Thursday, December 27, 2007

Autotelic/flow/optimal experience

Reading a book called Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I find terms called autotelic or flow or optimal experience essentially meaning one thing - state of happiness or enjoyment even in most daunting or horrifying conditions such as concentration camps, solidary confinements or paralytic medical complications. Some people are lucky few, unlike happiness eluding most population, they have certain rudiments of character that prompt happiness. They devote more psyche energy in exploring things they like to do in certain framework in mind which include things they enjoy doing must have goals, rules and feed backs. These framework allows people to push the standard to higher level which is essential to achieve the flow experience. Also they usually are brought up in the families which propose the 5C elements of building autotelic experience. These are:
Clarity - what parents expect of a child needs clearly expressed
Centering- parents are interested what children are doing than what they will be in the future
Choice - variety of possibilities children could choose including breaking parent's rules
Commitment - parents trust and allow the child to feel comfortable enough set aside the shield of his defenses and become unselfconsciously involved on things he is interested
Challenge - the parents' dedications to provide increasingly complex opportunity for action to their children

The book concluded that anyone can achieve autotelic experience which requires attention to building habits, investing psyche energy or attention in hobbies, sports, reading, art, music, even mundane routines that sometimes people find them rut. All these could make life enjoyable and take little resources apart from what we have already had. As parents, the 5C is some concept that is coinciding to coaching concept which worths parents to look into incorporating into their beings while kids are still young. It's never too late.

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