When I was trying to work out how to manage my own anxiety, I came across a book by Martin Seligman called Flourish. In it he sets out a model of well-being with five elements, drawn from looking at what is present when people are actually thriving.

The Five Elements

It is called PERMA, after the five.

• Positive emotion. Joy, gratitude, contentment, optimism, hope. The ordinary good feelings, not euphoria.
• Engagement. Being genuinely absorbed in what you are doing, rather than present but elsewhere.
• Relationships. Connection with other people, and the sense of belonging that comes with it.
• Meaning. Understanding why you are doing what you are doing, and having it connect to something beyond the immediate task.
• And achievement. Progress and competence. Not external success particularly, but the sense that you are getting somewhere.

A Good Model, With a Limitation

It is a good model. I have found it genuinely useful. And it has the same limitation as every other framework of this kind, which is that it describes what a flourishing life contains without telling you how to obtain any of it.

Knowing that relationships matter does not help the person who finds closeness frightening. Knowing that meaning matters does not produce meaning.

So it is worth laying the four steps alongside it, because the four steps are the training, and each element of PERMA turns out to rest on them.

What Each Element Rests On

Start with positive emotion. Your emotions come from your beliefs. That is the whole premise of this approach. Which means positive emotion is not something you generate directly by trying to feel better. It is what happens downstream when a belief becomes more accurate. Reframing is the lever, and gratitude is one of the most direct forms of it.

Engagement is attention. Being absorbed in something requires your attention to stay where you put it, and that is precisely what mindfulness trains. It also requires the challenge and your skills to be in balance, which is an assessment, and assessments are what insight examines.

Relationships are where the three core themes live. Trust, value and acceptance are not abstractions in a relationship, they are the whole substance of it. And the order runs from the inside out. When you trust your own judgment you can extend trust to someone else. When you can see your own worth you are far better at seeing theirs. Compassion is the skill that makes this possible, and it is trained on yourself first because that is the harder direction.

Meaning depends on seeing the connection between what you are doing today and what you actually care about. Mindfulness gives you awareness of what you are doing. Insight gets you to your actual values, as opposed to the ones you have inherited or assumed. And compassion lets you look at a gap between the two without turning it into an indictment.

Achievement needs all four. Mindfulness to notice the steps you are taking, which otherwise vanish. Compassion to let a small or imperfect result count. Insight to know why the goal matters to you in the first place. And reframing to keep going when something goes wrong, because how you explain a setback determines whether you continue.

Every Element Reduces to Beliefs

There is a pattern in all of that worth naming.

Every element of PERMA reduces, when you look closely, to beliefs. What you believe about what is happening, about other people, about your own capacity, about what matters. And the four steps are simply the process for finding those beliefs and adjusting them.

Which is why I am not offering you a second system here. PERMA is a good description of where you are trying to get to. The four steps are how you walk.

If you already know this model, you have not learned anything new today about the destination. You have learned which part of the work produces which part of it, and that is the piece that lets you do something on Tuesday morning.