The Success Myth
Flourishing Isn’t About Feeling Good, It’s About Living Well
There’s a common misunderstanding about positive psychology: that it’s about making happiness one’s predominant emotion. If that were the case, it would be a delusional field more closely related to toxic positivity, all dopamine hacks and forced optimism.
Positive psychology isn’t about chasing happiness. It’s about understanding what allows individuals and groups to thrive, to flourish. It’s about mapping the conditions that support resilience, purpose, and deep engagement with life. Instead of focusing on what’s wrong with us, it asks what’s right with us.
Aristotle proposed that we flourish in a life guided by reason, using our unique capacities in a virtuous way, in pursuit of the good. When we do this, we can be said to be flourishing.
Dr. Martin Seligman, one of the founding figures of positive psychology, follows in Aristotle’s footsteps today, proposing that we need to embody our unique strengths and virtues to live a meaningful life, employing our capacities for a greater purpose than ourselves.
The Anatomy of Flourishing
Psychologists Hefferon and Boniwell describe flourishing as “a state of positive mental health.” Flourishing is about functioning well, not about feeling good. It’s when emotional vitality meets meaningful action, when you’re not just getting by but fully alive and fully engaged with your life.
Researchers consider three primary ingredients to determine how fulfilled someone is:
Pleasure – The capacity to experience joy, satisfaction, and positive emotions.
Performance – The ability to operate at your best, mentally and physically.
Contentment – A sense of peace, stability, and fulfillment.
Most people hover somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. They may have a lot of one ingredient and a little of another. Or they may have some of each, but not necessarily in balance. When something is off, it tends to manifest in a consistent, dull dissatisfaction that many of us habitually numb using our phones and Netflix. When these three ingredients are acutely out of balance, a symptom that we are not living in accordance with our unique strengths and virtues, we experience deep dissatisfaction and unhappiness.
The Real Relationship Between Happiness and Success
One of the most widespread myths our modern-day capitalist consumerist society lives by is the idea that success leads to happiness. Work hard, achieve, gain status, buy more stuff, and then you’ll feel fulfilled.
Decades of research indicate otherwise. Building the capacity to regularly experience positive emotions creates success. Feeling good leads to success, and getting to the point at which you feel good regularly takes an intentional, concerted effort.
Studies by King, Lyubomirsky, and Diener show that positive affect, our capacity to experience and express positive emotions, predicts better relationships, higher achievement, and greater overall well-being.
Happiness isn’t an outcome; it’s the launchpad.
But our default as a society is to operate under the old framework: chase after external markers of success and expect them to result in a life that feels meaningful and provides sustainable joy. It’s a narrative that helps our capitalist economy and the companies in it grow, but it doesn’t consistently create joy and meaning for us as people. The traditional “success” narrative, rooted in meritocracy, hustle, and acquisition, was never designed to produce deep, lasting fulfillment. It was designed to keep people striving.
What Actually Predicts Well-Being?
If our culture’s traditional markers of status and wealth don’t reliably lead to flourishing, what does? Seligman offers the PERMA model as a framework for understanding what drives well-being:
Positive Emotion – Cultivating joy, gratitude, and optimism.
Engagement – Deep absorption in meaningful activities.
Relationships – Strong, supportive social connections.
Meaning – A sense of purpose beyond the self.
Accomplishment – Pursuing and achieving goals that matter.
People who report high levels across these dimensions tend to have more satisfactory lives. Instead of slogging through life looking for brief moments of relief from a baseline of stress, they experience a sustained, wholesome sense of well-being.
The Role of Positive Emotion in Broadening and Building
Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory takes this further, showing that positive emotions are a superpower unto themselves. They literally expand our cognitive and behavioral capacities, making us more curious, open-minded, and connected with others. Since positive emotions are contagious, bringing positive affect to a group interaction has a ripple effect that spreads these superpowers to the whole group!
Contrast this with negative emotions, which narrow our focus and push us into survival mode. When we’re stuck in a cycle of stress and scarcity, we become rigid, reactive, and closed off to possibility. Failure to notice and manage negative emotions makes us more liable to fall prey to cognitive fallacies, like the false assumption that we are experts.
Coaching to Thrive
So, what does this mean for coaching? It means that a coach’s job isn’t just to help clients hit goals; it’s to help them design lives in which they feel engaged and alive. Foundationally, it requires that we build positive behavioral and emotional habits.
We can approach this in two ways:
Goal-Oriented Coaching: Using positive psychology principles to enhance performance, motivation, and achievement.
Exploratory Coaching: Coaching is a curiosity-driven, introspective partnership intended to help the coachee unpack their unique relationship with meaning, purpose, and contentment.
Both are valid, and the second is where real transformation happens. The real work isn’t just about helping people get what they think they want; it’s about helping them figure out what’s actually worth wanting in the first place.
The Bottom Line
Flourishing isn’t a luxury reserved for people with seemingly perfect lives. It’s a process available to anyone willing to challenge their conventional scripts of success and happiness.
And it starts with a simple but radical shift: designing one’s life from the inside out, free of external expectations, free of someone else’s definition of what a good, meaningful life looks like.
