Good morning. Welcome back. You’re listening to episode number 281 of Practically Happy. Today’s episode is going to be about five ways to check in with your well being. I’m going to tell you a little bit about the PERMA model of well being, which is one of the most recognized frameworks within the world of positive psychology.

It was developed by Martin Seligman, who is often known as the father of positive psychology. He was one of my professors in graduate school at Penn last year. One of the things that I really appreciate about the PERMA model Is that it feels really pragmatic. I love that there’s some check ins that I can do evaluation about different aspects of my life.

I really love an opportunity to check in and evaluate, do a personal audit, see what is going well, what I can improve, how I might tweak things a little bit to feel a little bit better. And the PERMA model offers some opportunity to evaluate based on different areas of our life, different types of activities.

Before I tell you more about PERMA, let’s start with a quick segment called Life Lately.

Segment: Life Lately

When you’re listening to this episode, if the episode comes out on Thursday morning, Thursday afternoon, three of my best friends from Austin, Texas are coming to spend the weekend in Richmond. And this is really exciting. When I lived in Austin, I had Three young children. I had Plum about a few months after we moved to Texas.

So I had a four year old, a two year old, a newborn, right as we were building our first home in a beautiful neighborhood, and I was just in the stage of life and found these incredible humans to connect to on a sisterly level is the best way to describe it. One of my friends who’s coming, I had met initially in Within a week or two of living in Texas when we didn’t live in our house yet, and We decided to move out into a suburb and build a house.

And she came up and I remember having this discussion about the virtues and vices of living in the suburbs versus living in the city. At the time we were renting a house in the city. I believe they were also renting a house in the city. So we lived nearby each other downtown in Austin. We ended up having this funny conversation about how it was disappointing to be, I guess selling out and moving into the suburbs and building a big house on a big lot.

And. There’s just wasn’t the same amount of charm and there wasn’t the same walkability and then I don’t know, maybe six months later, she and her husband bought the lot the last remaining lot on the cul de sac that we were building on and they built their own house and then they became our neighbors in the suburbs and we were walk, back and forth door to door next door neighbors for basically three and a half years.

I remember one time my daughter Plum was about two and I couldn’t find her anywhere. If you’re a parent, you’ve had this experience maybe where one of your toddlers disappears completely. It’s a scary moment. And I walked outside. I looked, we had this big yard and I wandered around the yard and then I saw that the gate was open.

So I thought, Oh, I bet she went over to the neighbors. So I walked over to the neighbors, rang the doorbell. No one answered. I noticed that they’re back. gate was cracked open. And so I went into their backyard. She’s nowhere in the yard. I can’t find her. And I go look in their back door, this like glass door.

I peek in and Plum is sitting at their kitchen counter eating a bag of fruit snacks from their pantry. She had walked over to their house, gone in the back door, which was open and helped herself to snacks from the pantry. That’s just part of her regular routine when my friend was there. And so Plum didn’t seem to care that she wasn’t there.

And she just helped herself to the neighbor’s pantry. This is the level of family slash friendship that I experienced when we lived in Austin. Our neighbor was one good friend, and then there was a combination of other really beautiful, wonderful women that I got to know, and just Absolutely adore.

This made our move to Richmond especially difficult, even though we were moving for a great job, a good opportunity for our family. Richmond is an incredible, beautiful, wonderful city, leaving behind friends that felt like sisters, which are so important when you live away from family. I have wonderful sisters.

And I’ve also really loved and enjoyed and felt like it was important for me to have good friends in the location where I live. Friends that I could go on walks with and that I could get together with pretty regularly. After we moved to Richmond, it took me a while, years, to find a group of friends or, some good friends that felt close and supportive and tighten it the way that my friends in Austin had.

And at the same time, I’ve been happy to stay in contact with my girlfriends in Texas. Maybe two years after we moved to Richmond, I went and spent a girls weekend with them downtown in Austin doing all of our favorite Texas things. Then we had to pause for the pandemic and pretty soon after, Decided to start planning a Texas friends weekend here in Richmond.

This has been a long time coming, maybe two years that we’ve been. Looking forward to it, planning around different life circumstances and it’s here. So I haven’t seen my girlfriends in about four years now and I cannot wait to pick them up at the airport and spend the weekend sharing my favorite parts of Richmond with some of my very favorite people.

As I’m sharing about this, it’s reminding me of the importance of having some skills to making friends as an adult, friends at different stages of life. And I wanted to just call out that I have two podcast episodes that talk about the process that I’ve used to make friends as an adult, both in Texas, as well as here in Richmond and in all of the other cities that I’ve lived in.

You can listen to Episode 3 or Episode 80. To hear some ideas and inspiration for making friends as an adult. I think it’s one of our most important skills and friends are so important. So I can’t wait to see mine. And that is Life Lately.

PERMA MODEL

Today, I’m going to introduce you to a model of wellbeing called PERMA.  Like I mentioned at the beginning of the show, this is a framework for helping people understand some of the levers that can be adjusted in order to increase well being. This framework is based on extensive research, cross culturally and cross demographically.

The idea being that any one of these five elements independently Could contribute to your well being and to your feeling good and fulfilled in your life independent of the others Regardless of your background and your socio economic status in your culture Because we’re all different and our value systems are different as you listen You may realize that there are a couple areas that are much more fulfilling or more important to you than others And in science, we’re doing research based on trends, based on curves and whole, data sets.

As my 14 year old always likes to remind me, they didn’t do that research on me, so it doesn’t apply to me, but that can be the case. And in general, we’re looking at trends, correlations, and getting a pretty good degree of confidence that the information being shared is True and applicable and helpful.

As I’ve studied positive psychology and practiced with some of these different elements in my own life, I have recognized some of them feel inherent to me, like of course, and others feel like they need a little cue or a little more intention in order for me to wrap my head around thinking clearly about one of these areas and focusing on it in a meaningful way in order to intentionally increase my flourishing.

I’m going to walk you through these five areas. Like I said, the PERMA model, P E R M A, that’s the acronym. I always chuckle a little bit about acronyms that aren’t real words, although I was just talking to Dave about how I may consider getting a perm for the summer. I know that’s such an 80s thing to do, but the 80s and 90s are coming back, and I could use a little body wave for when I’m spending so much time traveling and, want the ease of getting ready.

People who have curly hair would probably say right now that having stick straight hair like I do would be much easier to manage. We’ll put the, a pin in the perm for now and talk about PERMA. I want to call out quickly that I created a PDF printable for this episode. Originally, I gave this overview as a presentation to a women’s group in New Jersey a couple months ago.

I came as a guest speaker and shared this idea, this overview of flourishing and the power of positive psychology. Thank you So the way that I’m organizing this episode and that I organized that presentation was to give an overview of each of these areas, positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

Give a little bit of an overview, a little bit of the research, and then a reflection question. So during this episode, you’ll have five reflection questions to help you think about how and what you’re In what ways you’re engaging with this aspect of well being and if there’s something that you could do to feel a little bit more invested or if you could make an adjustment to get even more benefit out of a particular area of your life that could increase your flourishing.

POSITIVE EMOTION

To get started, let’s begin at P. P stands for positive emotions. Positive emotions encompass feelings like joy, gratitude, and serenity, calm, contentment, happiness. They contribute to overall well being. Some of the ways that positive emotions contribute to our well being is by fostering resilience and enhancing our mental and physical health.

These emotions can broaden our perspective, literally, and I’m using that word, literally. In the original sense, positive emotions can literally widen our sight lines, open up our peripheral vision so that we’re able to take in more information, which can help us, see resources that are otherwise unavailable to us, build social connections.

Fuel our motivation to engage with the world in meaningful ways. One of my favorite psychological theories that I have discussed in other episodes is the broaden and build theory of positive emotion. This theory developed by Barb Fredrickson really gets to the heart of why positive emotions matter.

The evolutionary purpose of us feeling good. I know oftentimes. We think, no pain, no gain. And that when you’re working on something really hard or you’re struggling through something, that’s where all of the benefit might come. And if we’re relaxing and feeling good and feeling happy that it’s a break from development.

What Barb has shown through her models of broaden and build is that feeling good, those positive emotions of calm and clarity and creativity, And joy and gratitude. Those positive emotions serve a really important evolutionary purpose of helping us broaden our vision, open perspective, acquire resources, and build relationships.

So broaden and build positive emotions can create this upward spiral where we’re feeling good or. We’re open to new ideas. We maybe have some insight or some creativity, which then leads us to develop ourselves in a way or have some new innovative ideas that then open us up further to new opportunities.

And we’re going around gathering resources, building on our own inspiration and creativity and relationships. And that is contributing overall to an increase in our feeling good, doing good and being fulfilled. So working on increasing our positive emotions, prioritizing experiences that feel good, that build positive emotion into our lives, can, independent of the other four factors that I talk about today, build our overall life satisfaction and well being.

So here’s the reflection question. What are some ways that you can prioritize positive emotions into your everyday life right now? What are some activities you could plan, some habits that you could work on, some experiences that you could prioritize that would help you feel positive emotions, help you feel joy and gratitude and hope and serenity and calm?

Think about the last time you felt. Some of those great positive emotions, what you were doing, what were the circumstances surrounding that, and how can you engineer that more often in your regular life? Take a second and think about that and then we’ll move on to E for engagement. The second letter in PERMA is E.

ENGAGEMENT

That stands for engagement. Engagement refers to a state of total immersion. and absorption in an activity where time seems to fly and actions feel effortless. The idea of engagement or flow is characterized by deep concentration, intense focus, and a sense of being completely involved and energized by the task at hand.

This flow state is brought about by a well matched balance of challenge and skill. One of the ways that I deeply engage in The flow state or one of the activities that engages me in my life is home improvement projects. If you followed along on Instagram, you’ve seen that I love a DIY project. I love painting a room.

I love tiling. I love gardening, getting my hands and mind engaged in creating something, renovating something, redoing something. I can get so focused and lose the lose track of the day and feel so good working. Intensely on something specific where I have this well matched balance of challenge and skill.

That’s a really important quality of engagement or flow. When we are more challenged than our skill level, it’s not as enjoyable. It feels a little bit more like a strain and if that challenge is even too high, we may feel frustrated and just give up, feel like a failure, like we couldn’t do it. Which is true, we couldn’t do it at that level, but if we lowered the challenge to be a little bit more appropriate, then maybe we’d find that sweet spot.

Conversely, if the challenge is below our skill level, we will probably get bored. It’s not easy to be engaged in something that’s so simple that it doesn’t feel like anything. motivating anymore. So the balance of challenge and skill is a really important aspect of engagement. In a recent call with one of my one on one coaching clients, we discussed why my client was not making the time that she wanted to sit down and play the piano.

She has a piano at home. She grew up playing the piano. It’s a hobby that she wanted to engage more fully in. And just wasn’t getting around to it. So we discussed motivation and we discussed challenge and skill. And as we were talking about this idea of flow and having this well matched challenge and skill, which creates a real like interest in the activity that you look forward to it and you enjoy it, she recognized that she had chosen a piano book that was pretty advanced above her current skill level.

And the aha moment was I can just go buy a little bit easier book and be able to get into that flow where I’m just reading the music and playing and enjoying it rather than struggling through a piece. I thought that was such a great example of recognizing how changing the challenge, adjusting the challenge to meet our skill level or be just comfortably beyond it, just beyond it will help us not only learn and grow but also continue to be engaged in the activity at hand.

So here’s your reflection question for engagement. When in your life do you experience flow? Is it like my client when you’re sitting down and playing a beautiful piano piece that you’ve played before, and that you know the notes. And it also is still interesting and fun. Is it when you go on a walk or run in nature?

Is it like me when you get out all of this stuff to paint a room and you start, deeply engaging in a DIY project, everyone’s modes of experiencing. Engagement are going to be different because we are different the things that I love that will like erase time for me and bring me this deep sense of engagement and flow will be different than the things that feel like flow to you.

So take a just a couple seconds and reflect on. When in your life are you experiencing flow? And if you can’t think of anything or if it’s been a while since you experienced flow, try to think about in the past or even when you were a child, what were the things that you loved to do that you were drawn to that you could spend hours getting lost in?

And what is something adjacent to that or similar that you could pick up now to experience some of those same feelings?

RELATIONSHIPS

The third letter in PERMA is R, and that stands for relationships. The R emphasizes the quality of connections and social interactions with others. Relationships encompass supportive, authentic, and meaningful connections that foster trust, empathy, and mutual respect. Relationships of low quality are not going to contribute to our relationships.

Flourishing our well being. Relationships of high quality, strong relationships, not only can provide a sense of belonging and emotional support, but can contribute to our overall sense of well being. A researcher named Jane Dutton has done a lot of Great studies on the idea of high quality connection.

Her focus is often on the workplace and how to create meaningful relationships at work or increase wellbeing at work, which, the research shows that these high quality connections can do that. And we can also mirror them in our everyday lives. Four factors that are really important in a high quality connection are trust play.

Respect and support or encouragement. I love the play piece. How having this level of comfort and being able to be silly and play and engage in, ways that feel outside of a strict context can contribute to the well being of the relationship itself and to the quality of the connection. Those episodes that I mentioned earlier about building relationships as an adult, building adult relationships, Friendships are full of ideas of how to build connections with new people and not only that, but to take connections that you already have with people to a new level, so they become even closer and even more deep and meaningful.

The reflection question for relationships is, how are you currently building your relationships and connections right now? And, how could you improve? How could you deepen your relationships, deepen your connections with other people, considering those four factors, building trust, engaging in play, supporting each other through mutual respect, and supporting and encouraging the other. Remember that there is actually a worksheet where you can have these notes and reflection questions and write them down.

If you’d like to take this episode to a more applicable level and actually You know, take some notes. You can go to the show notes at livefreecreative. co, find episode 281, and there’ll be just a place to enter in your email so that the PDF can be sent right to you.

Sponsor: Green Chef

Let’s take a quick break for today’s podcast sponsor, Green Chef.

A couple weeks ago, my middle son, my 12 year old told me that he wanted to learn how to cook. We pulled out our Green Chef box for the week, which had Three Mediterranean style meals in it. I showed him the recipe cards where there is an overview of the meal that you’re making, and then step by step instructions with photographs for how to make the meal in 30 minutes or less and how each of the bags contained everything that he would need in order to have the ingredients on hand to follow the instructions and make these incredible meals.

The ingredients are pre measured, some of them are pre chopped, and there are pre made sauces that are already custom made in house for Green Chef, which adds this level of ease to the process and makes it perfect for learning some cooking skills or developing your skills even further. My family loves a meal kit.

HelloFresh now owns Green Chef. And there’s a wide array of meal plans to choose from. I’d like to switch off between brands and try the new offerings. This Mediterranean box from Green Chef knocked it out of the park. The first meal that Elliot made by himself was a spice crusted barramundi fish with the summer squash feta salad.

We sat down for family dinner after he had cooked the meal by himself in under 30 minutes. Heh. And everyone was blown away by how incredible it was. My older son kept saying, there’s no way he made this. There’s no way it’s too good. While I have personally always loved the ease and simplicity of a meal kit like Green Chef, because I can nourish my body with chef crafted, nutritionist approved recipes with clean ingredients, I now also have another reason to love it because I can pass it off to my kids so they can learn to develop some cooking skills with simple, easy Organic, fresh meals that can be made in 30 minutes or less.

All of the produce is organic. All of the proteins are sustainably sourced, including antibiotic and hormone free chicken and sustainably sourced seafood. I can feel good about what’s happening inside the box. I can feel good about the process and ease of either making it myself or giving it to one of my.

Teenagers to learn how to make, and I can feel good about all of us enjoying the delicious, incredible meals that come out of Green Chef boxes. My son has already asked me when the next box will arrive so that he can continue to practice his skills in the kitchen. And to be honest, I cannot wait either.

If you could use a fresh, whole foods, solution for simple, easy meal plans that may help you or your family learn how to cook. Go to greenchef.com/practically50 and use the code practically 50 for 50 percent off plus 20 percent off the following two months. As we’re heading into the variability of summertime and schedules changing a lot, having simple, fresh, whole food meals like Green Chef on hand can make dinnertime a breeze. Go to greenchef. com slash practically 50.

Use the code practically 50 to get 50 percent off and 20 percent off your next two months. You are welcome.

MEANING

The fourth letter in PERMA is M for meaning. Meaning is a big word. It’s a big concept and I think is sometimes. Maybe misunderstood? Meaning refers to a sense of purpose and significance in life.

Where you as an individual feel like your actions and existence have value and contribute to something larger than yourself. Meaning involves pursuing goals that align with your personal values that leads to a sense of fulfillment and direction. I’ve often heard meaning described as the story that we tell about our lives.

I think that’s an interesting way to consider meaning. The meaning that we use to frame out the things that are happening to us or that are happening in the world. What is the story that we’re telling? Is there an essence of connection to other people, to ourselves, to our lives? One relationship that I think is interesting is the relationship between positive emotion and meaning.

It’s a dual, relationship. It goes back and forth. So when you increase your positive emotion, That tends to lead to an increase in meaning, you feel like things are more meaningful when they’re accompanied by positive emotion, and when you increase your meaning, when you have a deep sense of purpose, and are able to connect to something greater than yourself, that in and of itself, that story of connection and purpose will increase your feelings of contentment and fulfillment and satisfaction.

It’s a win. Positive emotion can build meaning can build positive emotion. I want to call out here too that positive psychology as a field recognizes the wholeness of human experience. Although I’m talking about positive emotion and the benefits of positive emotion, there are. Also, incredible benefits over time to the suffering that we experience, particularly when that suffering is chosen, and we’ve framed it in a way that feels purposeful.

There’s purpose in joy and in suffering. We learn through positive emotions and through disappointments and grief and struggle. And based on that how you were raised, the connections that you have, what your belief system is, what brings meaning to your life may feel different than what brings meaning to other people.

And there’s no right or wrong. Meaning is a personal construct and a, an individual identity. So I want you to reflect on meaning by asking yourself the question, what brings meaning to your life? What is meaningful to you? And what rituals connect you to a larger purpose?

ACCOMPLISHMENT

The last category is A for accomplishment. Accomplishment encapsulate a sense of achieving goals or milestones that are personally significant. These involve the realization of one’s capabilities and competence, fostering feelings of pride, satisfaction, and confidence. Accomplishments, whether they’re big or small, can contribute to a sense of progress and motivation in life.

Let’s talk about motivation for a second. There is great research around the different types of motivation along a spectrum. At one end you have a motivation where you’re not interested, you’re not interested. Moving you’re not going to do that thing in the middle. You’ve got external motivation. This is when you’re motivated by some reward That will happen as you engage in whatever the goal or activity is a lot of people go to school and are motivated by the reward of good grades or the reward of being with friends or the reward of earning money by getting a good job someday, pulling along like there’s a carrot dangled in front of them and they’re doing the pathway there.

Processing through these experiences in order to as we move along the spectrum we go from a motivation totally not motivated to external motivation or that kind of dangling carrot to internal motivation or intrinsic motivation where process itself is the purpose for doing. An activity that we are engaging in it, not for some outside reward or recognition, but for internal sense of joy and enjoyment and autonomy and accomplishment.

I’ll be honest that when I first was learning about accomplishment as part of this well being model, I felt a little bit. Put off by it, particularly because I think as women, we are taught that our accomplishment of tasks are, giving and doing and moving and contributing is so related to our worth and sometimes we might just need a break.

Sometimes what we really need is not to be told that if we accomplish more, we’ll feel better, but that it’s okay to accomplish less. I think the key differentiator here is to recognize that accomplishment is autonomous and intrinsic, is more likely to contribute to being than accomplishment of things for external motivating factors.

And when we’re thinking about, Motivating our kids are engaging our family in goals and accomplishment, having some real buy in from our kids themselves, asking them what they want to do, what they enjoy being okay with it, not aligning with our own personal ideas around what is right or good to accomplish is going to be better off for them.

It reminds me of the book, The Self Driven Child, where the author is essentially. Invite parents to allow their kids more autonomy and to step into the driver’s seat of their own lives when the stakes are low in their, early teenage years, so that The child begins to learn about themselves and have some awareness around what their goals are, what their internal motivating factors are, what drives them to accomplishment.

And when it’s the child initiating the goals and the progress and not the parent, that goal not only is more fulfilling, but it’s also more sustainable. So the reflection question for accomplishment is what accomplishment are you most proud of? Right now. And what are you pursuing in your life right now that feels fulfilling?

Is there something that feels fun and interesting for its own sake? Not because of some outside goal, but something that you want to do or are doing for you right now. That’s the accomplishment that’s going to build your wellbeing. As a recap of this episode, PERMA is a framework for building deeper life satisfaction and fulfillment and the five categories that are addressed and are independent of each other within PERMA are P, Positive Emotion, E, Engagement, R, Relationships, M, and Z.

Meaning and a accomplishment. The final reflection question for this episode is this, which of these categories feels the most interesting to you? If you were to choose one to focus a little bit deeper on, is it building some positive emotion with intention into your life or prioritizing, feeling good more of the time?

Is it Getting back to something that you loved doing that you can find your flow and feel really engaged and that you can lose yourself in a project or an activity of some sort. Is it building relationships, adding some more play into your friendships or your relationships with your partners or with your kids, building more trust, working on making friends as an adult?

Is it meaning thinking about how you’re connected to a greater purpose and what that looks like and how you can reflect on that and feel it? Or is it a accomplishment where there’s some goal worthy of your pursuit that you’re really enjoying pursuing for its own sake? Write one down and one or two action steps that you’ll take to build up your personal.

Being and satisfaction through using the promo model this week, or in the next couple of weeks, if you want a worksheet and notes sheet to take you through the framework of this episode, feel free to download that for free at live free, creative. co slash podcast, episode number two 81. And I hope that you’ve enjoyed tuning in today.

I’ll send you off telling you, thank you so much for tuning in today. The podcast is on the cusp of 2 million downloads, and I’m so excited. I’m planning a little get together in Richmond for that milestone celebration. So I appreciate you giving some attention here today and hopefully learning something that helps you feel a little bit better, feel like you have permission to make changes in your life that build your potential.

wellness, your wellbeing, and your happiness. I also want to mention that I am opening up space in my schedule for additional coaching clients. I’m really loving leaning into using my recent education and credentials to work one on one with women to help them find some clarity through transitions or build systems that are meaningful in their everyday lives.

You can grab a free coaching call through the link in the show notes and I’ll chat with you soon.