When both challenge and skills are perceived as being in balance and above a person’s average, the athlete will experience an optimal state, which represents flow.
According to Csikszentmihalyi (1988), a crucial prerequisite for an athlete to experience flow state, is the self-perceived or individually estimated balance of situational challenges and personal skills. A key notion of flow experience is the perceived balance between challenge and skills, and not the objective nature of the challenges or skills per se ( Csikszentmihalyi, 1982). 277) referred that the level of challenge represents the “intrinsic demands” of the activity, while the level of person’s skills refers to the “self-perceived capacity to meet the demands” of the activity. Two characteristics formulate the quality of this experience: (a) self-perceived challenge of the situation or activity and (b) self-perceived skills of the person ( Csikszentmihalyi, 1982 Moneta and Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). The orthogonal model of flow theory constitutes an important part for understanding the quality of this enjoyable and self-rewarding subjective experience ( Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi, 1988). By adding the subsequent absence of worry about the upcoming result and the automatic and effortless experience, there is a great possibility that the athlete will experience flow ( Csikszentmihalyi, 1988 Jackson, 1995 Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). This enables the athlete to be completely concentrated and absorbed by the activity, and to perceive the task at hand as self-rewarding, controllable and joyful. In the sporting context, the athletes will experience flow when goals are clearly set by the athlete, feedback is immediate and unambiguous ( Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). The theoretical and practical links of positive experience to other well-established theoretical approaches, such as goal orientation theory will provide fruitful information to better capture the nature of optimal experience, which is helpful to consultants and coaches’ work, and athletes’ performance improvement.įlow experience refers to an optimal and pleasurable experience, linked to intrinsically rewarding and high enjoyable feelings ( Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi, 1988 Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). However, this approach is not new as three decades earlier Csikszentmihalyi (1982) started building this trend through the flow theory, examining ways to create and control this positive experience. This new scientific field focused on the study of positive experience, trying to find the pathways to improve humans functioning, performance, and well-being. Around the beginning of millennium this trend started to shift as a theoretical approach has emerged, under the name positive psychology ( Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Additionally, not the level of task and ego orientation per se, but the balance between athletes’ goal orientation preferences seems important for the formation of flow experience, indicating that high task – high ego and high task – low ego athletes are experiencing the most positive mental state.Īs managing negative emotions has been the primary focus of practitioners in the past, positive emotions have received limited examination in the sporting context. The results indicated that the athletes’ task orientation may be an important factor for attaining flow in competitive sport, feeling more skillful and estimating the upcoming competition as challenging, while low ego and low task oriented athletes lack these elements, which are important for them to get into flow. In the following, the Flow State Scale-2 was completed up to 30 min after the competition they just participated, along with the challenge-skill ratings, based on how athletes felt during the competition. The challenge and skills ratings were completed 1 h before the competition, based on how they felt at the exact time of answering. Two hundred and seventy eight athletes completed the Task and Ego Orientation Sport Questionnaire based on how they usually feel. The main purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between flow experience and goal orientation theory, as well as, the differences in flow experience based on the orthogonal model of goal orientation theory.
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