Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By : Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D
Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By: Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D

Overview of this book

There comes a day when we have to make a tough decision under stress. That decision might change the course of our life. Flow-Based Leadership helps you improve your decision-making skills through the use of some great real-life stories of firefighters. The book first introduces the feeling called ‘flow’—teaching by example its importance in decision-making. Next, you’ll explore various techniques to initiate flow in critical situations and how to respond when flow doesn’t occur as expected. You will learn how to implement flow-based decision making and flow based-leadership within personal and professional circumstances. You will next encounter an extreme, experiential training program called Georgia Smoke Diver (GSD), and how it helps special military forces like Navy Seals and Army Rangers to maintain a calm focus in chaotic situations. Towards the end, the book uses the GSD program to describe the flow-based organizational framework and how it can be integrated into your life and workplace to achieve better decision-making skills. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use flow-based leadership in your personal and professional life maintain clarity and confidence under duress.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

2 Initiating Flow (or Not)

“Creative suspension is very different from ‘doing nothing.’ It is an active form of watchfulness and assessment in order to take the most effective action as quickly as possible.”

—F. David Peat

People often ask me, “How can I trigger flow?” While the answer is unique to each person, there are specific conditions that must be in place for flow to occur. In addition, my flow triggers are different from yours. In first-responder world, there were very specific triggers of flow. While you can prepare yourself thoroughly through training and experience and put yourself in situations where flow might occur, there are also techniques you can use to consciously initiate flow. We will discuss these steps later in this chapter.

In addition, there are times when flow just doesn’t happen, even when all the elements of the situation seem to be in alignment. So much about experiencing flow is allowing...