Flourish

Flourish establishes a new model for well-being, rooted in positive psychology, building on five key pillars to help you create a happy life through the power of simple exercises.

The model Martin Seligman built to completely represent a happy life with all its facets and components is predicated on five key pillars. Numbers 1, 2 and 4 have been agreed upon in their importance by psychologists for a long time, 3 and 5 have been identified through Seligman, his team and their work.

Positive emotion. What you might call “happiness” in colloquial language, but is mostly pleasure. The warm feeling you get when your girlfriend hugs you, the excitement you get from dancing at a club to loud music, the comfort of a warm blanket and some hot pizza on a Winter’s day, etc. Engagement. The flow component, which describes the state of effortless work. How much of your time do you spend absorbed in activities you love, which make you forget time, lose yourself and feel absolutely in sync with what you’re doing? Relationships. The number one thing keeping people from becoming depressed is a strong set of great friends. Good relationships are the best, most natural anti-depressant in the world. Is your social live alive and kicking? Do you trust those around you? Do you love them? Meaning. What’s a cause you’re willing to serve, simply because you believe in it? Where do you feel like you belong? Which community can you give your time and skills to, to make the world a better place for them? Meaning is where motivation comes from. Accomplishment. As Seligman says: Winning for winning’s sake. It might sound silly, but as human beings, we need that. We need that push to the ego we get from climbing the mountain, hitting the sales goal, winning a tennis match, pulling off the conference organization, etc.

And there you have it – the PERMA model in a nutshell. Positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. If you build your life around that, there’s not much you can do wrong after that.

Martin Seligman has the best and most positive feedback from his students about the exercises they’ve done in class. Many of them said that in spite of taking so little effort, they ended up changing their life. Here are two of them. The “what went well” exercise. Before you go to bed, take ten minutes to write down three things that went well that day. Then, ask yourself “Why did this happen?” for each one of them. This will show you that your choices do matter in making a positive change and help you do it again. Do this for a week and watch…