Three keys, a quote and an invitation
One
The day Susannah Rodgers won the gold medal in the Rio Games in 2016, her energy felt ‘different’. She described to me feeling an ‘aura of connectivity’—she was in ‘her zone’.
“I just remember feeling this strange energetic level of calm before I won. I felt tapped into myself, my inner self, my spiritual essence. For years I had been taught to act like a robotic machine, but at the Rio Games, my final as a Paralympic swimmer, I felt this sense of flow carrying me. I remember wandering around the athletes’ village speaking to strangers, I was outwardly aware of my senses and the surroundings, far more than ever before.
Instead of fearing my final in the evening, I felt my purpose deep within and everything was just so simple, open and straightforward. Of course, it had taken four years of work and training to get there, but on that day, what set it apart was a submission to something greater than the event itself.
By approaching the Games with the mindset of a human being rather than an athlete, I truly believe that is why everything worked calmly, with less of a fight and more success as a result.”
Two
“Imagine my mum is playing the piano, totally in the zone, immersed in the music. Then imagine that someone goes up to her and says, ‘You are an amazing pianist, how do you play so well?’
This instantly makes her lose her rhythm. She starts to consciously think about how she does it and the flow gets disrupted. When we learn a method or a craft, we consciously practise it. The skill then gets imprinted in our unconsciousness—the sea within—and we stop consciously thinking how we do it. This shows that tapping into our InnSæi often means switching off our logical brains and letting what we know flow.”
(From: InnSæi: heal, revive and reset with the Icelandic art of intuition. HarperOne, May 2025)
Three
Mark Pollock has pushed the boundaries as an extreme athlete. He is the first blind man to cross the South Pole and, since he became paralyzed, seeks to find a cure for paralysis in our lifetime as well as being a leadership coach. When Mark and I spoke about intuition and InnSæi, he said:
“Accessing a flow state heightens our intuition and allows us to be hyper-connected with ourselves, other people and the world around us. If you are always switched on, executing and moving too quickly between people and places, you can only operate at a shallow level. This includes shallow reflection on yourself, connection with other people and the broader questions about the rest of the world.
As part of that research and practice I have learned that our neocortex shuts down so that we lose our sense of self, time dilates—speeds up or slows down—things become effortless, and perhaps most relevant to your question, we start to perform physically and mentally in a way that we didn’t quite know we were capable of.”
(From: InnSæi: heal, revive and reset with the Icelandic art of intuition. HarperOne, May 2025)
A quote
“You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.”
—ANNE LAMOTT, BIRD BY BIRD: SOME INSTRUCTIONS ON WRITING AND LIFE (1995)
An invitation
Wisdom is asking the right questions. Clarity comes with presence and heightened awareness about how and to what we pay attention to.
My invitation this week is for you to train being in a flow state, to access the full-circle capacity of your intuition at work.
Flow is considered “the deepest form of attention that human beings can offer,” as Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus, put so eloquently.
Flow state is a state in which we get out of our logical brains and mind chatter, we lose track of time and are immersed in a task. We balance ‘the two rhythms’ that help us harness intuition and result in enhanced creativity and optimal performance, as I cover in more depth in my book InnSæi.
Set the timer to an hour or more if you can and try these three steps into a flow state:
- Choose one goal. Flow takes all your mental energy, deployed deliberately in one direction.
- That goal needs to be meaningful to you—you can’t flow into a goal that you don’t care about.
- It helps if what you are doing is at the edge of your abilities; take what you like doing a step further, make it a bit more challenging.
As always, I recommend you journal about what comes up for you. It‘s a proven way to align with and harness your intuition, improve happiness, strengthen intention, deepen presence and enhance creativity.
Thank you for reading, as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions. If you are enjoying reading this, are curious to find out more and think others might be, please do share!
With love & respect,
Experience InnSæi
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