walked off. But then, she turned around and in her limited speech (she's not yet 2 years old, remember) asked me to finish it. I went to reach for a piece but she kind of clicked back into focus, picked up the piece I was going for and slotted it in the right spot immediately. The other two soon followed, and the session was over.
So what caused the final burst of effective puzzle solving?
One possibility comes from.what we spoke about yesterday with respect to flow. Flow emerges in a cycle with four stages. The first is struggle. The second is relaxation. The third is flow itself and the fourth is recovery. Now I'm not saying my daughter was in flow, but intense concentration is a characteristic of flow and she was concentrating intently to deliver an awesome puzzle performance (in my biased daddy eyes!) so I think that she was exhibiting enough characteristics of flow for it to be relevant to this disucssion.
It looks to me like our session passed through a flow cycle, with a little bobble backward to the struggle phase towards the end.
She was initially tired and took time to get into it, even with the east options I initially set (phase 1, struggle).
She then got settled and started to get going (phase 2, relaxation).
Then came the prolonged period of focus and the success at 8 and then the first half of 9 (stage 3, flow).
Then with 3 pieces left she started struggling (back in phase 1).
She walked away for a moment and asked me to finish the puzzle (was that phase 2, relaxation again?),
Next she appeared to snap back into focus and solve the puzzle (phase 3 flow reemerging following the relaxation).
Then she was done (phase 4 recovery).
Did she actually go through a flow cycle? Who knows. Heck, there are neurological arguments to be made that because the prefrontal cortex of the brain isn't fully developed in kids that they permanently exhibit many of the traits of flow, but it was certainly interesting to consider.
COMPARISONS TO TRAINING AND THE GYM
So what does any of this have to do with the gym. Well here’s something!
The first is that I now realise that unconsciously I do already follow a routine when teaching movement that mimics the flow cycle. For example, when teaching new skills to adults I’ll have them practise for a bit, but then I’ll force them to rest for maybe 60 seconds before trying some more. I’ve always done this to prevent overwhelm (i.e. when you try so much that you hit your limit and stop being able to practise productively), but it strikes me that it also runs the chance of putting them into flow.
To put this another way, I’ve always done it because I thought that by spending time int he struggle phase and then resting, that someone would have a greater ability to then spend even more time in the struggle phase. However now it occurs to me that it also runs the chance of not putting them back into struggle, but into flow itself!
The other way in which we somewhat inadvertently follow the flow cycle in our training is in how we approach skill development over weeks or months. Each week we have a theme for our skill practise. Let’s imagine it’s balance. We practise balance every day for a week. Then the next week we have a different theme, but balance might pop up in a subtle way (perhaps in a workout) later in that week. Very often people find that they are substantially better at balancing when we revisit it in that second week. In that situation, we have struggled for a week, relaxed (perhaps rested) away from that struggle as we moved on to something else and that managed to perform the balance much better (low grade flow perhaps?) when we have returned to it.
Ultimately, whether the scale is minute to minute, day to day, week to week or more, we regularly, oscillate between struggle and recovery in a way that mimics interval training. Not necessarily interval training for the cardiovascular system, but for the brain instead.
Cheers
Coach Jack
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