If you’ve spent any time studying positive psychology, you’ve encountered PERMA. It’s the field’s most widely cited framework for understanding wellbeing, developed by Martin Seligman as a successor to his earlier, narrower focus on happiness alone. For coaches, PERMA isn’t just theory to memorize. It’s a practical lens that can shape how an entire coaching relationship is structured.
This guide breaks down what PERMA actually measures, why Seligman built it the way he did, and how coaches put each of its five elements to work in real sessions.
Why Seligman Moved Beyond “Happiness”
Seligman’s early work centered on happiness as the primary outcome positive psychology should study. Over time, he found this framing too narrow. Happiness, as commonly understood, leans heavily toward pleasant feelings in the moment. But Seligman noticed that people often pursue things that don’t make them feel happy in any immediate sense, such as raising children through difficult years or training for a demanding goal, yet describe those pursuits as deeply worthwhile.
PERMA was Seligman’s answer to that gap. Instead of one outcome, he proposed five distinct elements that together make up a fuller picture of human flourishing, capturing both the pleasant and the meaningful.
The Five Elements of PERMA
- Positive emotions — the pleasant feelings most people associate with happiness: joy, gratitude, contentment, and hope. Important, but only one piece of the larger picture.
- Engagement — the experience of being absorbed in an activity, closely related to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow. Engagement often produces little immediate positive emotion in the moment, yet contributes strongly to a sense of a life well lived.
- Relationships — the quality and depth of a person’s connections with others. Decades of wellbeing research consistently identify relationships as one of the strongest predictors of long-term flourishing.
- Meaning — a sense of belonging to and serving something larger than oneself. Meaning can persist even through difficult periods, distinguishing it clearly from positive emotion.
- Achievement — the pursuit and accomplishment of goals, valued for its own sake rather than only for the rewards it brings. Seligman included this specifically because people often pursue mastery and accomplishment even when the process itself isn’t pleasant.
How Coaches Use PERMA as a Framework, Not a Checklist
A common mistake when first learning PERMA is treating it like a checklist to run through in every session. In practice, experienced coaches use it more like a diagnostic lens: a way of noticing which elements are currently strong in a client’s life and which are underdeveloped.
A client might report high positive emotion and strong relationships, for instance, but struggle to name anything that feels meaningful. Another client might be deeply engaged in demanding work and clearly driven by achievement, yet feel isolated and disconnected from others. PERMA gives coaches language for these patterns and a structure for deciding where to focus.
Applying Each Element in Session
- Positive emotions — coaches often introduce simple, evidence-based practices here, such as a brief gratitude exercise at the start of a session, to help a client notice positive emotion they might otherwise overlook.
- Engagement — coaches explore where a client naturally loses track of time, then look for ways to bring more of that quality into other parts of their life or work.
- Relationships — coaches might ask a client to map their key relationships and identify where more investment or repair could strengthen their support system.
- Meaning — coaches help clients connect daily actions to a larger sense of purpose, often by exploring values directly rather than assuming meaning will emerge on its own.
- Achievement — coaches support clients in setting goals that are personally meaningful rather than externally imposed, since PERMA research suggests self-determined achievement contributes more to flourishing than achievement pursued only for approval or reward.
A Simple Way to Bring PERMA Into a First Session
Many coaches introduce PERMA early in a coaching relationship as a kind of informal self-assessment. Rather than a formal test, this often looks like a conversation: walking a client through each of the five elements and asking them to reflect on where they currently feel strong and where they feel a gap.
This serves two purposes. It gives the coach a clearer sense of where to focus initial sessions, and it gives the client a vocabulary for their own wellbeing that extends well beyond “happy” or “unhappy.”
Why This Matters Beyond the Theory
PERMA’s real value for coaches isn’t that it’s an interesting academic model. It’s that it gives structure to something coaches often sense intuitively but struggle to name precisely: that a client can be doing well in one area of life and quietly struggling in another, and that lasting change usually requires attention to more than one dimension at once.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is PERMA the same as just being happy?
No. PERMA was specifically designed to move beyond happiness as a single measure. Positive emotion is only one of its five elements; engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement each capture something happiness alone does not.
Do all five PERMA elements need to be equally strong for someone to be flourishing?
Not necessarily. Different people find different balances across the five elements meaningful. PERMA is generally used as a way to notice patterns and gaps, rather than a strict formula requiring equal scores across all five.
Can PERMA be used outside of one-on-one coaching?
Yes. PERMA is widely applied in workplace wellbeing programs, education settings, and group coaching, in addition to individual coaching relationships.
Do I need a psychology degree to use PERMA in my coaching practice?
No. PERMA is taught as part of PrimoLearn’s Positive Psychology Certification, which is designed to be accessible to coaches and complete beginners alongside those with a psychology background.
Want to go deeper into PERMA and the rest of positive psychology’s evidence base? Explore PrimoLearn’s Positive Psychology Certification to see the full curriculum, or browse the complete course catalog if you’re still deciding.