Valentijn Mees
Meet Valentijn, a LeAn / Agile coach.
Flow is in many ways the missing piece of the puzzle. Since the start of my career I felt that I have been wandering around without going in a clear direction. I have tried different disciplines in the past decade crossing over from management positions to consultancy and then to coaching. My world has flip flopped from abstract technical work to human centric work, from employment to entrepreneurship, from earning a living to ‘living life’, and from changing outside circumstances to changing my own inner experience...which leads me to the Flow Centre.
When I reached out to The Flow Center my goal was to learn more about flow and learn new ways to find more of it. Secondly, I wanted to incorporate this into my coaching activities.
Why flow? Human beings have an innate longing to master the things they love doing and becoming one with it. And when they do they find themselves in flow; knowingly or unknowingly. Intuitively everybody knows this, however most people are not necessarily aware of this or have thought about how to purposefully engineer it.
Why did you choose the Flow Centre?
Simple. Their track record is impressive. I started with the online training and quickly decided that I wanted to learn more. So I did the Coaching Diploma and the Flow Diploma.
What are some key takeaways that you took from the training?
The training deepened my knowledge of the science behind flow, such as the psychology, neurophysiology and other aspects of flow. It also widened my knowledge and practice of proximal concepts such as mindfulness etc.
Put simply, it helped me to understand how the mind, body and energies all collaborate to produce our inner experience and in particular the flow experience.
But the real golden nugget was that flow can not be learned from a book or by studying theories. It takes real effort and practice to master. The training facilitates you to get you going. To master it, requires deeper practice; integrative practices. Through the training, I learned to build my own flow practice which I now do almost daily. It has helped me to set the right challenge and manage my intentions in what I do. It has helped me to condition my mind, body and energies in the right way to find flow more easily in any activity.
So, how has learning about flow improved your life?
My flow practice helps me to centre myself by raising my awareness of my experience. It helps me to accept how things are, embrace the challenges in my life and calibrate my challenges to an optimal level before playfully being involved in the next activity.
Importantly, the practice helps me to reset myself. I am now more aware of when I am over-challenged or under-challenged, and when I get caught up in my own drama or the drama of others.
The goal I set out with is definitely fulfilled. I am more knowledgeable and skilful than I was before I started the training.
This training has led me to my next goal: to explore the Eastern tradition of finding flow. Actually, I am writing this flow story from my quarantine hotel in Southern India. In a few days I will go off the grid and participate in an 8-month intense Sadhana programme to learn the practice of Yoga and meditation. I wrote my flow thesis about the link between flow and yoga.
