The PERMA Model of Happiness

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer. I’m your happiness expert and this week’s video is coming to you from this particular conference room, which is really fun and exciting, and I’m looking forward to working today. But first, let’s go back to the topics we’ve been talking about in the last two weeks, which was kind of this overall construct, this conceptual understanding of what it is that creates well-being in us. What is it that means happiness for us? And that it’s not just as simple as a big smiley face on your face. It’s seen differently and in different ways, depending on the researchers who are writing about the basic elements of what happiness is. Two weeks ago, we talked about this three-legged stool: pleasure, meaning, and psychological richness. And last week, I talked about Martin Seligman’s original model, which is all about positive feelings, engagement, the sense of being and flow, and then thirdly, meaning again. And today, I want to talk to you about a new idea that Martin Seligman came up with in mid 2007 or something like that. And it’s the most commonly referred to construct for happiness. It’s called PERMA. And let’s look at that model today. It’s not one I particularly use, but it’s helpful in the differentiation between his original model and the second model. So that’s coming right up.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Okay, what the heck is PERMA? What is this model that describes a different way of being happy, that Martin Seligman was refined over his original model that came out in the mid-1990s? Seligman said the three original elements, pleasure, engagement, states of flow, and meaning, are still relevant in his new model, but he added a couple things, an R and an A, which stand for relationships and accomplishments. So, the model is PERMA: pleasure, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishments. And briefly, pleasure is those sensory experiences, the dopamine rush we get from eating a good potato chip, from listening to beautiful music, anything that just makes us feel good in the moment, that’s pleasure. Engagement, it’s the state of flow. It’s when you’re an athlete and you’re playing hockey, and you’re just, everything else is out of your mind except shooting that puck on goal, or making a good pass to your teammate. And flow can come from all kinds of activities beyond athletics. And meaning, the third item in his model, that’s the same as the original one, is this idea of knowing what our values are, living our lives on purpose, asking the question, “What is it that gives me a sense of importance and purpose in my life that I have a reason to get up in the morning and do something in particular?” And those are the things that are meaningful and important to us.

Now, Seligman was very clear that when he revised the model to include relationships and accomplishments, he said they’re not really separate and apart from the original model of pleasure, engagement, and meaning. All of our happiness, he believes, are encapsulated in those three categories. But he added relationships and accomplishments because they are just so important in his mind, and so he wanted to include them specifically, even though the reason why relationships and accomplishments make us happy is because they also tie into either pleasure, engagement, or meaning, the same way as any other source of happiness comes from. So, does that make sense? Pleasure, engagement, and meaning are, in his view, all the three ways in which we can be happier and have more well-being in our lives. But because relationships are so critical to get those first three things, and accomplishments can be very strategic to get those first three things, he added them as though they were separate and distinct, when really, they kind of fold in. Makes sense?

And so, relationships is saying, “Who is it in my life that gives me joy, peace, who gives me a sense of calm and stability in my life, and who gives me support?” These are the key relationships in our lives. And everyone in the world, like ridiculous sums, not everyone, are reporting levels of loneliness that we haven’t seen historically. And there’s all kinds of reasons: isolation, no longer living in little village tribal communities that we would have hundreds and thousands of years ago, social media is this terrible loneliness creator because everybody else’s lives seemed to be a curated list of all the wonderful, happy times they were doing exciting things with friends and family, and of course, highlight reels are not the real life that we actually have. So, we’re feeling lonely. We need to categorize and strategize more ways to have helpful relationships in our lives.

And there’s some, a few things that we can do in a practical way. You know, catch up regularly, invest in the people who have been meaningful in your life. And sometimes we move away, or we begin new hobbies or interests, and we start a new job, and we lose connection with people who we wouldn’t have seen as the deepest, closest friends, or our most intimate members of our family. And yet those relationships really matter. And I think the people that you reach out to, that you used to work with, or that you were a friend with in your old city, will be thrilled and so pleased to hear from you when you call. You might want to take a little inventory right now. Who are the people in your life that you haven’t made a phone call to for weeks, maybe months, maybe even a year? And then today’s the day that you’ll make at least one of those phone calls.

And you know, here’s an interesting one. Through the pandemic, new research came on about the importance of weak ties. These are the people who we meet in everyday informal settings that are not important ongoing relationships. It’s the cashier at the bank, it’s the waiter that’s serving you dinner, it’s the stranger that you wait at the bus stop with. And these little connections we have are very, very important. And from a biological perspective, the biology, the chemistry of love is felt the same way in short interactions with people that we meet briefly with. We get oxytocin, we get endorphins, we get dopamine. And so, if you have a really good connection moment with the stranger in the grocery store, that’s an important way to enhance our sense of connectivity and meeting some of our social and relationship needs, even though that would be unexpected. It’s true. Practice active listening, so that you paraphrase a little bit what you’re hearing from somebody else, and make inquiring questions for the day for them to explain more, and that will enrich their experience of meeting with you, and you’ll get more engagement and flow from that conversation as a result. And finally, this one maybe seems obvious but so many of us need to be reminded, say “I love you” often. Say it well. Say it to the people for whom to you that is real.

We love to hear it, and it’s good for us to say it. Then finally, he added, Martin Seligman added accomplishments to the list of things that make up this whole PERMA model for well-being. I have deliberately stayed away from it because we, as a society, are often overly driven by the sense of accomplishment. How many of us are on the edge of burnout and just feel like there’s so many things I need to do? One of the main suggestions for accomplishments is to keep to-do lists. That’s all valid and well, and I keep lots of to-do lists. In context and in appropriate measure, to-do lists are in fact a good thing, but I worry a little bit about talking about this accomplishment, one because a lot of us are feeling too pushed already.

Having said that, when we do have some kind of project in our lives and we’re working strategically forward on it, and we’re getting little pieces down, and then ultimately we arrive, the do-it-yourself project, the new bedroom is painted the way you had intended. You complete the course on second level Spanish learning, whatever these things are that were important to you, and you set out on a journey to accomplish them. We need to pause and reflect on that, and the teaching I think that Martin Seligman was trying to get across is that sometimes in our lives when we’re not feeling a lot of well-being, we’ve eliminated those longer term projects and goals from our lives feeling overwhelmed already, and so we just become listless, languishing, disengaged, flat. Pursuing accomplishments is one of these things that can bring us back into a sense of aliveness. And of course again, it’s bringing pleasure, engagement, and meaning, those first three things. But accomplishment is one way of getting at them.

If it’s not a SMART goal, you’re probably not going to get very far towards it. SMART goals mean it’s specific, it’s measurable, it’s attainable, it’s relevant to the reason why you created the specific goal, and then finally, it’s time bound. Sometimes we have really, really big goals like, you know, I want to be a better meditator, I want to be more mindful on an ongoing basis, and setting the SMART goal for that can be difficult. But if I break it down into some other sub-goals, for example, I want to take a meditation retreat every single year, it’s very easy to put that now into a SMART goal. Well, the specific goal is, I want a 10-day silent meditation retreat which I often do, which is kind of fun. If you haven’t tried it, you should think about it. It’s measurable, I’ll know whether or not that thing actually happened in this calendar year. It’s attainable, of course I can set time aside and go to some meditation retreat and actually do it. It’s relevant, it’s completely and causally related to my bigger goal of becoming a more mindful person, and then it’s time bound, 2022, I’m going to get it done. Makes sense?

PERMA: Pleasure, Engagement, Meaning, Relationships, and Accomplishments. That’s one additional construct. And next week, I’ve got another one that’s kind of right out of the box from the three we’ve considered so far. That’s another way of looking at well-being and happiness, and it’s instructive and great to have the language and the understanding for that goal, that way of getting more well-being in our lives.

Hey, if you like this kind of content, click the like button, share it with your friends and family, and we will see you next week. Thanks so much for watching. Bye for now.