4: Preparing the Self for Flow-Based Leadership

Imagine being a firefighter in a small rural fire department. You have had plenty of training and have even served as incident commander a few times. One night, your department gets called out to the biggest fire of your career. You become the incident commander by virtue of being the highest-ranking officer on scene. You have a choice about how to respond in this situation. You can either panic, or you can let all your training and experience inform your decisions. In the blink of an eye, you feel like a conductor leading an orchestra. You are “game on” — knowing exactly what to do, what to have other people do, and dealing with all the decisions that are coming at you 100 miles per hour. You feel unshakable. You make the surprising discovery that you are comfortable with commanding, even though you have never commanded an incident of this size. You discover later that this event will influence you in subsequent incidents. You will have the confidence and self-awareness to recognize how to deal with the stress inherent in emergent situations. Instead of feeling terror, you will choose to be calm and allow yourself to enter a flow state where everything you do is exactly as it should be.