A Little Out of Your Depth: The Nine Dimensions of Flow

Discover how the nine dimensions of flow help athletes and professionals perform at their peak when stepping just outside their comfort zone.

By Scott K. Wilder · Confidence and Focus

GAME READY MINDSET™

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A Little Out of Your Depth

The nine dimensions of flow — from the field to the office

David Bowie had a rule for creative work. Wade into the water until your feet don’t quite touch bottom — until you’re, in his words, “a little bit out of your depth.” That’s where the exciting things happen, he said. Not in the shallows. Not where it’s safe.

I’ve spent my career moving between two worlds that rarely talk to each other. On fields and in gyms, I work with athletes and teams on the mental side of competing — baseball, soccer, softball, volleyball. On weekdays, I’ve worked inside companies like HubSpot, Adobe, Google, and LastPass, watching smart people try to do hard things under pressure. And I keep noticing the same thing: Bowie’s water line shows up in both places. The hitter facing a pitcher just above his level. The analyst handed a project slightly bigger than her résumé. Same water. Same feeling of feet leaving the bottom.

Psychology has a name for what happens when the depth is exactly right. Flow.

Where the nine dimensions come from

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” in the 1970s to describe the state of complete absorption in a task — what athletes call being locked in, and what the rest of us call being in the groove. Susan Jackson brought the concept to sport. Her doctoral research in the early 1990s involved long interviews with elite athletes about their best moments, and in 1999 she and Csikszentmihalyi co-wrote Flow in Sports, the first book devoted entirely to the zone in athletics. I also owe Jackson credit for the Bowie image that opens this piece. I encountered it in her writing on flow, and it stayed with me from the moment I read it.

Out of that work came a nine-dimension model. Together, the nine define the state. Separately, they’re the elements you can actually train, engineer, or at least recognize. For coaching purposes, I organize the nine into three groups: three conditions you can build, five experiences you may feel, and one payoff that makes the whole thing worth pursuing.

Dimension

In one line

On the field

At work

Build — the conditions you can engineer

1. Challenge–skill balance

The moment stretches your ability without overwhelming it.

Practice set just past the athlete’s edge — not grooved, not impossible.

The stretch assignment — past sandbagged, short of fantasy.

1. Clear goals

You know exactly what you’re trying to do — this rep, this play.

One focus per play: W.I.N. — What’s Important Now.

Meetings and projects where everyone can define “done.”

1. Unambiguous feedback

Immediate, clear information about how it’s going.

Ball flight, stopwatch, scoreboard — a seconds-long loop.

Short loops: work shipped small, progress made visible.

Feel — the experiences that mark the state

1. Action–awareness merging

Doing and thinking fuse; no gap between deciding and doing.

The swing that happens without narration — earned through reps.

The presenter who stops reading her slides and just talks.

1. Concentration on the task

Total absorption — nothing splits the attention.

Between-pitch discipline: narrow the world to one target.

Protected blocks of unbroken attention — no pings.

1. Sense of control

Feeling capable without gripping.

A practiced pre-pitch routine — BALL: Breathe, Anchor, Let It Go, Lock In.

Preparing the hard Q&A well enough to stop scripting it.

1. Loss of self-consciousness

The inner critic goes quiet; no audience awareness.

Playing free despite the stands, the phones, the recruiters.

Working the problem — not how you look working it.

1. Transformation of time

Time compresses or dilates.

The ball looks slow; the game is gone in a blink.

The afternoon that vanishes into a problem.

The payoff

1. Autotelic experience

The activity is rewarding in itself — the doing is the point.

Loving the competing itself; flow doesn’t require winning.

Engagement — absorption in the work, not just effort at it.

Adapted from Jackson & Csikszentmihalyi, Flow in Sports (1999); grouping is the author’s.

The three you can build

1. Challenge–skill balance. The demands of the moment stretch your current ability without overwhelming it. You’re not standing comfortably in the shallows, but you’re not drowning either. This is the foundational dimension — Bowie’s water line turned into science. Too shallow and you’re bored. Too deep and anxiety takes over. Stretched — just past comfortable — something switches on.

In sports readiness, this is a design question. A hitter grooving off a machine set ten miles an hour slow isn’t preparing. He’s rehearsing boredom. The coach’s real job is calibration — setting practice so every athlete spends time at their edge, not camped inside it. In the corporate world, this is the case against both busywork and impossible goals. A sandbagged target produces coasting. A fantasy target produces quiet panic and creative accounting. The stretch assignment — the project slightly bigger than the person — is where people grow, and where they report their best days at work.

1. Clear goals. Knowing exactly what you’re trying to do, right now. Not the season goal. This rep. This pitch. This play.

Athletes drift when the goal is vague. “Play well today” isn’t a goal; it’s a wish. In our work we use a tool called W.I.N. — What’s Important Now. It’s one question an athlete asks between plays: of everything I could think about, what one thing matters in the next ten seconds? One question. One focus. Right now. The corporate translation is almost embarrassing in how directly it applies. Most meetings fail the clear-goals test before they start — an hour passes and nobody could tell you what “done” looked like. The teams that feel best to work on are the ones where, at any moment, each person can answer the W.I.N. question without hesitating.

1. Unambiguous feedback. Immediate, clear information about how it’s going.

Sport is drenched in feedback. Ball flight. The stopwatch. The scoreboard. Your body tells you things every rep. This may be one reason flow is easier to recognize in sports than at work — the loop is seconds long. In most companies, the loop is a year long. An annual review is the opposite of unambiguous feedback: delayed, filtered, and compressed into a rating. The fix isn’t more reviews. It’s shorter loops — work shipped in smaller pieces, progress made visible, a manager who tells you this week what they noticed this week.

Here’s why I put these three first: they’re the conditions a coach — or a manager — can actually engineer. Jackson’s research is clear that flow itself can’t be forced. But these three are the levers on the outside of the machine. The next five describe what it feels like once you’re in.

The five you’ll feel

1. Action–awareness merging. Doing and thinking fuse. The athlete stops narrating her own movement — there’s no gap between deciding and doing. This is what reps are actually for. You don’t practice so practice looks good; you practice so the game can be automatic. The corporate version is the presenter who finally stops reading her own slides and just talks, or the engineer whose fingers are ahead of his inner monologue. You can’t will this state into existence. You earn it upstream, through repetition.

1. Concentration on the task at hand. Total absorption. Nothing splits the attention. This is the dimension the modern office has most thoroughly engineered against — open floor plans, notifications, the meeting that could have been a message. Every ping is a hand pulling the swimmer back to shore. Athletes train the opposite deliberately: the between-pitch discipline of narrowing the world down to one target. Protecting blocks of unbroken attention isn’t a productivity hack; it’s a precondition for the state that produces the best work.

1. Sense of control. Feeling capable without gripping. This one carries a paradox: the feeling of control in the moment comes from preparation before the moment, not effort during it. This is why routines matter. In our baseball work, the pre-pitch routine is called BALL — Breathe, Anchor, Let It Go, Lock In. Four steps, a few seconds: a breath to settle the body, a physical anchor to return to the present, a release of the last pitch, and a narrowing onto the next one. The routine doesn’t control the pitch. It creates the felt sense that you’re ready for whatever the pitch is — and that feeling is the dimension. The executive who prepares for the hard Q&A doesn’t script every answer. She builds enough readiness that she can stop gripping.

1. Loss of self-consciousness. The inner critic goes quiet. No audience awareness — not the crowd, not the camera, not the boss. I think this is the hardest dimension for young athletes today. Parents in the stands, phones recording, a recruiting profile hanging over every at-bat. It’s also the dimension most corporate cultures quietly destroy: when a meeting is a performance for the most senior person in the room, nobody is working on the problem — everybody is working on how they look working on the problem. Psychological safety offers a useful team-level parallel here: when people trust the room, they can spend their attention on the problem instead of on protecting their image.

1. Transformation of time. Time bends. It compresses — a game gone in a blink — or it dilates, and the ball looks slow. This is the least trainable of the nine and the most instantly recognizable, which makes it useful as a diagnostic rather than a target. I’ll ask an athlete: did today feel fast or slow? The answer tells you something about where their attention lived. Office workers know the corporate version — the afternoon that vanishes into a problem — usually as the best afternoon of the month.

The one that makes it worth it

1. Autotelic experience. The activity is rewarding in itself. “Autotelic” comes from the Greek — auto (self) and telos (goal). The doing is the point.

Here’s the finding people consistently miss, and Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi are explicit about it: flow does not require winning. It isn’t a synonym for peak performance, and it can show up in a loss. For youth and college sports, sitting inside a burnout epidemic, that’s not a footnote — it’s the escape hatch. If the only reward is the outcome, every practice is a debt payment against a game that might not pay off. Train the experience, and the outcomes tend to follow anyway. The corporate parallel is engagement. Hard work alone doesn’t explain burnout; the greater danger is sustained effort without enough control, meaning, recovery — or moments of genuine absorption. All challenge and no absorption wears people down. So does all repetition and no challenge.

You can’t force it. You can train the way back.

The most useful thing in Jackson’s research might not be the nine dimensions at all. When she asked elite athletes what got them into flow, what kept them out, and what knocked them out, a pattern emerged. The factors that get you in — preparation, the right arousal level, focus, confidence — athletes overwhelmingly described as controllable. The things that knock you out — a bad call, the weather, an opponent’s run, and I’d add a surprise reorg — were mostly not.

It’s worth sitting with. You cannot prevent getting knocked out of the zone. Nobody can. What you can train is how quickly you return to the conditions that make flow possible. I’ve watched a hitter step out after a bad call, take one breath, touch the end of the bat, and step back in with a completely different presence. Nothing about the call changed. Everything about him did. That’s why we treat the reset — the few seconds between plays, or between the email and your response to it — as a trainable skill rather than a personality trait. The athletes and professionals who look unshakeable aren’t people who never leave flow. They’re people with a short, practiced route back.

This is where mental readiness becomes more than a motivational idea. Coaches and managers can design the conditions: the right level of challenge, a clear immediate target, useful feedback, protected attention, and a practiced reset. None of them guarantees flow. Together, they make it more likely — and they make disruption less costly. That, in the end, is the work.

Which brings it back to Bowie. The water is going to move. Waves will push you toward shore — that part was never up to you. The skill, in both arenas, is wading back out. A little further than feels comfortable. Feet not quite touching bottom. Right where the exciting things happen.

About the Author

Scott K. Wilder is the founder of Game Ready Mindset™, a program and platform serving players, position groups, teams, and athletic programs across baseball, soccer, softball, and volleyball. He holds master’s degrees from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, now Sofia University, and The Johns Hopkins University. His coaching credentials include programs through Georgetown University, Brian Cain’s MPM Program, and the National Federation of State High School Associations. He is currently completing a coaching program through FC Barcelona Football Club. He is the author of Millennial Leaders and the forthcoming book Compete in Any Weather.

Sources

1. Jackson, S.A. & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1999). Flow in Sports: The Keys to Optimal Experiences and Performances. Human Kinetics.

1. Jackson, S.A. (1995). Factors influencing the occurrence of flow state in elite athletes. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology.

1. Jackson, S.A. & Marsh, H.W. (1996). Development and validation of the Flow State Scale. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology.