PERMA: A handy guide in financially uncertain times: Part 1
Also, I passed the AFC exam!
Hello everyone! I’m back and happy to report that all of my studying paid off — I passed the 165 question, 3-hour long AFC exam last Saturday.
Now I’m in the stage of building out the components of my financial coaching business. I’ve got meetings with lawyers and mentors, logo design prototypes and tag lines, and a long, long to-do list. It’s exciting, terrifying and life-affirming all at once.
If you’d like to be added to a delightfully expanding list of people interested in becoming a client once I launch, just reply to this email or message me. I’ll be offering discounts on packages for the first cohort of clients as I build up experience hours:
I’m still processing the many implications of the election along with the rest of the country.
But today I want to talk about a tool I learned about in my studies that has stuck in my mind.
It’s called PERMA. It stands for the five elements that enable human flourishing, according to psychologist Martin Seligman:
Positive emotion
Engagement
Relationships
Meaning
Accomplishment
The thing I like about PERMA is that some of these elements are obviously helped by having a ton of financial resources, but at the same time, being rich won’t automatically conjure these elements in your life either.
If we buy into this theory, cultivate these elements, and stay aware of what areas demand our attention, we can better direct our energetic and financial resources in directions that can actually help us thrive, instead of throwing money and energy at problems that may not actually be at the core of our malaise.
Today’s post is about the first, and I think the most sticky, element of PERMA — positive emotions.
I’ll get into what it means, how I do and don’t identify it in my life, and how I think it can help our personal finances.
The P in PERMA
“Positive emotions are momentary in nature and can be forward-looking (e.g.. optimism), present focused (e.g., happiness), and reflective (e.g., life satisfaction)…the frequent experience of positive emotions contributes to a flourishing life.” (K.L. Archuleta et al.)1
The idea “think positive thoughts” could be annoying to some of you out there. It’s a little annoying to me.
Optimism? Now? Really?
It’s not always easy to cultivate frequent experiences of positive emotion, and if we suffer from mental health challenges2 it could feel impossible.
But the positive emotions in PERMA are momentary — they don’t have to last long — and multi-temporal — our futures, our pasts and our presents are all potential sources of frequent hits of positive emotion. If one source doesn’t work, there are others.
The Future
Speaking personally, it isn’t easy for me to draw positive emotions from the future.
Sure, I have dreams. I’m even optimistic about some of them.
But I also have a brain that runs scary, future “what if” scenarios all the time.
Just this morning, as my brain was coming online, I thought:
“What if I got an incurable brain tumor?”
If using the future as a source for frequent positive emotions doesn’t do it for me, which it doesn’t, the PERMA theory still leaves me with two other sources for frequent positive emotions: the present and the past.
The Present
My mindfulness practice and a general appreciation of the mathematical miracle that any of us are here are both sources of positive emotions drawn from the present.
My fidgety, hippy ass loves going on walking meditations through the park I live near. My passing, present thoughts are usually about the trees around me.
I love finding one, looking at its leaves and admiring its colors and roots.
Thinking about the oxygen it’s giving. Thinking about how it originated from a tiny seed that came from another tree. Thinking about how it’s ok with losing leaves and adjusting itself to the seasons and how it’s connected, underground, to all the trees around it.
The present is full of miracles. It’s so corny and it’s so true.
The Past
Have you ever spent time looking back on old photos in your phone? It’s a trip. Because even eras that I knew sucked — my year in Chicago between 2014-2015, 2020-2023 — held memories I loved. Give me sparks of past-oriented positive emotion.
One of the best benefits of having a wedding is that I have a goldmine of happy memories, and beautiful photos of that happy day.
My favorite picture is one of my husband and I walking into the reception. He held my flowers so I could hold his hand. I set it as my phone background.
Every time I look at my phone I feel a little spurt of past-derived positive emotion.
What’s money got to do with it?
“When it comes to money, psychology has been shown to significantly affect financial decision-making and financial outcomes.” (Durband, 101)
It’s undeniable that we can use money to buy a present moment fix of happiness to generate the P in PERMA.
Hell, I paid for a wedding that gave me a huge dose of present and past-derived P.3
But there are so many sources of positive emotion to draw from, from so many moments in time.
If we believe that we need money to generate the P in PERMA we will inevitably chase money to buy those positive feelings.
But if we know that there are many sources of it,
if we know we don’t need to draw from temporal wells that won’t lead us anywhere,
if we know there are forms of it that we’re perfectly willing to pay for,
if we know that many of them are absolutely free,
that’s all good information for making financial decisions that enable us to thrive.
More on the ERMA of PERMA next week.
ETC.
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Durband, Dorothy B., et al. Financial Counseling Edited by Dorothy B. Durband, Ryan H. Law, Angela K. Mazzolini. DeGraff, Alycia N., and Daniel Dillon. “Chapter 7, Contemporary Theories and Frameworks for Use in Financial Counseling” p.101, A. Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Springer, 2019.
That can give us useful information — that we need to direct more resources toward our mental health.
Though my wedding was obvs debt free - I’ll tell you how I did it in a future post.
Congratulations!