The Path of Ease and Flow — Tutti Taygerly

I tend to be a go-go-go driven person in perpetual motion towards the next milestone, goal, or dream. It’s the default mode that I’ve been familiar with since childhood. And increasingly through the years, I’m feeling a deeper pull towards a different way of being—the path of ease of flow. I’m sharing three vignettes from the path.

If I slow down, I’ll lose my edge

About a decade ago, I was sitting in the office of my first coach, Matthew. He’d been trained as a cognitive-behavioral therapist before becoming a coach and I figured he was ideal to help me with specific leadership feedback. As the only female leader in a startup, I was simultaneously viewed as a role model of strength to the 50% female staff, and also as an opinionated and strong-willed design advocate. The COO had asked me to work on softening some of my rough edges. I’ve written a lot about my past as a difficult person, yet while that specific topic landed me in Matthew’s office, I gained so much more as he provided my first peek into the path of ease and flow.

I was fiercely proud of my success and of being a fighter for what’s right. The mantras that had driven my life to date were all performative and I thought they had served me well. I relished my drive and grit that kept me trying, striving, fighting, and to never stop.

Matthew asked me: “What if the path was easy and fun, not so hard?” I laughed at his foolishness and confidently replied:

“The easy way is not for me. If I slow down, I’ll lose my edge.”

You see, I was conditioned to look for the challenge. I felt that challenges and hardship shaped me, and I had a disdain for anything that could be considered the easy path.

Fast-forward a decade and I’ve been through some major hardships with the death of 2 parents (my father-in-law and my father) and a divorce that instantly shattered the lives of my two girls. I now know that I can see the gift through whatever life throws at you. And I also know that the fear of losing my edge is a limiting belief. I share more in this parody piece— The Perfect System for Success & Exhaustion. I’ve learned that this fear of losing my edge holds me down and keeps me performative. It feeds into the rational, problem-solving part of myself, while ignoring the emotional richness and intuition that comes with the path of ease and flow.

I’ve been working on these limiting beliefs over the past decade and will continue to do so in the coming decades.

How can we be more design-led?

One of my clients, a startup founder, asked me this question the other day. He’d launched a lot of products before and was struggling with how much time to dedicate towards building new features vs going deep on the design to craft the best experience for the existing features. This is an age-old prioritization question that product people repeatedly face. As I rolled up my sleeves and prepared to put on my rational problem-solving hat, I took a pause to understand what he was really asking. Listening deeply, I realized that he was looking for a competitive edge to make his product stand out, and also a framework for a different way of thinking.

Instead of a rational conversation about use cases, feature-prioritization, and his two-sided marketplace, we slowed down and envisioned:

“How do you want the people using your product to feel? What emotion should they walk away with?”

Many of us technologists are hyper-rational. We are able to understand goals, milestones, metrics and sprints. We can size up the addressable market and create a sprint plan that bundles related features together. Yet this fails to account for the indescribable feeling & experience of encountering a product that unexpectedly makes you smile and relish the click of familiarity when you’ve found something that deeply touches you or solves a need you never knew you had. I’m referring to the mysterious power that can emotionally tug on someone’s heart.

Community products like Facebook groups or Slack networking group provides a sense of belonging with others who share your same passions (and perhaps also the deep shame that’s the dark side of the passion)
Photo filters in any variety of apps gives you a sense of professional pride as someone who can take good photos
Maps provides the feeling of power and knowledge over uncontrollable factors such as like traffic, road construction, police presence, and stopped vehicles.

As my client sought to be more design-led in his MVP (minimal viable product), we explored the emotion of how his top users should feel. We explored how their golden path through his product could be adjusted to strengthen their sense of accomplishment. We explored a balance between the intuition of how the product should feel versus the rational list of features. And the path of ease and flow started to open up around feelings & emotions.

Surrender to Ease and Flow

I spent this past long weekend in the clear clean air of Mendocino, a coastal retreat of artists, boutiques, fantastic food and wine but most of all, stark beauty. Majestic nature surrounds you—the steep bluffs overlooking the sea, the insanely blue rivers, and the majestic nearby redwoods. My partner and I had been working hard through the past weeks and were looking forward to this glamping getaway and chance to reconnect.

Half of the weekend was really hard. My driven challenge-minded, fearful self-critic pushed fiercely for connection. I was afraid that we might be hitting our upper limit of couple-dom and gave in the weight and fears of the unknown, and where we might be going as a couple. We had many tearful, emotional conversations sparked from recent couples coaching where we were co-envisioning a future together. We jumped into the realm of anger, grief, and resentment. There was nothing easy about it. As my partner put it, “That wasn’t a connection— it was a dissection.” We pulled apart and hyper-analyzed many of our fears and faults. This was exhausting. It left us both drained and faint shadows of our adventurous, exuberant selves.

Yet interspersed through the challenge were glimpses of ease and flow. The joy of flying down a dirt bike path surrounded by blackberries and pines. The ease of floating down-river on our backs on a paddleboard, juxtaposed against the flow of digging in hard to paddle our way back against the wind and current. There was the accomplishment of building a fire and cooking lemon-wine scallops on a camp stove. I felt awe in feeling the weight of my own footsteps walking through a redwood grove surrounded by 1000-year old trees.

And that’s what fuels us. Hard stuff inevitably happens and coaching can support us in confronting what’s hard in an atmosphere of safety. That’s a challenge that I never shy away from. Yet perhaps, the act of doing, the act of trying so hard to get things right and perfect is itself self-defeating. Interspersed between the doings & pushing is the simplicity of being. Of doing nothing and surrendering to the path of ease and flow because that’s the beautiful moments that fuel the soul and generate creativity.

Bottom-Line

If you’ve been one of those people, like me, who fiercely marches into challenge, consider if there might be a different way. Consider that the path of ease and flow where you follow the fun might get you to an entirely different place. What would success look like from this path?