Enthusiasm In School
vs. apathy
Expressing interest and excitement in what I do
To practice Enthusiasm I will:
- put my whole heart into what I do
- smile to inspire others
- be an eager giver
- treat every job as important
- not be discouraged by failure
‘Find Your Flow’
– Bill Croskey
Have you ever lost track of time? On an ideal summer afternoon, you might experience this. You get engrossed in a leisurely activity in which your focus is pretty much solely on what you are doing. You are oblivious to your surroundings. Or, you are a video gamer and you get completely involved in the game as you reach Level 257, the farthest you’ve ever gone. Or maybe you are a runner; you fight through the heat or the rain and really achieve a pace and momentum which feels great. You feel like you could run forever. We call it a “runner’s high.” Perhaps you are an artist or crafter. You find a project which occupies your whole mind. Once you get into it, you are full of passion, gone from this reality. We say that you are “in the zone.” Perhaps music does that to you. Heck, it can even happen in a job for which you are paid. What I am trying to picture for you is a mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. This is a state which the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced, according to him, as “chicks send me high”) refers to as “Flow.”