What It Means to Thrive

If thriving isn’t just being happy or the absence of stress… if it’s not simply a good week, or even success, then what is it?

Thriving is the feeling and the reality that your life is going somewhere good: with enough stability, meaning, connection, and inner capacity to keep moving… even when the world is loud, fast, and complicated.

In the research, thriving is often described as more than mood, it feel more like momentum.

As organizational scholars Gretchen Spreitzer and colleagues put it,

“thriving at work [is]… a sense of vitality and a sense of learning” 

And here’s the part we can’t outsource: our leadership shapes the conditions in which humans either expand, or slowly shrink.

Not through one grand speech, but through thousands of small, daily moments: what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, what gets rushed, what gets protected.

Thriving is deeply personal and beautifully multidimensional, yet inseparable from the systems that define our working lives.

What It Means to Thrive?

Across modern wellbeing research, thriving shows up as a combination of three things:

• a positive sense of life direction

• the resources to meet reality without breaking

• the ability to keep becoming

Gallup’s research captures this beautifully with a deceptively simple idea: thriving includes how people rate their life now and how they think it will be in the future.

In other words: not only “am I okay?” but

“am I heading somewhere better?”

That future-oriented part matters greatly. Because we can tolerate a lot when we believe things are improving. And we can also fall apart in comfort when we believe nothing will change.

Thriving has a trajectory.

Why a “good job” matters so much to a “good life”

Many of us were taught to think of “life” and “work” as separate categories. But our nervous systems regulation mechanisms don’t agree.

Work shapes:

• our time (and how much of it we actually feel we own)

• our energy (and whether we have any left for the people we love)

• our identity (and whether we feel useful, respected, competent)

• our financial stability (and the baseline level of safety in our lives)

• our relationships (and how we experience belonging, conflict, trust)

  
  

So yes, a good job is a major ingredient of a good life. Not because work should be everything, but

because it touches everything

Gallup has long framed wellbeing as multidimensional, and one of those pillars is career wellbeing, the idea that liking what you do each day matters.

If work is where your waking hours go… then the quality of that environment becomes part of your health.

Which leads us to the part leaders sometimes underestimate: Leadership is human environment design.

What are other current contributing studies?

Harvard’s “flourishing” research expands the lens even more.

Researchers asks the question: What causes human flourishing?

Think of flourishing like a garden ecosystem. It’s not just the flowers (good feelings). It’s also the soil (health), the roots (meaning), the pollinators (relationships), and the climate (stability and support).

So What It Means to Thrive? In this view, thriving includes:

• meaning & purpose (life feels worthwhile)

• physical & mental health (energy and resilience)

• relationships (belonging, trust, repair)

• character/virtues (integrity, kindness, responsibility)

• life satisfaction (not perfection; coherence)

• financial and material stability (security to sustain the above over time)

  
  

It’s a more honest definition, because it allows this truth:

You can feel good and still be hollow. You can be successful and still be fractured. You can present fine and still be slowly disappearing.

Bhutan’s Happiness Index: thriving is also a societal design choice

Then Bhutan comes in with a fascinating, almost rebellious idea: wellbeing isn’t just a personal project. It’s a collective responsibility.

Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness framework measures more than mood, it includes community vitality, time balance, cultural resilience, ecological health, and governance.

It’s basically saying:

A “happy person” in a sick system is an exhausted person doing emotional labour.

This matters for leaders, because workplaces are mini-societies. They have cultures, norms, power dynamics, and ecosystems.

In other words: people don’t just have wellbeing, they live inside conditions.

And leadership is one of the strongest condition-setters of all. Next to work design systems and processes.

So what does thriving look like?

Let’s translate all this research (Gallup, Bhutan, Flourishing Study) into something we can actually picture.

A thriving person tends to have:

1) Direction

Not certainty. But a sense of forward movement. They can answer: “What matters now?” and “What am I building?”

2) Energy

We might be using our batteries a lot but the energy is renewable. Rest exists. Recovery is available to us. The body isn’t always in emergency mode.

3) Meaning

Their life feels connected to values. Even if it’s messy, it feels real.

4) Connection

We have a few relationships that include trust, honesty, warmth, repair. Not just networking. Not just roles. Actual friendly, supportive human beings.

5) Capability

We can meet stress without collapsing into either panic or numbness. We have emotional skills, not just grit and endurance.

6) Autonomy

We have some real agency in their day-to-day life. Enough influence to feel dignity.

7) Stability

Not luxury, enough safety to think, breathe, plan.

8) Contribution

We feel useful. We feel we matter. We experience our work as a form of participation in life.

And here’s a big one:

9) Inner capacity to face complexity

This is where the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) become incredibly practical.

The IDG lens: inner development for outer impact

The Inner Development Guide is an open-source framework designed for one of the most urgent problems of our time.

The one guiding question used in the first survey during the co-creation of the initial Inner Development Goals framework (IDG) was:

"What abilities, qualities or skills do you believe are essential to develop, individually and collectively, in order to get us significantly closer to fulfilling the UN Sustainable Development Goals?"

This open-ended question gathered input from 861 respondents, primarily professionals in leadership, sustainability, and consulting roles. Responses were independently coded by researchers, yielding overlapping categories that formed the basis for the 23, and later 25 skills in the IDG framework.​

It organizes personal inner growth into five dimensions:

• Being (inner stability, self-awareness, presence)

• Thinking (sense-making, humility, perspective-taking)

• Relating (empathy, compassion, connection)

• Collaborating (trust, co-creation, inclusive teamwork)

• Acting (courage, perseverance, wise action)

  
  

In plain language:

A thriving person can pause. They can reflect. They can learn. They can repair and forgive. They can act without burning everything down. They can move the work forward without burning themselves down.

Why leaders should care (even if they’re tired of “wellbeing talk”)

Because leadership is a multiplier, and a leader gets to be a multiplier.

Your leadership affects people’s:

• stress chemistry

• sense of safety

• motivation and confidence

• ability to speak up

• relationships at work

• energy at home

• belief in the future

  
  

Work consumes so much of our waking lives that leaders hold an outsized power to shape the most human question of all: "What does it feel like to be alive in this place?"

Far from sentimentality, this is the essence of culture, the felt texture of belonging, purpose, and vitality that either drains or elevates people day after day.

As a leader, you are granted profound space to make impact on lives, not through grand gestures alone, but by curating that lived experience: fostering meaning through shared purpose, resilience via psychological safety, and joy in relationships that repair and trust.

In this arena, your influence ripples into flourishing, because when people feel truly alive at work, they are better positioned to thrive everywhere else.

Thriving needs your leadership

As a Gallup Certified Strengths Coach, leader and change-maker myself, I’ve walked the path of trying to build thriving organizations myself, and I know the inner landscape it demands of us.

It starts with your own depths: the courage to turn inward, cultivating resilience, purpose, and presence amid complexity, change fatigue, AI disruption, and relentless acceleration.

This is the strategic foundation for fostering conditions where people flourish, driving impact across human lives, profit, and planet (and your own vitality).

Join me in this pivotal inner work.

Together, we’ll equip you to create workplaces where humans truly grow, learn, collaborate and innovate bravely.. and stay burnout free.

Step into this space: how committed are we to craft organizations that are part of a good life?

Let's begin!

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Hi, I’m Monika, Strengths Coach and facilitator. I help individuals and groups thrive, cultivate resilience, emotional intelligence, and well-being through strengths-based coaching. Passionate about transformative and creative leadership, I empower leaders to drive meaningful change within themselves, their organizations, and beyond.

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