The Flywheel

Talk to any person and ask them how the world has changed over the past several years, and chances are they'll mention that it's become a lot more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). Today, people are increasingly skeptical of promises — made by politicians, governments, employers, and the companies they buy from - and when those promises are left undelivered, they feel increasingly exploited with little tangible reward. As conventional rewards wane in power and availability, more people become desperate for a dose of the happiness and joy they expect to find in life.

When people make increasingly short-term decisions that prioritize immediate comfort and control over facing anxiety, dissonance, and trauma head-on, their ability to actualize themselves and others - and find happiness - fades.

At Integral Productivity, we believe there's a better way to actualize — a way to actualize better. People who align their happiness with their actualization, are not only happier themselves, they help the people and communities around them actualize and find happiness, too, making for a better world and a more healing-centered and resilient culture.

To actualize better, you need to be able to find meaning in every moment — that's where the flywheel comes into play.

The flywheel is a metaphor adopted by Integral Productivity to explain the momentum you gain when you align your lived experience around fulfilling your potential to create an immeasurable humanistic impact.

The flywheel was invented by James Watt; it's energy-efficient because it can store increasing energy while also using it to propel the attached vehicle forward. The amount of energy it stores depends on how fast it spins, the friction against it, and its size.

This energy is especially helpful when thinking about how any tension, dissonance, or resistance you face can help you grow. 

Other models think of your happiness as an outcome of fulfilling your more basic and psychological needs — nothing more, nothing less. When you face an unexpected setback or unfulfilled expectation, all the energy you spent getting to that point feels wasted. 

As we said above, the amount of energy, or momentum, your flywheel has depends on three things:

1. How fast you spin it
2. How much friction there is
3. How big it is

The most successful people will adjust their personal strategies to address all three. The speed of your flywheel increases when you add force to areas that have the biggest effect. Forces are programs and strategies you put in place to speed up your flywheel. For example, regular reflection, positive disintegration, visioning, and deliberate practice are all forces. By focusing on how you can boost your actualization, the more you can support yourself and find authenticity and fulfillment through any scenario.

Since you’re applying force to your flywheel, you also need to make sure nothing is opposing it — that means eliminating friction from your personal strategy.  Friction is anything that slows down your flywheel. For example, bad habits, denial, avoidance, circular thinking, self-centeredness, poor communication, wishful thinking, or misalignment between your intentions, behavior, and impact. You can reduce friction by looking at what signals you're missing, how your thinking is structured, why you feel unmotivated, where you're not connecting your plans with embodied practice and supporting systems, or staying in an unsupportive environment for too long. Are you paying attention to your emotions and new information? Are your beliefs and values aligned or are they at odds with each other? Are your direction and commitment focused or are they scattered and diffuse? Do you give yourself space to develop your skills and capabilities, or do you skip to the next distraction? 

The more you increase speed and decrease friction, the more support you will create for your actualization. All that support becomes a force that spins your flywheel. 

At Integral Productivity, we believe so strongly in the model that we've reframed the adaptive actualization methodology to teach you how to use the flywheel model to drive your actualization. 

That's why the new adaptive actualization method is a circle. When you use the everyday actualization strategy as a foundation, the five phases of your flywheel are sense, frame focus, stride, and find. By applying force to these five phases, you can realize your authentic self and potential faster and more fully.

For example, in the sense phase, you hone your sensitivity to threats and opportunities by becoming alert to signals that bring awareness of potential impacts on your life and removing barriers to learning about yourself and the world around you. The key is to stay open to your anxious feelings and emerging inputs that are part of your experience, not to filter them out just to stay on your current program. Some forces you can apply are your execution effectiveness to assess your degree of productivity and control, your inner sensitivity through reflection and perspective-making, and your outer sensitivity through continuous discovery and learning. 

As part of the reframing phase, you increase your neuroplasticity by exploring how your model of the world might shift with this information, making it easier to grow and adapt. Focus on expanding the frame, lens, or scope of your thinking to give each insight a place to go before narrowing it or closing things off. Some forces include the architecture and frameworks you use to organize your thinking and feelings. Others include analytical and emotional breakdowns (a.k.a. disintegrations) that help you understand, challenge, and even let go of obstructive components in your decision-making models as well as developing your adaptive capacity, growth mindset, and resilience to change. 

In the focusing phase, you bring purpose and intentionality into your lived experience. Remember, you grow most when you use your tensions as a pathway to happiness. Some forces you can use are a humanistic vision to ensure your goals are inclusive and beneficial to everyone and not just yourself, a mandated mission that drives and compels you through adversity, and evolving your intrapersonal and interpersonal leadership through revolutionary actions that help you and others defy opposition toward living authentically and finding fulfillment.

In the stride phase, you're spending your precious energy and time on what matters most. [] Some forces you can use here include embodiment work and deliberate practice to instill your desired way of being so it's more automatic, technology and automation to keep your focus on things that truly demand your utmost attention and thinking, and the development of personal products—checklists, templates, presentations, tools, frameworks, and more—that extend your reach.

Finally, in the finding phase, you come upon a new and transcendent sense of self. These are ego revolutions that represent your sense of connection to the universe where you shift from one level of meaning-making to another. Forces here might include deliberate exits and pivots from environments or meta-strategies that no longer serve you, double-down bets on key areas of passion that elevate your dedication to a specific cause, or intense meditation or sacred medicine rituals that help you perceive reality in new ways.