Designing for Flow

How purposeful practice and effortless performance are more connected than you think.

If you hear about effortlessness as something that is attainable but not something you can actually do, you can reasonably ask in exasperation, “What’s the point?”

Here are two experiences you may recognize.

You sit down for focused purposeful practice, but drift into vague expressive playing, hoping that the music will just happen if you feel it enough. Before long, you wonder why your playing is not improving.

Or maybe in performance you are so busy monitoring and correcting that you wonder why your playing doesn’t feel like the music you know is inside you.

Both experiences are real. Both get in the way of the music you’re capable of making.

If, as I wrote about recently, effortlessness is earned¹, what does the “earned” part look like? What is the doing before the non-doing, and how do they relate to each other?

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We earn effortlessness through purposeful practice. This is our preparation before performance, rehearsal, a lesson.² In the metaphor from Earned Effortlessness, this is the boatman first learning to swim.

We can experience effortlessness, flow, wu wei only when our music has been deeply internalized. This is full presence and commitment during our performance; being absorbed in the movement of body and sound with minimal awareness of technical details.³ In Earned Effortlessness, it is the boatman fully capable of navigating the river during a storm.

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Purposeful practice is what you “can actually do”. It is characterized by conscious, directed, systematic action. This is where you define timelines, constraints, and develop goals. It feels effortful because you are learning to do things you couldn’t do before. You’re consciously creating the mental representations⁴ your brain and body require for you to play specific pieces of music on your instrument.

You analyze your music for chunking and integration,⁵ creating sets of repetitions with clearly defined targets.⁶ You make plans to learn smaller bits of music so they combine into progressively larger sections. All the while you’re paying close attention to details: listening carefully, meticulously aware of physical and mental movements. Constantly planning and evaluating, not just every moment to compare your playing to how the music is supposed to sound, but how each practice session fits to daily, weekly, perhaps monthly milestones.

Lack of purposeful practice doesn’t just leave you underprepared for performance, it can trap you mercilessly in this phase of practice during performance. I’m sure we all have horror stories of attempting to rescue music falling apart in front of an audience.

Fortunately, the more thoroughly you do this work, the more freedom you cultivate when performance time arrives.

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Performance is where earned effortlessness becomes possible. The details of the music are forged so deeply into your body, mind, and soul that conscious management of them is no longer necessary. The ego steps aside. Your spirit carries you forward. You are the channel of the expressive and aesthetic experience of making music.

Here is an experience you may recognize.

“I realized I knew exactly what I had to do in that moment – and the next, and the next. That rush of energy became a flow of directed excitement and confidence centered in calm. This was a moment when music that once had been technically out of reach became a performance reality.”⁷

This experience of calm assurance cannot be willed into being. It comes from a willingness to step – and remain – in an extended moment of uncertainty. You stay vigilant. There is no certainty. Anything can go wrong at any moment. Still, you choose to steer through the waves because you’ve taught yourself to swim.

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When I was preparing for Company⁸, I was able to design my practice sessions to create flow for myself.

On reflection, I know now what I didn’t know then: doing and non-doing are not as distinct as they appear.

Let’s revise our notion of the conscious directed action of purposeful practice and the calm vigilance of effortlessness. Rather than separate, their relationship is a continuum — a shifting energy system of attention that deepens as preparation and reflection deepen.

We can’t “do wu wei” but we can design for flow at smaller to progressively larger divisions of the music.

Flow is found at the edge of what you can do – where security meets uncertainty. Where you know it is possible to play measures 1-28 correctly if you can just get those 2 or 3 tricky spots right this time. Where you’ve gotten that unusual rhythm correct 3 times, but can you get it right 5 times in a row? Where you can run through each of those two consecutive large sections on their own, but do you have the stamina and focus to play them together?

Something has shifted, perhaps without notice. Practice begins to feel like a mini-performance. Your performer’s perspective has entered the room. You are now designing for the just-right challenge — large enough to require self-trust, reachable with the right kind of effort.

These are questions only you can answer: What is “the right kind of effort” for any given moment? Do you know “what you can play” and “what you can’t” and what is “reachable” – right now, in this practice session?

Answering these questions comes from discovering yourself through your own active and reflective practice.⁹ Where you know yourself well enough to design for YOUR flow.

What has been carefully cultivated in smaller rep sets is now growing into something larger.¹⁰ You can’t will a garden to appear. But you can design the conditions for its growth.

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Next time in the practice room, ask yourself the questions only you can answer. But, don’t feel the need to have the answers right away. Allow them to unfold. It will take time. Let that be okay. Trust your practice. The most important thing is the depth of your reflections over time. Focus on that.

Reflective practice can be the water you learn to swim in and the boat you steer as you navigate the river toward yourself and your earned musicianship.

1. Earned Effortlessness

2. The Starter Page, Recapitulation features the tools of music practice.

3. The Play is Freedom Series

4. Anders Ericsson, in his book Peak, uses the term ‘mental representations’ for the mental images we build of how something works. These representations help us understand, interpret, and organize information, making learning more effective.

5. Chunking and Integration

6. Music Practice Design: Two First Steps

7. The Effort of Play

8. Company Calling

9. The Practice Repetition: An Imaginal Braid

10. Adding Perspective to Your Music Practice