Raúl Ballesta Barrera is a Sports and Organizational Psychologist oriented towards Positive Psychology, a current that focuses its attention on the potential of human beings.

Considering that in the sports world, attention management is a good part of what leads us to overcome ourselves, it is normal that the state of Flow, a state of consciousness first described in the 1970s, generates interest. But Ballesta believes that knowing this psychological phenomenon and the methods to enter it can help us not only in sport, but in many other facets of life.

Strategies to enter Flow: the testimony of Raúl Ballesta

“Be water, my friend: strategies to flow in sport and life”, written by Raúl Ballesta and his colleagues Marta Román, Juan Carlos Domínguez, Marta Ocaña and Juan Arza Mondelo, is the first book that deals with strategies to develop Flow’s state from the current of Positive Psychology, and with testimonies of elite sportsmen such as David Meca, Ruth Beitia or Jordi Villacampa.

Bertrand Regader: Your story highlights your experience as a swimmer. How do you think what you know about sport and life now fits in with what you knew during your years in the pool? I am referring to knowledge that appears in the book and that at that time you could know on a more intuitive level, for example.

Raúl Ballesta: As you say, when you compete the learning that you can have above all on a mental level is very intuitive. When I was swimming there were many things I didn’t know and if I had known them they could have helped me overcome situations that at that time were very difficult for me. For example, to overcome competitive anxiety, to learn to focus attention and most importantly to learn how to enter Flow.

Sometimes we think about what we need to know how to face challenges effectively and only cumulative resources that can help us come to mind: having more knowledge, more means, more money, more contacts… However, in the book a lot of importance is given to something that escapes this cumulative logic: attention. How do you think this element affects our well-being?

Proper care management is a very powerful tool for improving our quality of life in any setting. It is only by becoming aware of our thoughts and how they affect us that we realize how important they are to our overall health and well-being. Controlling the automatic thoughts that we generate is a very important step in improving our emotional well-being and we can only achieve this by learning to focus our attention.

There is a chapter on self-confidence in the book. Do you think this is an aspect that we tend to underestimate when we think about day-to-day problem solving?

It’s possible. Realistic self-confidence helps people to be more successful in the projects they carry out. It has been shown that people with greater self-confidence have what we call “presence” and that this presence is perceived by others. They can certainly express different points of view than expected, they are persistent in defending what they deeply believe in, they are determined people and capable of making decisions under pressure. People with high self-confidence believe that they can take the helm of their lives and surely for this reason they do so.

A large part of this work is also dedicated to talking about the importance of attention management and, in general, states of consciousness. The state of Flow, for example, involves both a special state of consciousness and an almost instinctive and natural form of problem solving. How would you summarize these experiences?

Entering Flow is an automatic thing that happens when the right circumstances arise. When you enter Flow you act without thinking, automatically feeling a special connection to the task you are carrying out and executing it in the best way you are able. When you enter Flow you give the best of yourself, of what you are capable of. The main problem is that only one of the aspects that make up the state of Flow fails, entering Flow is impossible. This is why you have to constantly work on these aspects beforehand, so that they can happen instinctively. Something similar would be when you learn to drive. In the beginning, you have to think about every detail and focus your attention correctly on those aspects that are relevant to driving a car and not hitting the first street light. With constant practice (especially in the beginning) and time, the brain automates the right steps and it ends up being very easy to drive a car.

Expectation management is also important. Between the pages of the book there is a point where it expressly talks about the need to be realistic, to find a balance between what we want and what we can do. Do you have any advice about how to get this kind of forecast right?

Finding a balance between the challenge and our abilities to meet it deserves some time of reflection. The objective knowledge of oneself is key to know if we have these skills or if on the contrary we have to work first some deficiency to face the challenge with guarantees. Having said that, one should not be afraid of failure because much can be learned from error and defeat. When should we stop pursuing it? When it is no longer exciting to try again.

It is interesting that the book includes the participation of several elite sportsmen and women. Why do you think their perspective is inspiring to many people who are not involved in sports and what do you think they can teach us?

It is a way of capturing the reader’s attention on psychological aspects with which they will surely identify. I remember how I got goose bumps when David Meca told me how he was overcome by Flow’s feeling while swimming from Jativa to Ibiza. I understood that that moment had been very special for him and that alone was worth all the effort.

The contributions of other athletes are equally inspiring and teach you that behind success there are feelings that in many cases are more important to them than the medal itself. Maybe we can’t aspire to win any Olympic medals, but we can aspire to feel the same sensations of Flow that they have felt.

Between the pages of the book, topics such as the relationship between the states of the mind and the states of the rest of the body are discussed. You can see this, for example, in the sections dedicated to relaxation and breathing exercises. Do you think we tend to think of these two areas as being totally separate things?

It’s quite possible that it is. We tend to compartmentalize everything because our Western thinking is focused on it, to break things down into their parts and work them out separately. The mind-body concept tends to be more and more holistic as Eastern thinking takes hold in our society. In India, for example, they have been practicing meditation for more than two thousand years. The new trends in positive psychology and Mindfulness teach us that what we think has its physical effect on our body and affects the benefits in our emotional and physical health of the daily practice of meditation.