Damian Vaughn, PhD
Flow scientist Former NFL tight end Student of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Co-author, A Culture of Flow
Flow science. For a future where ambition runs on love.
Where are you, right now?
Your body already knows. Move the stone to where today is.
Nothing you move here leaves this device.
Touch anywhere, or drag the stone.
And the people around you?
Same frequency. Different scale.
What you just did is where my work with leaders begins. A signal arrives in the body before it arrives in the mind. State, then mindset, then behavior.
A little of my story. A little of yours.
Who is asking
Damian Vaughn, PhD
- Flow scientist, in the line of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- The first Brazilian to play in the NFL
- Actively coaching All-Pros, All-Stars, CEOs and their teams - side by side
- Founding executive at BetterUp
- Founder, three times over
- Professor of strategy
- Composer
He earned his doctorate at Claremont Graduate University under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the scientist who named flow. Before that he walked on at Miami University in Ohio, became captain, and played tight end in the NFL for the Cincinnati Bengals and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
After football he built and ran his own companies - from marble and stone to wealth management - then led organization development at Fox and served as senior vice president of human resources for HBO Latin America. He was a founding executive at BetterUp, where he is Chief Programs Officer and leads flow science. He teaches strategy at the University of Oregon's Lundquist College of Business and has spent twenty years teaching people who perform under pressure - professional athletes, executives, coaches, surgeons, and performing artists.
He is co-author, with Michael Crooke, of A Culture of Flow (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2027), and author of the forthcoming Autotelic Evolution. He also composes music. You will hear it in the work.
He was featured in the HBO film State of Play: Happiness and received the NFL's Crystal Award at the Super Bowl. Today he works with NFL All-Pros and MLB All-Stars and with founders and CEOs of growing companies, in the same weeks. His clients have also included executives from Disney, Nike, FOX, Accenture, and Google, and Grammy-winning artists. He lives in Scottsdale and is a father of three.
Where the work has lived
Where I live the work - and study it
Six arenas. One question.
Can ambition run on love?
On the field and in the research, in the same weeks - doing it, and studying what it does.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's first job in America was selling travertine. My first company was in stone. Same material, different hands.
The questions that drive the work
Work with me
For founders and CEOs at their most consequential moments
Most coaching works on what a leader thinks and does. I work one floor down, on the state that decides both - so you stay clear when it counts, and the people around you tell you the truth sooner.
What I help you with
Clear under pressure
The board meeting, the close, the hard conversation - thinking and deciding at your best when the stakes are highest.
The four seconds
Catching the signal before it becomes the raised voice, the turned meeting, and the week spent repairing it.
A team that tells the truth
What is really happening surfaces in the room, while it is still small - not later, in the numbers.
Momentum that holds
Through scale, transformation, succession, or a transaction - a leadership team that stays one team.
Why leaders choose this work
Change you can see in the business
The work goes to the specific moments where your behavior has been costing the company, and progress is measured against markers we set together at the start.
Someone who has sat in your chair
The first Brazilian to play in the NFL. Senior seats at FOX and HBO, a founding executive at BetterUp, three companies of my own. I know this pressure from the inside, not from a case study.
A method that starts where pressure starts
A doctorate in flow science under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and thirty years of practice. We begin in the body, in your own words, with music composed for the state you need - not with a framework.
An advantage that stays
The capacity is built in you and in your team, so it holds after the engagement ends. You learn to catch the signal, and the team learns to read and correct itself.
How the work is held
You
Twelve months of weekly sessions, in person and remote, with access between them when it matters.
The seat
For a stretch, sessions can move to your CFO, head of sales, or a board member. In a week you cannot make it, someone on the team takes it.
The team
When the team is ready, each person speaks in their own words, the team sees its own picture, and sessions and an off-site turn what it sees into how it works.
It begins with a conversation, with nothing riding on it.
Before the book, three seats are open. Ask about the early window.
For leadership teams of five to fifteen
A team has a nervous system. When it is regulated, people sense each other, move together, and go far beyond what their individual grind could add up to. I teach a leadership team to feel its own state before the OKR reports it - and to bring itself back to flow with precision.
What the team learns
The three forces of flow
Momentum, differentiation and integration - where the team is going, what each person uniquely brings, and how truly connected they are.
Drift and friction, early
The quiet pulling apart, and the heat that builds or corrodes - sensed together in the room, long before it shows up in the numbers.
A language for sensing
Words for state, motion, direction and pace, so anyone can say in one sentence what the team is feeling and where it is heading.
Co-regulation with mastery
The team itself, not only the leader, brings the room back to a settled, regulated state. The leader holds the conditions.
The practices
The Reading
Where is the drift? Where is the friction? Each person, one sentence. The team reads its own state before it works.
Differentiation
What each person brings that no one else does, and what they need from the team to bring it well.
Integration
In pairs, the team moves from coordinating with each other to knowing and witnessing each other.
Momentum
Every goal is tested for real interdependence, so drift is caught before it reaches execution.
Each practice runs inside the meeting already on the calendar, and changes how that meeting feels within thirty days. Off-sites and immersive sessions, with sound, take the team deeper.
Over months the team becomes one body - drift is caught early, friction becomes fuel, and flow carries everyone farther together.
Talks for leadership teams, investors, and conferences - stories from two locker rooms, a dissertation, and twenty years beside people under pressure.
A Culture of Flow
Why some teams carry each other into their best work while others, with the same talent, stall - and how a team grows into flow together. From the book with Michael Crooke.
Same Talent, Different Planet
Two NFL locker rooms with close to the same talent, and the distance between them.
The Stakes Light the Fire
What drives people to their deepest performance, and what keeps them in the game.
Who Still Tells You the Truth?
For leaders and investors. The conversations that quietly stop as people rise.
Keynotes, executive sessions, investor and portfolio gatherings, and book talks.
Ask about a date
Talk reel - coming
January 5, 2027 - Columbia Business School Publishing
A Culture of Flow
The Three Forces That Drive Purpose and Performance - with Dr. Michael Crooke
Why do some teams carry each other into their best work, while others, with the same people on paper, stall?
Autotelic Evolution - the book about the person.
The first findings on autotelic leadership.
Written, published, and on its way
The work
The books and research I have written and published, what is in the press now, what I am writing as we speak - and the talks, podcasts and music in between.
Tap any one to see just those
Sound reaches the body before words do. For thirty years I have made music as a recording artist, studied flow as a scientist, and taught meditation - and this project is where the three meet. I began it with one mission: to help people steady the nervous system, sharpen what they sense, decide from a clearer place, and find flow more often. Alone, and with others.
The vision is to meet you wherever you are, with sound that helps you reset, heal, and come back stronger and clearer - and to gather people in live rooms where a group finds its felt sense of we, and realizes how in touch we already are.
Five Paths
Each Path is a journey of about thirty-five minutes, built from music and natural sound, that carries attention from where it is toward a state a person needs.
Ninety seconds of The Path to Flow
Let your attention rest on the lowest note you can hear, and follow it.
Live and immersive
Every Path is mixed in Dolby Atmos spatial audio, so sound arrives from all around and above you rather than from a speaker in front of you. In a room, a group moves through the same thirty-five minutes together - the same signal, now shared.
A short reflection - about a minute
Your fuel, in a minute.
Stay close
Same Talent, Different Planet - field notes from the work, every other Monday. What I am seeing with people and teams, a story, sometimes a piece of music.
When you join, you receive the full thirty-five minutes of The Path to Flow - and your own path through this site, kept for you.
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Flow science. For a future where ambition runs on love.