Intro to Well-Being Theory
It is summer, and the sun is shining. And I love the reset that summer brings because we take vacations, we're home with the kids, we try something new, we're outside in the sunshine. That reset is significant because we find things that bring us joy when we are with people who make us happy, and it is wonderful to have a reset outside of our everyday routine.
But then there's sometimes that harsh reality of jumping back into quote-unquote, normal life and work and the rhythms that come with that. And so that's why today we're gonna talk about happiness because I have been a student of happiness and research and well-being. I've been in organizations where I'm talking about happiness and well-being theory and connecting that to leadership development, and I'm constantly in conversations about what it looks like to strive for thriving and flourishing and being happy in the way that we are living our lives and leading through the work that we're doing.
So, when we talk about happiness, I want to tell you where you can go to get deeper knowledge on happiness.
If you're unfamiliar with Dr. Laurie Santos, she teaches a course at Yale. She's a professor of psychology there and teaches a course on happiness. This web course was so well attended and made such a difference in the lives of students in relation to their happiness. The goal of creating that course was to help minimize anxiety and depression in college students. Essentially, it was so well received that they ended up recording the course with a small group of students and offering it for free to anyone who wants to take it through Coursera. So, if you go to Coursera and look for the Yale happiness course with Dr. Laurie Santos, it is 100% worth taking that course for free and going through that content. I recommend it to anyone in higher education, but I really recommend it to anyone across any industry because it teaches us the science behind happiness, and happiness is so significant to our well-being.
Now, in that course, there's a lot of content, a lot of research that Dr. Santos presents, but the research that I kind of followed and then went on to read the book about was all of that rooted in happiness theory and well-being theory and that was penned by Dr. Martin Seligman. That work he has a great book called Flourish, which is definitely worth the read. But Dr. Marty Seligman, when talking about happiness, uncovered a framework for how we begin to define happiness and well-being. Ultimately, the reason why I love his work is there was a season where he had done a ton of research and had validity across the board for happiness theory, and a grad student sitting in his class who knew of his work raised her hand and said, I don't know if I agree with this, and presented an alternate story to happiness theory.
Ultimately, he went back and looked at the research and pulled her and other students in for a research team, and essentially, they blew up the theory. He decided to rewrite the well-being theory and to address some of those concerns where she didn't resonate with happiness, the happiness theory that he had written about.
I love that because, one, it shows how collaborative efforts are significant in our research, especially in academia.
But it also showed the humility of a leader to say, Yeah, I hadn't thought about that alternative narrative or somebody else's lived experience in that specific perspective, and let's follow that, and let's be curious about that, and let's dig and let's put together a research team, and let's blow up a theory that I created is essentially what he did.
I think that that shows humility and extreme self-awareness and shows how valuable it is to be a leader who considers an iterative process for our leadership, our work, and our lives.
Because we are never finished, we can always be better, produce more data, find better answers, or context changes, and so we have to adjust, and Martin Seligman did that. So that's where I kind of initially fell in love with that story about his work.
Fast forward to the PERMA Framework that he developed, and essentially, his theory evolved into the well-being theory. Here's what we know about well-being theory: is that it can be measured using five different elements, which is what's called the PERMA Framework:
P stands for positive emotions — This is more than just happiness; it's hope, it's interest, it's gratitude, and that is meaningful because sometimes, when we think positive emotion, we think just positivity or the Pollyannas of the world or optimism. It really is more than that.
E is for engagement — This is something we talked about a lot here on the podcast, but using your strengths to engage in flow or to experience flow and being in a state of challenge. And when we know that when we have challenges that match our strengths and capabilities, we find flow and areas where we're fully focused and fully committed to the task at hand.
R is relationships — We know that relationship matters and drives a lot of what we do and why we feel so deeply connected to an internal purpose that usually is in a relationship or another person or human being.
M is meaning — This is the purpose - what we've been talking about recently here on the podcast, but contributing to something greater than ourselves. Having that deep sense of purpose and meaning in our lives is really important to the way that we approach our work and to the reasons behind waking up every morning and diving into something for a greater portion of our day.
A is an accomplishment — We know that working towards achieving and celebrating goals really matters to motivation, really matters for how we feel significance, and how we feel loved even by the people around us. So accomplishment is a big part of well-being and knowing that you're making progress and moving forward and knowing that you're growing and learning as an individual.
What we also know about well-being is when all of those pieces of the PERMA Framework are in place, and when they're all synced up together for an individual, it leads to better health overall across every aspect of our life, and it leads to higher job satisfaction. When we believe in the work that we're doing, when we have relationships, and we're engaged in our work, and we find purpose and meaning, and we're experiencing accomplishments and knowing that we're doing well, all of that, including the positive emotions associated with it leads to better job satisfaction to feeling that we have confidence in our work, to having self-efficacy and the jobs that we're up for and that we are doing. That's really, really important.
When the PERMA Framework is utilized in business, we know that it's good for businesses when employees are utilizing well-being frameworks to understand their own happiness and to have those feelings of accomplishment.
So, in business, when leaders are supporting well-being, we know that business outcomes thrive and increase. That is significant because sometimes it can be hard for organizations to see the connection from: I'm focused on a person's well-being holistically and what's happening outside of work, and realizing that that impact so greatly impacts the internal side of work that we have to focus on it. It's easy to say like, Oh, yeah, I'll give you flexible time off or PTO policies and give you time for those occasions so that you can go do that stuff over there, outside of the workplace.
But what we know from all the research is all of the stuff that's happening outside in our lives, for ourselves as individuals, for the leaders that we're working with, for the teams that we're working with, impact how we show up every single day. We have to look at it with a more integrated approach; we have to, as leaders, make well-being our priority so that the individuals on our teams can show up as their whole selves to work.
So, the PERMA Framework, I want you to take a look at it, and I'm going to pause here and hit the next episode because the next episode is going to include a little activity for you as an individual to be thinking about your well-being to do a little bit of an audit and decide which areas of the PERMA Framework you need to focus on right now in the middle of your summer, to help increase your feelings of happiness, to help increase your feelings of meaning and achievement and purpose and positive emotion engagement to help improve relationships, all of it. So be sure to listen to the next episode for that activity.