Oren Harris knows about creating extraordinary results in ways that some people say is impossible. To that, he just smiles knowingly.
As a 'Master of Flow,' Oren is a coach and mentor to personal development and spiritual leaders, business visionaries, high performance athletes, and others who want to harness the incredible power of what he calls ‘The Flow’. He is also a speaker, facilitator and professional paradigm buster.
Oren helps leaders achieve better results than they ever imagined with less effort than they ever thought possible. How? He facilitates a "Flow experience' with them, and then teaches them how to recreate that for themselves. Why is that useful? Oren explains:
When people have an experience of the Flow, and when they're in the Flow, the things that happen are so unexplainable to our logical mind that we start putting fantastical types of words on them. You know we say things like 'strange', or 'wow', or 'amazing', or 'miraculous'…
Some of the things that happen when we're experiencing the Flow or when we're going with the Flow are like being in the right place at the right time, connected to the right people, seemingly spontaneous genius flowing from our mouth sometimes, a disappearance of time – like life gets to be more seamless, more effortless, more graceful.
And really, in a very simplistic sense, we're just not resisting life. We're allowing the life that's trying to flow through us, that’s birthing through us, to actually flow without obstructing it.
Oren was an athlete in school, and eventually became a teacher and sports coach. As an athlete, he was already familiar with being "in The Zone," that state of being in which athletes exhibit exceptional, and seemingly effortless, peak performance.
Oren then had his own experience of being in the zone in another context of life outside sports – a huge a-ha moment for him. He'd met his first life coach who opened his mind to new ways of looking at himself and what he truly wanted out of life. That led him to the realization that he wanted to become a life coach himself.
Oren decided to start public speaking as a way to build his coaching practice, and went to Toastmasters in order to develop his speaking skills. That opened the door to the a-ha moment that gave birth to his becoming a Master of Flow:
I signed up for Toastmasters which is a public speaking training organization. I went to the first meeting. I was nervous…I was like 'Okay, maybe I'll learn to speak.'
I signed up for my first speech, an icebreaker. For those who aren't familiar with Toastmasters, they hone the craft of speaking. They even have this buzzer, if you say 'um', 'ah', 'um…ah', they'd be like [buzzer] [buzzer] [buzzer] [buzzer]. They teach you all of the mechanics of speaking.
So I go home and I write the speech – it comes through me – and I start practicing it in the mirror, in the video camera, and I'm doing it. My heart's beating and I'm getting anxious and nervous, and there's not even anybody in front of me. So I thought to myself, 'Maybe I don't want to be a speaker. Maybe that's not my gig, but I'm going to go ahead and do this anyway.'
I was like 'You know what? Forget it. I'm going to go through with this, but forget this whole speaking gig. There's just too much going on here.'
So I put my speech aside. I actually crumpled it up. I was like 'You know what? I'm just going to go up there, be myself, speak from my heart, and that will be my definition of success. I'm not going to go try to be a good speaker.'
I go up there and I was just being myself, right? And I spoke from my heart and did my speech. I wasn't thinking about any of the mechanics – nothing. And when it was done, I got a standing ovation. And I was kind of like 'That was interesting…'
The experience got his attention, and opened a doorway that he hadn’t previously seen before:
I paid attention to a couple things: one was how people were looking at me and what I could feel they were feeling, and I knew it was something beyond what I was saying. And the other big question was 'How is it that when I completely let go of this, suddenly I'm being hailed as some genius speaker?' I'm asking 'What is that?'
And then I remembered back to playing sports, at times where somehow unexplainably my skill and talent level shot up and I felt like I was outside of time, and I could anticipate what was happening on the defense and all these extra senses, and I was 'Ahhh…that's the same thing.'
So then I was like 'Well if I could be in the Flow…' which at the time I was familiar with the term 'the zone' – 'If I can be in the zone in sports, and I can be in the Flow here, (the same experience) would have to be applicable to every area of life.
And so that presented a really big question like 'What is the Flow, and how can I really be in the Flow more and more in every area?'
The same thing happened again the next time he got up to speak, this time for a private company: he got a standing ovation. Oren knew that he was on the right track:
When I got a standing ovation again, I was like 'Okay, I'm going to start speaking. ' The first thing I decided to speak about was what was happening inside of that, or the Flow, and that's how the Flow platform began, and so then I set off on that course…
Even when I decided to be a speaker, I was like 'I want to be this type of speaker: I want to be the speaker that I am' — because that's most natural, and that's actually a clue to being in the Flow. It's finding something that is very organic, and natural, and true to me. I'm like 'If I'm going to be that type of speaker, there's going to be some degree of effortlessness to it because I am me.'
It just so happens to be that in me being me, and being inspired, and connected, and in spirit like that, no matter what I'm sharing, I'm going to be sharing that message regardless of the content order or whatever I say.
I think that really assisted me in not projecting any sort of limiting ideas about becoming a speaker. I already felt like an amazing speaker.
*Sigh*…can you feel the relief in that way of being? To be your most natural self, to do something so organic and effortless for you, where you’re so in tune with all of Life and what’s happening around you, that your Being is communicating even more than your words, and paving the way for the greatest possible impact on others with the least amount of effort yourself? (I’ll have what he’s having! ;D)
You can listen to my full interview with Oren here, in which we talked in depth about the rest of his journey to becoming a Flow Master, and what he can teach you about tapping into your own experience of the Flow, including:
- The most common misperception about the Flow that leads to people cutting themselves off from it
- Some of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself to get into the Flow
- How the beliefs you hold can greatly limit you and block you from the Flow, or liberate you to live in it
- Why people pleasing is a game that no one has ever won, and one that takes you out of Flow
- How to become more of your most authentic self even when others have fixed ideas of who you are
- And much more!
You can find out more about Oren and how to step out of the limited ideas of what’s possible for you and into a direct flow experience in all areas of your life and business at OrenHarris.com, as well as at TheFlowAcademy.com. I also highly recommend signing up for Oren’s free “Tips From The Flow” that teach you the core principles of Flow and how to apply them to your life.
Oren says most people spend only 3% of their lives in the Flow.
What would your experience of life and business look like if you tapped into your own Flow and that number bumped up to 10%, 20%, or even 30%?
Photo: Jax Austin
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