Notes from my “flow state” retreat

Posted by Adam Franklin

Updated on February 9th, 2020

Bluewire News – 8th July 2019

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Flow state retreat

Today I’ve got some other insights to share with you, including the notes from my recent “flow retreat”.

First up though… my friend Frank Bria interviewed me for his podcast show.

We discuss how I’ve launched and refined the , after several early false starts. Amongst the lessons I’ve learned, I’ve realised it is very important to map out the the destination as well as each of the steps in the journey.

Not only that, you need to be clear on exactly who you help and provide certainty in terms of results they’ll achieve when they do the work, ideally even offering a guarantee.

Adam Franklin interview

Watch my 26 min interview with Frank Bria

Secondly… My “Flow State Retreat”

I’ve been promising the notes from my flow retreat on the Gold Coast recently.

Pre-reading: Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work.

Other book suggestions:
The Power of Intention by Dr Wayne Dyer

Video we watched:  

Below are my notes from the sessions I did at the “flow state” retreat.  They all help you get in flow state.

MORNING ROUTINE:

This was an interesting session on a morning ritual on how my friend Jon Hollenberg gets in flow.

Step 0: The key to a good morning routine is a good evening routine. One tip is use candle light not bright electric lights, plus get to bed on time. I actually have an alarm at 10pm that reminds me to go to bed and get some sleep!)

Here are steps 1 to 9:

• 1: Make bed
• 2: Do the work everyday
• 3: Exercise
• 4: Go outside barefoot — (“earthing”)
• 5: Red light exposure (aka the sunlight between dawn and ~8am)
• 6: Do breath work — (in his “priming” example, it involved 30 arm pumps whilst breathing in & out)
• 7: Cold exposure (cold shower)
• 8: Gratitude and visualisation
• 9: Discipline (become devoted and addicted to what feels great!)

VOICE TRAINING:

We practised some warm up activities like poking your tongue around your mouth and voice warm ups. It was particularly useful for conference speaking and workshops I run, but a bit hard to convey properly in writing!

We also learned about different types of energy.

• 1st circle energy — “Victim” — feeling sorry for myself.
• 2nd circle energy — “Present” — this is the one we want to aim for!
• 3rd circle energy — “Bully” — zero empathy.

2 speaking techniques:

‘See’ everybody first by taking the time to look people in the eye. If it’s a big audience you can break the room into quadrants and take the time to look at one person in each of the 4 group. Our speaking coach refers to this technique as the “4Fs” Find Four Friendly Faces.
Bring the back of the room to you with your voice. (Again we got a demonstration but harder to convey in writing)

FLOW & PEAK PERFORMANCE

Flow is when you feel ‘Timeless, Selfless, Effortless

It’s now possible to do DNA and physical testing to see what we are most naturally good at responding to in order to reach flow. This includes the best food, exercise, training routines, sleeping patterns and it extends to how we should arrange our daily calendar to optimise our ability to experience “flow”.

One good tip was to split your business year into pre-season, in-season, finals and off-season. We can’t perform to our peak ability if we are go-go-go all the time with no downtime. We need rest and reflection.

BREATHING EXERCISE & ICE BATH

We did a warm up 10 min breathing exercise where we lay on a tennis court and did continuous breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Then we did a 45 min session as a group of 50 people. It creates an unexpected experience of floating high in the sky and then coming back down.

This was followed by a 2 min ice bath for ‘cold therapy’ and we followed the Wim Hof Method. By the way Wim Hof is known as “The Ice Man” and the technique we did involved breathing in slowly through the nose for 6 seconds and out for 6 seconds. Remarkably when we breathed out, it created a warming sensation.

ESSENTIAL OILS

We immediately rubbed pure orange and peppermint oils together on our hands, cupped them together and inhaled. One inhale is supposedly like having 28 cups of tea. The oils increase oxygen flow and within minutes the inhaled essential oil aroma is in our bloodstream and improving our cells. Of course diffusers are another way to get essential oils into your life!

EVERYDAY FLOW

We developed a simple plan to get “flow” into our every day. We wrote down the following:

• What does ‘flow’ mean to me?
• How are you ‘fueled’?
• What robs you?
• … and based on that… What does our ideal day look like?

HYPNOTHERAPY

We finished the retreat with a hypnosis session. We had the option to ‘opt-out’ of this but everyone decided to do it. In the hypnosis we were guided to reach back into our memory to a time when were in complete flow.

We were told not to worry about coming up with a memory consciously but that the hypnosis would take us there subconsciously. And it did. It was incredible really. And now we can go back to that memory to help get us in flow, on demand.

Let me know if you have questions about these notes from the flow state retreat.

Cheers,
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About Adam Franklin

Adam Franklin is the bestselling author of Web Marketing That Works. He is an international social media speaker and CEO of Bluewire Media.  His blog was Australia's #1 Business Blog and his podcast was #9 on the top marketing podcasts in Entrepreneur magazine. His work has featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Huffington Post and iTunes. Download the popular Web Strategy Planning Template which has been used by hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. His weekly 'Bluewire News' email goes out to over 32,000 readers.

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