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)

Consciously Initiating Flow

How firefighters dealt with the trigger varied. While some participants recognized when they were game on, in the zone, or in the flow at the time, only one firefighter in my study said that she consciously decided to enter the flow state. In multiple stories, she told me the trigger for the flow state and then said, “I hit the kill switch,” which enabled her to focus on the task at hand (one of the characteristics of flow) and not get caught up in emotions or the unfolding drama. Everyone else said that flow happened at an unconscious level.

There are five mechanisms of flow that must be in place for us to be able to consciously initiate flow: Knowledge of our own triggers of flow, preparation, physical readiness, mental alignment, and spiritual connection.

Figure 2: Five Mechanisms of Flow

Knowledge of Our Own Triggers

Most of us are not involved in situations where a child is in trouble or our safety is threatened, but we...