Rosa worked on the processing line at a chicken factory in Hobart. She stuck a metal hose in chickens all day. She was the happiest person in the building.
When I asked her how, she didn’t talk about the work. She talked about Sunday dinners with the whole family, and the trip back to Italy every two or three years. She wasn’t engaged because the task was stimulating. She was engaged because she knew exactly what she was working toward, and nothing about that goal felt routine.
Most senior leaders would hear that and think: simple life, simple goals. But that’s the wrong read. What Rosa had built, without ever knowing the research behind it, was the precise architecture that neuroscience identifies as the precondition for absorbed, energised performance. Clear goal. Meaningful stretch. Immediate feedback, money in the bank and a flight booked. She had the conditions right. Most people running sophisticated careers don’t.
I spent a few hours recently with Dr Sue Jackson, one of the world’s leading sports psychologists and a researcher who worked alongside Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who identified and named the flow state. What she described wasn’t a new productivity framework. It was an explanation for why Rosa was thriving and why so many of the leaders I work with, despite the credentials and the complexity and the stakes, are grinding.
The Assumption That Needs Challenging
Here is the assumption: that focus is a discipline problem. That if you can just stay off your phone, block your calendar, and commit to deep work, you’ll get into the kind of absorbed, high-quality thinking that produces your best output.
The neuroscience says something more uncomfortable.
Every ping, every quick check, every “just a second” glance at a message: you have been training your nervous system to seek interruption. Not choosing it. Training it. The pattern gets embedded in the way your brain allocates attention. At a certain point, it stops waiting for an external notification and starts generating the impulse to seek one itself.
This is not a willpower problem. It is a design problem.
What Flow Actually Requires
Dr Sue’s research on flow, built directly on Csikszentmihalyi’s foundational work, identifies nine dimensions. Three of them are preconditions that set the stage: a challenge that slightly exceeds your current skill level, a clear goal, and unambiguous feedback on how you are tracking.
The precondition most people underestimate is the first one. The challenge has to slightly outweigh the skill. Not overwhelm it, not sit comfortably below it. Slightly exceed it. That edge of uncertainty, that small gap between what you can do and what the task demands, is what pulls you in. It is the tension that creates absorption.
Some leaders engineer that edge out of their days deliberately. They stay in the domain they know, delegate the work that unsettles them, run the meeting they’ve run a hundred times. Other leaders swing the other way: the calendar is relentless, the stakes are always high, the challenge is permanently overwhelming. But many leaders carry both patterns simultaneously, swinging between over-stimulated busyness and under-stretched routine.
The result, in both cases, is the same: competence without absorption, performance without energy. Dr Sue’s eight-channel model shows boredom and anxiety at opposite ends of the spectrum from flow. What’s striking is how many leaders oscillate between the two without ever landing in the zone that actually makes work feel worth doing.
The Eight-Channel Model You Haven’t Seen
Csikszentmihalyi mapped eight distinct psychological states based on the relationship between challenge and skill. Flow sits at the top right: high challenge, high skill. But the journey away from flow is not a single path. It is a map.
On the other side of flow, when challenge outpaces skill, you move through worry and then anxiety. Anxiety is actually closer to flow than relaxation is.
That last point is worth sitting with. The butterflies before a big presentation, the elevated heart rate before a difficult conversation. That arousal state is not the enemy of performance. It is the near neighbour of your best work. The problem is not being anxious. The problem is not knowing what to do with the arousal, or having an environment so fractured that you can’t channel it into concentrated effort.
The leaders I work with who struggle most with performance moments are not the anxious ones. They’re the ones who’ve engineered so much certainty into their days that they’ve drifted into relaxation or apathy and then are surprised when the high-stakes moment arrives and they can’t access their best thinking. The nervous system hasn’t been asked to perform. It hasn’t been trained.
The Fix Is Not Willpower
Here is what this means practically. If your default environment includes open notifications, rapid task-switching, and a calendar structured around responsiveness, you are not managing your attention. You are systematically degrading it.
I’ve been doing significant work with a global trading firm. The traders operate across multiple time zones, and distraction has a measurable cost: it shows up directly in revenue. What the research showed, and what the traders confirmed from their own experience, is that the highest performers weren’t the ones with the most information. They were the ones who had built Operating Rhythms that protected blocks of concentrated effort. They managed the environment, not just the calendar.
The fix is not willpower. It is design. Remove the notifications. Restructure the environment. Build work blocks that require genuine stretch: challenge that slightly exceeds comfortable skill. Give your nervous system a reason to concentrate.
That is not a morning routine. It is an Operating Rhythm built around how the brain actually works.
What Focused Leaders Actually Do
At Manly Sea Eagles, I worked with players who were convinced they needed to sustain focus for the full 80 minutes of a game. The belief itself was the problem. Nobody sustains 80 minutes of peak concentration. The research on elite athletic performance is clear: the pattern is focus, recovery, refocus. Not sustained attention, but disciplined cycling.
When I showed the players the data: focus hard for four minutes, recover, refocus. Several of them looked like a weight had been lifted. They’d been carrying a standard that didn’t exist.
Senior leaders carry the same unnecessary standard. The goal is not to be maximally focused for 12 hours. The goal is to access deep concentration in the moments where it matters, and to build the recovery that makes the next focused block possible.
Dr Sue calls what follows peak flow a necessary recovery phase. The neurochemicals that make flow feel energising (dopamine, endorphins) require replenishment. The leaders who chain one high-stakes performance to the next without recovery don’t maintain output. They degrade it gradually and wonder why the work that used to energise them now feels like a grind.
The Question Worth Sitting With
That’s the key distinction in Dr Sue’s model. The challenge that drives flow doesn’t have to be in the task itself. It can live in the life you’re building toward. Clear goal. Meaningful stretch. Immediate feedback.
When I asked her how, she didn’t talk about the work. She talked about Sunday dinners with the whole family, and the trip back to Italy every two or three years. She wasn’t engaged because the task was stimulating. She was engaged because she knew exactly what she was working toward, and nothing about that goal felt routine.
Most senior leaders would hear that and think: simple life, simple goals. But that’s the wrong read. What Rosa had built, without ever knowing the research behind it, was the precise architecture that neuroscience identifies as the precondition for absorbed, energised performance. Clear goal. Meaningful stretch. Immediate feedback, money in the bank and a flight booked. She had the conditions right. Most people running sophisticated careers don’t.
I spent a few hours recently with Dr Sue Jackson, one of the world’s leading sports psychologists and a researcher who worked alongside Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who identified and named the flow state. What she described wasn’t a new productivity framework. It was an explanation for why Rosa was thriving and why so many of the leaders I work with, despite the credentials and the complexity and the stakes, are grinding.
The Assumption That Needs Challenging
Here is the assumption: that focus is a discipline problem. That if you can just stay off your phone, block your calendar, and commit to deep work, you’ll get into the kind of absorbed, high-quality thinking that produces your best output.
The neuroscience says something more uncomfortable.
Every ping, every quick check, every “just a second” glance at a message: you have been training your nervous system to seek interruption. Not choosing it. Training it. The pattern gets embedded in the way your brain allocates attention. At a certain point, it stops waiting for an external notification and starts generating the impulse to seek one itself.
This is not a willpower problem. It is a design problem.
What Flow Actually Requires
Dr Sue’s research on flow, built directly on Csikszentmihalyi’s foundational work, identifies nine dimensions. Three of them are preconditions that set the stage: a challenge that slightly exceeds your current skill level, a clear goal, and unambiguous feedback on how you are tracking.
The precondition most people underestimate is the first one. The challenge has to slightly outweigh the skill. Not overwhelm it, not sit comfortably below it. Slightly exceed it. That edge of uncertainty, that small gap between what you can do and what the task demands, is what pulls you in. It is the tension that creates absorption.
Some leaders engineer that edge out of their days deliberately. They stay in the domain they know, delegate the work that unsettles them, run the meeting they’ve run a hundred times. Other leaders swing the other way: the calendar is relentless, the stakes are always high, the challenge is permanently overwhelming. But many leaders carry both patterns simultaneously, swinging between over-stimulated busyness and under-stretched routine.
The result, in both cases, is the same: competence without absorption, performance without energy. Dr Sue’s eight-channel model shows boredom and anxiety at opposite ends of the spectrum from flow. What’s striking is how many leaders oscillate between the two without ever landing in the zone that actually makes work feel worth doing.
The Eight-Channel Model You Haven’t Seen
Csikszentmihalyi mapped eight distinct psychological states based on the relationship between challenge and skill. Flow sits at the top right: high challenge, high skill. But the journey away from flow is not a single path. It is a map.
On the other side of flow, when challenge outpaces skill, you move through worry and then anxiety. Anxiety is actually closer to flow than relaxation is.
That last point is worth sitting with. The butterflies before a big presentation, the elevated heart rate before a difficult conversation. That arousal state is not the enemy of performance. It is the near neighbour of your best work. The problem is not being anxious. The problem is not knowing what to do with the arousal, or having an environment so fractured that you can’t channel it into concentrated effort.
The leaders I work with who struggle most with performance moments are not the anxious ones. They’re the ones who’ve engineered so much certainty into their days that they’ve drifted into relaxation or apathy and then are surprised when the high-stakes moment arrives and they can’t access their best thinking. The nervous system hasn’t been asked to perform. It hasn’t been trained.
The Fix Is Not Willpower
Here is what this means practically. If your default environment includes open notifications, rapid task-switching, and a calendar structured around responsiveness, you are not managing your attention. You are systematically degrading it.
I’ve been doing significant work with a global trading firm. The traders operate across multiple time zones, and distraction has a measurable cost: it shows up directly in revenue. What the research showed, and what the traders confirmed from their own experience, is that the highest performers weren’t the ones with the most information. They were the ones who had built Operating Rhythms that protected blocks of concentrated effort. They managed the environment, not just the calendar.
The fix is not willpower. It is design. Remove the notifications. Restructure the environment. Build work blocks that require genuine stretch: challenge that slightly exceeds comfortable skill. Give your nervous system a reason to concentrate.
That is not a morning routine. It is an Operating Rhythm built around how the brain actually works.
What Focused Leaders Actually Do
At Manly Sea Eagles, I worked with players who were convinced they needed to sustain focus for the full 80 minutes of a game. The belief itself was the problem. Nobody sustains 80 minutes of peak concentration. The research on elite athletic performance is clear: the pattern is focus, recovery, refocus. Not sustained attention, but disciplined cycling.
When I showed the players the data: focus hard for four minutes, recover, refocus. Several of them looked like a weight had been lifted. They’d been carrying a standard that didn’t exist.
Senior leaders carry the same unnecessary standard. The goal is not to be maximally focused for 12 hours. The goal is to access deep concentration in the moments where it matters, and to build the recovery that makes the next focused block possible.
Dr Sue calls what follows peak flow a necessary recovery phase. The neurochemicals that make flow feel energising (dopamine, endorphins) require replenishment. The leaders who chain one high-stakes performance to the next without recovery don’t maintain output. They degrade it gradually and wonder why the work that used to energise them now feels like a grind.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Rosa worked on the processing line at a chicken factory in Hobart. She stuck a metal hose in chickens all day. She was the happiest person in the building.
When I asked her how, she didn’t talk about the work. She talked about Sunday dinners with the whole family, and about the trip back to Italy every two or three years. She wasn’t engaged because the task was meaningful. She was engaged because she had a clear goal that gave the task meaning. The work was the vehicle. The challenge was the life she was building toward.
That’s the key distinction in Dr Sue’s model. The challenge that drives flow doesn’t have to be in the task itself. For Rosa, the challenge was in the life she was building toward. Clear goal. Meaningful pursuit. The conditions for absorption were present, even on a factory floor.
I think about that when I watch senior leaders grind through days that produce output without absorption, revenue without satisfaction, performance without energy.
You’ve built a sophisticated career. The question is whether the system you’ve built around it is working for you or against you. Because there is a version of your working life where more of the day feels like Rosa’s: absorbed, purposeful, energised by the work. The question is whether you’re willing to design for it.
If your organisation’s leaders are operating in grind mode, technically performing but chronically depleted, Performance Intelligence’s Human Performance Assessment identifies where the system is breaking down and what it would take to rebuild it. This is not a generic wellbeing program. It is a performance diagnostic for senior leaders who know something is off but haven’t had the data to act on it.
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About Andrew May
Andrew May is a high performance expert, keynote speaker, and founder of Performance Intelligence. Over two decades he has worked with senior leaders, executive teams, and elite athletes across Australia and internationally to build the habits, systems, and mental skills that sustain high performance over time. Andrew is the host of the Performance Intelligence Podcast.
