How to Move Toward a Flourishing Life?

When we open up about our mental health, we often find ourselves talking about what is painful. Inevitably, our conversations about solutions tend to focus on reducing symptoms, repairing what feels ruptured, and easing what feels stressful. What’s less common is for our conversations about mental health to give equal attention to what’s been working well and what continues to support us in our lives.

This makes sense because, to ease our pain and stress, we need to understand what may be contributing to them and how they are affecting the way we feel. But looking only at what isn’t working can cause us to overlook the parts of our lives that are already working, including the strengths, resources, and experiences that are supporting us. Think about this way: when we imagine a life that feels better, we don’t only picture being less sad or having less fear, do we? We also imagine feeling more joy and more fulfillment.

The “Flourishing State”

Positive psychotherapy approaches take a similar view of well-being as noted above. These approaches, including the strengths-based approach, suggest that we also need to deliberately explore the strong and resilient sides of ourselves and our lives to create the life we want, not only the troubles.

They often refer to a “flourishing” state when talking about this process. Flourishing is a state where we experience positive emotions, find our lives meaningful, and feel a sense of vitality and connection. While alleviating stress and reducing what causes us pain is important to achieve such a flourishing state, repairing and remediating alone may not be enough to bring happiness and zest into our lives. We also need to intentionally explore and cultivate the things that bring us joy and resourcefulness. From this perspective, focusing on our strengths this way improves our wellbeing in a way that focusing only on weakness cannot.

Character strengths

Positive psychotherapies explore “character strengths” that can help us move toward a flourishing state. These strengths are the qualities and capacities that are already part of who we are and can support us as we navigate life’s challenges. They can show up in the ways we think, feel, and respond to the world around us. Character strengths are different from talents and abilities in that they are not necessarily things we are naturally good at or accomplishments we achieve. Instead, they are qualities we can learn and bring forward to support ourselves.

For example, when we are struggling with depression, we may unintentionally lose touch with inner strengths like hope or playfulness, while leaning heavily on our strength of critical thinking. Noticing the strengths we may not be using enough and gently bringing more of them into our lives, while also finding a more balanced way to use the strengths we may be overusing, can support us in moving toward greater well-being.

While all of us have unique strengths that deserve dedicated time for exploration, positive psychotherapies also offer some guidance on what common strengths may look like. One widely used classification of virtues and strengths by Peterson and Seligman (2004) describes six overarching virtues with a total of 24 character strengths:

Wisdom and Knowledge: These include creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, and perspective. These strengths can help us explore new ideas, continue learning, think things through, and draw on our experiences to better understand life.
Courage: These include bravery, persistence, integrity, and zest. These strengths can help us face challenges, stay committed when things are difficult, act in line with our values, and bring more energy into our lives.
Humanity: These include love, kindness, and social intelligence. These strengths help us build meaningful relationships, care for others, and better understand ourselves and the people around us.
Justice: These include teamwork, fairness, and leadership. These strengths help us contribute to groups, treat others with respect, and support healthier communities.
Temperance: These include forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self-regulation. These strengths help us manage ourselves wisely, make thoughtful choices, and respond to situations with greater balance.
Transcendence: These include appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, and spirituality. These strengths help us notice what matters, connect with a sense of meaning, and experience more appreciation in life.

3 questions to start noticing your strengths today

We all have strengths that might be waiting for us to discover, and that we can bring forward to cultivate more positive life experiences such as joy and vitality. Therapy can help us explore and build more of these strengths.

We can also start to gently reflect on our own. Below are a few questions that can help you notice some of your strengths today:

What are you particularly proud of having overcome? What helped you deal with that struggle?
What aspects of your life do you feel you carry out particularly well?
Think of someone you like or respect, whether real or fictional. What is it about this person that you like the most? Do you see any common strengths that you share with them?

Takeaways:

Mental health conversations often focus on reducing symptoms and alleviating suffering, but exploring what is already working, such as our strengths, resources, and experiences, is often overlooked.
According to positive psychotherapy approaches, focusing on our strengths can improve our well-being in a way that focusing exclusively on weakness and suffering cannot. That is why intentionally exploring and noticing our strengths can support us further in creating positive life experiences.
Positive psychotherapy focuses on a “flourishing” state, where we cultivate positive emotions, meaning, vitality, and connection by strengthening what brings us joy and resourcefulness.
Positive psychotherapy notes character strengths, which are qualities we can develop and use to move toward a “flourishing” state. The six character strength groups, Wisdom and Knowledge, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance, and Transcendence, describe some of the most common strengths we tend to show in ourselves and our lives.
Therapy can help us explore our strengths, recognize underused strengths, and balance overused ones to support us in navigating life’s challenges and moving toward flourishing.

References & Further Reading

Niemiec, R. M. (2014). Mindfulness and Character Strengths: A Practical Guide to Flourishing. MA: Hogrefe
Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. New York: Oxford University Press.
PositivePsychology.com. (n.d.). Exploring character strengths [Worksheet]. https://positivepsychology.com/strength-cards/
Rashid, T., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2014). Positive psychotherapy. In D. Wedding & R. J. Corsini (Eds.), Current psychotherapies (10th ed., pp. 461–498). Cengage Learning.
https://roamerstherapy.substack.com/p/the-meanings-of-being-happy?utm_source=publication-search

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At Roamers Therapy, our psychotherapists are here to support you through anxiety, depression, trauma and relationship issues, race-ethnicity issues, LGBTQIA+ issues, ADHD, Autism, or any challenges you encounter. Our psychotherapists are trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, Acceptance, and Commitment Therapy, Person-Centered Therapy, and Gottman Therapy.

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This page is also part of the Roamers Therapy Glossary; a collection of mental-health related definitions that are written by our therapists.

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