What Is The Meaning Of Thriving?

And Why Most of Us Are Settling for So Much Less

There is a question I hear underneath almost every coaching conversation I have. It is rarely spoken directly. It lives in the pauses, in the exhaustion behind someone's eyes, in the way a high-achieving leader will sometimes stop mid-sentence and say, almost surprised by themselves, "I don't actually know if I'm happy."

The question is this:

Is this it? Is this what a good life feels like?

If you've ever asked yourself some version of that (I certainly have), at 2am, or on a Sunday evening before the week begins again, or in the middle of a moment that should feel like enough but somehow doesn't, this article is for you.

Happiness vs. Thriving

We use the words interchangeably. But positive psychology draws a meaningful distinction.

Happiness is a feeling. A moment. The first sip of coffee. The text from someone you love. The relief when a project finally lands. Real, and fleeting.

Thriving is something else entirely. It is a sustained state of flourishing, not the absence of difficulty, but the presence of something deeper. Purpose. Growth. Connection.

The sense that your life is going somewhere that matters.

Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, describes thriving through his PERMA model: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement.

The shift from happiness to thriving is the shift from feeling good occasionally to living well over time.

And it turns out the conditions for one are quite different from the conditions for the other.

What Global Research Tells Us

Gallup's Well-Being Research

Gallup has been tracking human flourishing across the globe for decades. Their research identifies three states most people move between:

• Thriving: rating your current and future life highly, experiencing positive emotions regularly

• Struggling: moderate satisfaction, daily stress, uncertainty about what comes next

• Suffering: low life satisfaction, difficulty meeting basic needs

  
  

What strikes me about this framework is how honest it is. Most of us, most of the time, are in the struggling category, not always because our lives are terrible, but because we are moving too fast to notice what's actually there.

The Gallup Well-Being Index measures five elements: Purpose, Social connection, Financial security, Community, and Physical health.

When any one of these is depleted for long enough, the whole system starts to crack.

Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index

And then there is Bhutan, a small Himalayan kingdom that in 1972 decided, under the leadership of its young king, that GDP was the wrong measure for a good society.

Instead they developed the Gross National Happiness Index: nine domains that together paint a picture of what a life, and a society, worth living looks like.

Psychological wellbeing. Health. Education. Time use. Cultural diversity and resilience. Good governance. Community vitality. Ecological diversity. Living standards.

What I love about Bhutan's approach, and I suspect it resonates because of its roots in Buddhist philosophy, is that it refuses to separate the inner life from the outer one.

You cannot thrive as an individual in a community that is broken. You cannot flourish in a body you have neglected. You cannot find meaning in work that is destroying the planet you live on. Everything is connected.

Happiness, in Bhutan's framework, is not something you feel. It is something you practice, through mindful living, ethical choices, meaningful work, and genuine belonging. It is collective as much as it is personal.

Together, these two frameworks suggest the same thing: thriving is not an accident. It is not luck. It is not what happens when you finally finish everything on your list.

It is a practice, something you build, tend, and return to.

Flow — The State Where Thriving Becomes Felt

There is a moment most of us have experienced at least once, where time dissolved, effort became effortless, and the noise in your head went completely quiet. You were so absorbed in what you were doing that you forgot to check your phone, forgot to worry, forgot to wonder if you were doing enough.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this Flow, and spent decades studying it.

Athletes know it as being in the zone. Musicians find it in performance. I find it behind a camera lens, in the particular quality of attention and presence that photography demands.

Flow is not rest exactly. But it restores something that rest alone cannot: the sense of being fully alive in the present moment.

The research is striking: in Flow states, the brain releases dopamine, norepinephrine, and endorphins simultaneously, a delicious natural cocktail of focus, pleasure, and motivation.

People in Flow report higher creativity, stronger resilience, and significantly greater life satisfaction over time. Flow is one of the most reliable pathways to sustained wellbeing.

And here is what Gallup's CliftonStrengths research adds to this picture: Flow happens most reliably when we are using our natural strengths. 

When the challenge of what we're doing meets the skill we naturally bring to it, not too easy, not overwhelming, something opens. We stop performing and start living.

If you have the *Analytical strength, you may lose hours in a research rabbit hole and emerge energized.

If *Empathy is your signature, a deep conversation might restore you in ways that a holiday cannot.

If *Ideation lights you up, a blank page is not terrifying, it is an invitation.

The question worth asking is not am I happy? but when was I last in flow, and what was I doing?

*if you'd like to know your Top 5 Clifton Strengths, email me for a discounted access code to take the assessment -> monika@goodone.ca

The Leaders Who Are Thriving — and the Ones Who Are Not

In my coaching work, I have noticed something consistent. The leaders who are genuinely thriving are the ones who have clarity about what matters to them, and the courage to organize their lives around it, at least some of the time.

The ones who are suffering, quietly, invisibly, often with enormous external success, are usually the ones who have not asked themselves the fundamental questions in years. Not because they don't care. Because they have been too busy.

Thriving, it turns out, requires a quality of attention that busyness crowds out.

An Invitation — Especially If You Lead People

If you lead a team, a department, or an organization, the question of thriving is not just yours. It lives in the room with you. Your baseline becomes the culture's baseline.

Your relationship with rest, with meaning, with recognizing what's working, all of it ripples outward.

The research is clear: teams whose leaders score high on wellbeing show greater engagement, lower turnover, and stronger performance. Not because leaders who thrive are easier to work for, but because they create conditions where others can thrive too.

I want to be honest: thriving is not simple.

It is not a destination you arrive at and stay. It is layered, non-linear, and deeply personal. It coexists with difficulty, trauma, with uncertainty.

What I know from my own life and from years of working alongside leaders is this: the questions matter more than the answers. And having someone to think alongside, a coach, a circle, a trusted presence, makes the exploration less lonely and more generative.

So here is my invitation. Not to a programme. Not to a formula. Just to a question — one worth taking seriously, perhaps for the first time in a while:

What would it feel like to not just manage your life but to actually inhabit it?

If something in that question stirs something in you — I'd love to think alongside you. I work with leaders who are ready to move from exhaustion to presence, from performing to genuinely flourishing.

And if you want to start with something concrete: discovering your natural strengths through CliftonStrengths is one of the most direct paths into Flow, and one of the most reliable ways to begin building a life that actually fits you.

Reach out at goodone.ca or share this with a leader you care about who might need to read it today.

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Hi, I’m Monika, Strengths Coach, facilitator, social-profit organization leader, and photographer. I’m here to help you own your vision for meaningful growth and transformation, uncover your unique leadership strengths, and empower you and your team to thrive and create lasting impact. Passionate about driving change within, around, and beyond, I love supporting fellow change-makers on their journeys.

I hope you’ll visit often, and I look forward to connecting and working together!