Positive Psychology
Positive Psychology, distilled into Seligman's PERMA model, treats wellbeing as five workable parts - Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment - so you diagnose and build the weak one instead of guessing at 'morale'.
Five boxes sit across the page, one per PERMA letter, each with space to jot a rating.
Reach for this when…
- Someone is competent on paper and flat in every meeting - nothing's wrong, nothing's working either.
- Coaching keeps chasing deficits and never asks what's already going right.
- Engagement scores are dropping despite every process box being ticked.
How to run it
- Rate yourself, or the team, 1-10 across all five PERMA domains.
- Find the lowest-scoring domain - that's where the leverage is.
- Match an intervention to that domain specifically, not a generic wellbeing exercise.
- Use Fredrickson's broaden-and-build: let a positive emotion open your thinking before you act.
- Set a 30-day practice against the weakest domain and check the score again.
A worked example
Situation. Nurul Aisyah ran a small community health clinic in Penang, Malaysia, where her nursing team was technically fine but exhausted and going through the motions.
Applied. Scoring the team against PERMA, Meaning came out lowest by some distance - most had lost sight of why the clinic existed beyond the daily patient count. She built a 30-day practice around reconnecting staff to specific patient outcomes.
Result. Sick days didn't move much in a month, but two nurses who'd been quietly job-hunting told her they'd decided to stay.
The catch
PERMA's five letters feel intuitive but Meaning and Accomplishment overlap heavily in practice, and reducing it to a five-question self-report is a thin instrument for something this personal. Positive psychology's early interventions, like gratitude journals, show real but often short-lived effects in the research, and no domain score fixes a genuinely bad manager or bad pay.
A gratitude journal doesn't fix a toxic manager. Check the environment before you prescribe the exercise.
Origin: Martin Seligman; Barbara Fredrickson