Positive Psychology in Practice: Using Positive Psychology in Coaching

Positive psychology can be a great addition to coaching to bring lasting results to your clients. This article walks you through the main defining features of positive psychology, and then outlines how you can apply its principles in your own coaching.

Key Takeaways

• Positive psychology gives coaches a framework for building flourishing, not simply fixing problems. PERMA, character strengths, hope, and positive emotions give you specific lenses for exploring what is helping a client thrive and what may be missing.
• PERMA works best as a diagnostic conversation, not a happiness checklist. A client may be accomplishing plenty while lacking engagement, connection, or meaning, so the five dimensions help you look beyond surface success.
• Character strengths become useful when clients apply them deliberately. Identifying a VIA strength is only the beginning. Coaching explores where a strength helps, where it is underused or overused, and how to apply it differently.
• Hope can be coached through agency and pathways. When clients feel stuck, examine both their motivation to move and whether they can see realistic routes toward the goal.
• Progress should include flourishing as well as task completion. Completed actions matter, but changes in engagement, relationships, meaning, agency, and accomplishment can reveal whether coaching is producing the life change the client actually wanted.

How Do You Use Positive Psychology in Coaching?

Positive psychology is used in coaching by helping clients identify and deliberately build the conditions associated with flourishing, including positive emotion, engagement, supportive relationships, meaning, accomplishment, character strengths, and hope.

In practice, this means you do more than ask a client what is wrong or what goal they want to achieve. You might use PERMA to identify an area of well-being that needs attention, VIA character strengths to explore resources the client can draw on, or Hope Theory to distinguish between low motivation and a lack of workable pathways.

Positive psychology does not require you to redirect every difficult conversation toward something positive. Effective use means acknowledging problems accurately while also exploring strengths, resources, possibilities, progress, and actions that can help the client move forward.

What Is Positive Psychology?

Positive psychology is the study of human flourishing; it has been defined as the examination of the strengths and virtues that will allow individuals, organizations, and communities to thrive. As a whole, the discipline of psychology tends to focus on dysfunction in the world, including the treatment of people with mental illnesses and other psychological problems. Instead, positive psychology looks at how everyday people can become happier and live more fulfilling lives.

While the field of psychology’s concern with remedying human problems is important and understandable, much of the science fails to address what it is that makes our lives worth living. Positive psychology works to correct this imbalance by focusing on both strengths and weaknesses, choosing to build on the good things while also repairing the bad. The school of thought believes that excellence and human goodness are just as authentic and important as disorder and distress. 

What Are the Central Elements of Positive Psychology?

In order to nurture talent and to make life more fulfilling, positive psychology focuses on three main areas:

What Role Do Positive Emotions Play in Positive Psychology?

The concept of positive emotions in positive psychology involves being content with the past, happy about the present, and having hope for the future. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson is one of the most prominent researchers in the relatively unchartered terrain that is positive emotions, and she believes that we need negative emotions flourish, while positive emotions tend to be subtle and fleeting. She believes that the secret to happiness is to try and increase how often we are experiencing positive emotions to achieve a better balance in our lives.

Which Positive Individual Traits Support Flourishing?

At the individual level, the field of positive psychology focuses on positive individual traits, otherwise defined as the more positive behavioral patterns that are seen in people over time. Understanding positive individual traits will require the study of strengths and virtues, including the capacity for love, courage, work, resilience, integrity, and self-control. Positive individual traits could include the ability to tap into one’s creative potential or the inner drive to pursue excellence and success.

How Do Positive Institutions Support Flourishing?

Positive institutions are a pillar of positive psychology for society as a whole. Understanding positive institutions involves the study of the strengths that will develop better communities, and those strengths can include work ethic, justice, civility, responsibility, and tolerance. This level of positive psychology will explore how an institution can work better to nurture and support all of its citizens.

What Happens When You Coach the Person but Ignore Their Environment?

A strengths-based coaching conversation can miss the real problem when it treats every difficulty as something inside the client rather than examining the environment around them.

Positive psychology includes positive institutions for a reason. Flourishing is affected by workplaces, families, communities, leadership structures, expectations, and relationships, not only by an individual’s attitudes or personal strengths.

Imagine a leadership client who keeps describing herself as unmotivated. Her calendar is packed with meetings, her manager changes priorities every few days, and she has no authority to make decisions without approval. Asking how she can become more disciplined may send the coaching in the wrong direction.

A stronger conversation separates personal capacity from environmental constraint.

You might ask:

• What part of this situation is actually within your control?
• Which parts of the system repeatedly make the desired behavior harder?
• Where are your strengths helping you operate inside this environment?
• Where are you compensating for a system that needs to change?
• What conversation, boundary, request, or structural change would improve the situation?

The same distinction matters with entrepreneurs. A business owner who cannot finish meaningful work may have a focus problem, but she may also have designed a week in which every client can contact her at any time. Coaching only her mindset leaves the operating problem untouched.

Positive psychology is most useful when it helps clients build on what is strong without asking the individual to carry responsibility for every condition around them.

What Is the PERMA Model?

Martin Seligman is thought to be one of the founding fathers of positive psychology, and he has developed several models to explain the theory of happiness. The most recent is the PERMA Model, which includes five core elements of well-being and happiness, and it is believed that these elements can help people to reach a life of happiness, meaning, and fulfillment.

• P – Positive Emotion – Being able to focus on positive emotions is the ability to be optimistic and view the past, present, and future from a positive perspective. This positive view can help you in work and relationships while inspiring you to take more chances and to be more creative.
• E – Engagement – It is important to our lives to find activities that will take our full engagement, as these activities will help us to grow, learn, and nurture our own personal happiness.
• R – Relationships – Social connections are a foundation for life, as humans thrive for intimacy, love, and interactions with other people. Building positive relationships will help to spread joy and love while providing support during difficult times.
• M – Meaning – Having meaning and purpose in life is important for overall fulfillment and happiness.
• A – Accomplishments – Ambition and goals in life can help us to achieve things that make us feel good about ourselves. When you achieve your goals, you’ll reach a sense of fulfillment and pride that will further push you to flourish and thrive.

How Can Coaches Use PERMA as a Coaching Diagnostic?

PERMA can help you diagnose which part of a client’s well-being deserves attention before you rush into another goal or action plan.

The five areas give you a structured scan:

• Positive Emotion: What experiences currently create enjoyment, gratitude, interest, hope, or other positive emotion?
• Engagement: Where does the client become deeply absorbed and use their abilities fully?
• Relationships: Which connections strengthen the client, and which important relationships are weak or neglected?
• Meaning: What makes the client’s work, goals, relationships, or contribution feel worthwhile?
• Accomplishment: What does the client want to achieve, master, complete, or become more capable of doing?

This matters because the client’s stated problem may not reveal the real coaching target.

A business coach might hear, “I need to be more productive.” A PERMA scan could reveal that accomplishment is already extremely high. The client is hitting revenue targets, shipping projects, and keeping every commitment.

The real gap is meaning. She no longer believes the company she has built reflects what she wants to spend her life doing.

More productivity would intensify the wrong solution.

PERMA also keeps coaches from treating general well-being as one score. Butler and Kern developed the PERMA-Profiler specifically to measure multiple dimensions of flourishing. Their validation work drew on three studies involving 7,188 participants and produced measures across positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

You do not need to turn every session into a formal assessment. A simple periodic PERMA review can be enough:

What is working here? What is thin? What has changed? What deserves attention next?

Then choose one area.

If engagement is low, the coaching action might be testing work that creates deeper concentration. If relationships are the weak area, the client might initiate one conversation they have been avoiding. If meaning is low, the next step may be reviewing where their time is going against what they say matters most.

If you use LCH Core, the PERMA review can become a reusable worksheet rather than a conversation you have to recreate each time. You can then connect what emerges to goals, journals, resources, or specific action items. Life Coach Hub’s support guidance also shows how coaches can build a reusable library of coaching tools for exercises they use repeatedly.

The technology is secondary. The coaching move comes first: diagnose before prescribing.

Why Does Positive Psychology Fit Coaching?

When it comes to coaching, positive psychology is a natural fit. Positive psychology studies the things that work well in our lives, so it fits well with the basic assumptions of coaching that the client is naturally resourceful, creative, and whole. Coaches who use the principles of positive psychology will focus on the use of their clients’ strengths to enhance day-to-day personal happiness, knowing that happiness will grow when we have meaning, engagement, and pleasure in our lives.

While your clients will seek out your services for a variety of issues, the basic foundation to all of those potential problems is their desire to improve their happiness and well-being. People who are looking for life coaching are doing well, but they want to flourish. Life coaching will focus on their strengths, goals, hopes, and dreams, and all of these areas are within the reach of positive psychology.

How Do You Use Positive Psychology Without Forcing Positivity?

Positive psychology works best when positive emotion expands a client’s options, not when it is used to talk the client out of a difficult experience.

Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build work proposes that positive emotions such as interest, joy, contentment, and love can broaden a person’s momentary range of thoughts and possible actions and, over time, contribute to personal resources. That is very different from telling someone to “look on the bright side.”

Consider a client who has just been passed over for a promotion.

An immediate question such as, “What’s the gift in this?” may be technically positive and still be poor coaching. The client may first need to name the disappointment, anger, embarrassment, or uncertainty attached to what happened.

Once the experience has been explored honestly, a positive psychology lens can widen the conversation:

What else can you see now?

Perhaps the client recognizes that the rejection exposed how little advancement exists in the organization. Perhaps curiosity appears around another department. Perhaps perspective helps them separate one hiring decision from their overall professional value.

The sequence matters.

A useful pattern is:

1. Name reality. What happened, and what does the client make it mean?
2. Explore the response. What emotions, assumptions, and concerns are present?
3. Look for resources. What strengths, relationships, previous successes, or knowledge can the client draw on?
4. Broaden the possibilities. What options become visible when the client is no longer locked into one interpretation?
5. Choose an action. What does the client want to do with the wider view?

This also protects you from converting strengths-based coaching into avoidance.

A client who is furious about an unfair workload does not necessarily need gratitude. A client grieving the end of an important opportunity may not need optimism in the first five minutes. A client who has made a serious mistake may need to take responsibility before reframing anything.

Positive psychology adds something to the conversation. It does not require you to subtract reality from it.

How Can You Use Positive Psychology in Coaching Sessions?

Positive psychology can be extremely beneficial when it comes to life coaching, as there are a number of ways that the study can fit in with the ICF core competencies. Positive psychology focuses on asking what is right, instead of what is wrong, with people. While this doesn’t mean that as a coach you are to ignore problems or weaknesses, it does mean that you should be thinking that there is at least as much use in focusing on the positive.

How Can Positive Psychology Strengthen the Coach-Client Relationship?

Creating the coach-client relationship is important in any life coaching situation, and the ICF highlights the importance of establishing trust and intimacy with the client. It is important that the coach shows genuine concern for the client’s future and welfare, keeps promises, and provides ongoing support for new actions and behaviors.

Positive psychology can be extremely useful in establishing a trusting and open relationship with your client. Reacting to your clients in a positive way will reinforce the coach-client bond. A positive reaction to your client can magnify the uplifting effects of the good things that are happening in their life. Developing a strong bond through positivity can make it easier for you to move on to coach the client in new and sensitive areas to help them to further make progress toward their goals.

How Can Coaches Communicate Through a Positive Psychology Lens?

When using positive psychology throughout communications with your client, it is important to be focused and actively listening on both verbal and nonverbal levels. As a coach, you should be specifically attuned to moments in which the client is seeking to share positive successes or moments of pride. Then, rather than simply acknowledging what you have been told, you can use responses that provide positive feedback that is supported with an emotional content. This will make the feedback sound more affirming and authentic for the client.

A life coaching process that is influenced by positive psychology doesn’t mean that you and you client can only discuss the good and never address difficulties, failures, or painful experiences. Your clients should feel free to discuss anything that they feel is important to them and relevant toward reaching their goals. However, the difference is that you should steer the conversation to talking about difficulties against a background of strengths, putting obstacles and difficulties in a broader context.

A positive psychological perspective should also be used with direct communication, as it is important that as the coach you are using language that will have the greatest positive impact on your client. You will want to help the client to reframe and articulate a situation from a positive perspective, and you can use metaphors and analogies in order to better illustrate a point from a perspective of positivity.

How Can Coaches Identify and Use Client Strengths?

Positive psychologists Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson have developed a strengths classification system known as the Values in Action (VIA) strengths survey. This questionnaire works to measure strengths, and it has been useful for both researchers and life coaches. The system identifies six primary categories of strength, known as core virtues, and each has several subcategories, resulting in 24 signature strengths. After taking the test, the client’s strengths will be ranked, and coaches can focus on those at the top and help clients to harness these qualities.

Research has shown that working with signature strengths can be extremely effective for clients. People who worked with their strengths in a new way were found to be happier and more engaged in their lives. By encouraging clients to use their strengths to take on a challenge, they will experience improved performance while enjoying greater satisfaction in the accomplishment of the task.

How Do You Turn a VIA Strength Into Something a Client Can Actually Use?

A VIA strength becomes valuable in coaching when the client deliberately applies it to a real situation and examines what happens.

Knowing that curiosity, perseverance, kindness, bravery, perspective, or another strength ranks highly can create useful language. The deeper work begins when you move from identification to application.

Research by Park, Peterson, and Seligman examined character strengths in 5,299 adults and found different strengths had different relationships with life satisfaction. Hope, zest, gratitude, love, and curiosity were among those most consistently associated with life satisfaction in their samples.

That does not mean every client should try to become more hopeful, zestful, or curious. It means strengths are specific qualities you can explore rather than treating “be more positive” as a coaching strategy.

A useful four-step sequence is:

Spot it. Test it. Apply it. Review it.

Suppose perseverance is one of a client’s signature strengths.

First, spot it. Ask where perseverance is already visible in the client’s life. You want behavioral evidence, not simply agreement with a test result.

Next, test it. Ask where perseverance has genuinely helped and where continuing may no longer be useful.

Then apply it. The client chooses a situation in the coming week where they want to use perseverance deliberately.

Finally, review it. At the next session, examine the result. What changed? Did the strength fit the situation? Was another strength needed alongside it?

This last question matters because strengths can be used too little, too much, or in ways that fit the context poorly. Ryan Niemiec describes this through the idea of underuse, overuse, and optimal use of character strengths.

Kindness offers an easy example.

A client may value kindness and use it brilliantly when supporting colleagues. The same strength can become less useful if “being kind” repeatedly means agreeing to work she cannot realistically complete.

You could explore:

What would kindness look like if it included you in the equation?

Or take bravery. A client may underuse it by continually avoiding a necessary conversation. Another may overuse bravery by charging into conflicts before thinking through the consequences.

The coaching goal is not maximum strength.

It is the right strength, used to the right degree, in the right situation.

That turns a strengths assessment from an interesting personality result into something your client can actually practice.

How Can Positive Psychology Improve Goal Setting?

Creating realistic and obtainable goals is a major step in a coach’s role to facilitate learning and results, and this task can be done from the perspective of positive psychology. Goals will provide your clients something to look forward to and a focus, and they will give their life a purpose while increasing feelings of optimism and hope. In turn, this optimism can build your client’s motivation and ability to get out and achieve their goals, working through complications that might arise and not giving up when things get difficult.

Positive psychology focuses on the importance of choice, believing that a large part of a person’s happiness can be explained by the choices that they make in their lives. Coaching will build upon this belief, providing clients with the tools and knowledge needed to make informed choices that will help them to achieve their goals. In keeping up with the theme of positive psychology, the end result should be to improve overall happiness and wellbeing.

What Do You Do When a Client Has the Goal but Not the Hope?

When a client has a clear goal but keeps stalling, separate the problem into pathways and agency instead of assuming they simply need more motivation.

C. R. Snyder’s Hope Theory defines hope through two connected components: agency, the determination to move toward a goal, and pathways, the perceived ability to find routes toward it.

That distinction gives coaches a much sharper question:

Does this client lack the will to move, or can they not see a workable way forward?

Consider a client who wants to leave a corporate role and start a consulting business.

She is committed to the goal. She talks about it every session. She has researched the market. She can clearly explain why the change matters.

Yet nothing happens.

If you treat this as an agency problem, you might focus on confidence, commitment, accountability, or motivation.

But when you explore pathways, something different appears. In her mind, “starting the business” means resigning, losing her salary, replacing her full income immediately, and hoping clients appear.

She has one pathway, and it feels too risky.

The coaching opportunity is pathway generation.

Could she test a small paid project first? Speak with five potential buyers? Create a limited pilot? Reduce her working hours before leaving completely? Define a financial threshold that would make the transition viable?

The goal did not need to change. The route did.

The reverse can happen too.

Another client may have ten sensible pathways written down but take none of them. Now agency deserves attention.

Ask:

• Which of these routes do you genuinely believe you can execute?
• What makes you hesitate?
• What evidence do you have that you can take the first step?
• What would make the action small enough to begin?
• Who or what could strengthen your follow-through?

This is especially useful when goal coaching gets repetitive. If the client has written the same goal three times, another SMART goal worksheet may not be the answer.

Diagnose the blockage.

When you want to keep the resulting plan visible between sessions, goals and action items can separate the destination from the immediate pathways. In LCH Core, those are reusable and assignable coaching tools, which can make the distinction easier to maintain across a longer coaching engagement.

Hope becomes much more coachable when you stop treating it as a feeling and start asking whether the client has both a reason to move and a route they believe they can take.

How Can Hope and Strengths Support Client Change?

As coaches, we believe that when it comes to making powerful and positive change, our clients have the answers inside of themselves. It is our job to help them discover these answers through active listening, asking engaging and thought-provoking questions, and monitoring progress. When incorporating positive psychology, we work to make our clients stronger and more productive, helping them to actualize their full potential in order to pursue a change that will improve their overall happiness.

Helping your clients to develop hope for the future is also an important part of empowering change. Hope is directly related to positive outcomes, and not only is it a feel-good emotion, but hope serves as a motivational system. Hope for the future leads to growth and improvement, and people who are hopeful for their future tend to be actively engaged in developing strategies that will help them meet their goals. People who are lacking hope tend to choose easy goals that don’t offer opportunity for growth or a challenge, and when they fail they typically give up.

How Can Coaches Manage Progress and Accountability?

After our work in empowering our clients to make changes, it is our responsibility as coaches to hold attention to what is important to them. We should clearly request that the client take actions that move them toward their goals, acknowledge what they have completed, and work to keep them on track between sessions by drawing attention to the agreed-upon courses of action.

How Can You Measure Flourishing Instead of Just Checking Whether Tasks Got Done?

You measure flourishing by reviewing what is changing in the client’s life as well as whether they completed the actions you agreed on.

Accountability can easily become too narrow.

Did the client make the call? Yes.

Did they send the applications? Yes.

Did they exercise three times? Yes.

Those are useful measures of behavior, but they do not automatically tell you whether the coaching is moving the client toward greater well-being.

Return to PERMA.

A client may complete every action in a business-growth plan while becoming less engaged in the work and more disconnected from important relationships. Another client may miss one planned action while making a significant shift in meaning, confidence, or the way they handle a recurring situation.

You need both views.

Action evidence tells you what the client did.

That might include:

• conversations initiated
• decisions made
• applications submitted
• habits practiced
• boundaries set
• experiments completed

Flourishing evidence asks what those actions are producing.

You might review:

• Has positive emotion changed?
• Is engagement stronger or weaker?
• Have important relationships improved?
• Does the client experience more meaning in what they are doing?
• What accomplishments now exist that did not exist before?
• Does the client see more pathways when problems appear?
• Is the client showing greater agency in pursuing what matters?

You can make this concrete by establishing a small baseline early in the coaching relationship.

Suppose a client begins career coaching saying, “I want a job that doesn’t drain me.”

That statement is too broad to measure well.

Through PERMA, you might discover the client wants three specific changes: more engagement during the workday, stronger relationships with colleagues, and greater meaning in the problems they solve.

Now the coaching has observable markers.

Several sessions later, you can ask whether those dimensions have actually moved rather than relying on a vague impression that things seem better.

The formal PERMA-Profiler is one option when an appropriate standardized measure is useful. It was designed specifically to provide a multidimensional profile rather than collapsing flourishing into one undifferentiated idea.

For everyday coaching, a simpler repeated review may be enough.

This is also where your client records matter. Notes, previous goals, completed actions, and earlier reflections give you evidence that memory alone cannot provide.

If you use LCH Core, the Progress Stream brings recent client activity into one view, while the Engagement Report can help you notice changes in participation. Life Coach Hub’s client journey setup guide explains how the two can be used to spot client drift between sessions.

Neither tells you whether the client is flourishing by itself. They give you behavioral evidence that can strengthen the coaching conversation.

The question still belongs to you and the client:

Are we merely completing coaching activities, or is something meaningful changing?

When Is Positive Psychology Coaching No Longer Enough?

Positive psychology coaching is no longer enough when the client’s needs move beyond your competence, your coaching agreement, or the appropriate scope of coaching.

A strengths focus does not change professional boundaries.

You might begin with a client who wants help making a career decision. Over time, the material they bring changes substantially. Their needs may now require assessment, diagnosis, treatment, crisis support, or another form of professional expertise that you are not qualified to provide.

The right response is not to intensify the positive psychology.

More gratitude, more strengths work, or a more optimistic reframe does not solve a scope problem.

The current International Coaching Federation Code of Ethics took effect on April 1, 2025 and places ethical practice and professional responsibility at the center of coaching. ICF’s referral guidance also states plainly that coaches should not diagnose or provide treatment and should refer when the client’s needs fall outside the coach’s qualifications, experience, or agreed scope.

For a coach, the practical question is:

Am I still coaching within an area I am competent and contracted to coach?

Warning signs are not limited to a particular diagnosis. Look at what the client is asking you to do and what the work now requires.

If the client needs clinical treatment, specialized legal or financial advice, medical guidance, or another service outside your training, helping them connect with the appropriate professional is part of responsible coaching.

Referral does not always mean the coaching relationship must end. In some situations, coaching may continue alongside another professional service when roles are clear, appropriate, and agreed.

The key is not to use positive psychology as a reason to stretch coaching beyond its proper limits.

Strengths, hope, meaning, and accomplishment are powerful coaching territory. Professional judgment includes knowing when another kind of support is the stronger next step.

Where LCH Core Fits

Positive psychology becomes easier to use consistently when the reflections, actions, goals, and evidence of progress do not disappear between sessions.

The simplest approach is to match the coaching method to the tool rather than assigning tools for their own sake.

A PERMA check-in can become a worksheet. A strengths experiment can become an action item. A client exploring meaning can use a journal. A larger desired outcome can be kept visible as a goal. A framework you explain repeatedly can become a reusable resource.

Life Coach Hub’s guidance on keeping clients engaged between sessions follows the same principle: choose the tool that fits what actually came out of the coaching conversation.

Client management can support another part of the process. Client profiles, notes, and intake forms give you a place to retain context from earlier conversations instead of treating each session as an isolated event.

Progress tracking then helps you review the work over time. The Progress Stream can bring recent client activity together, while the Engagement Report provides another view of participation and potential drop-off. Those signals do not replace your judgment about progress, but they can tell you where a conversation is needed.

This matters for the business side of coaching too. When clients can revisit goals, actions, and progress, it becomes easier to have grounded conversations about what the coaching relationship has produced. That connects directly with the broader practice of making progress visible discussed in Life Coach Hub’s guide to client lifetime value for coaches.

The value of the system is not that software performs positive psychology for you. It does not. The coach still listens, notices patterns, asks the questions, chooses the framework, and exercises professional judgment.

LCH Core simply gives those coaching decisions somewhere consistent to live, from worksheets and journals to goals, action items, client notes, the Progress Stream, and the Engagement Report.

Frequently Asked Questions About Positive Psychology Coaching

What is positive psychology coaching?

Positive psychology coaching uses research on flourishing, strengths, positive emotions, relationships, meaning, accomplishment, and hope to help clients build more of what supports a satisfying and effective life. It does not mean ignoring problems or asking clients to remain positive all the time.

How do coaches use the PERMA model with clients?

Coaches can use PERMA to explore five dimensions of well-being: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. The model is especially useful for identifying where a client’s stated goal may be hiding a different well-being gap.

How can a coach use VIA character strengths in a session?

A coach can use VIA strengths by helping the client identify where a strength already appears, examine where it is underused or overused, deliberately apply it to a real situation, and review the outcome. The assessment should start the coaching conversation rather than finish it.

What is the difference between positive psychology coaching and therapy?

Positive psychology coaching focuses on coaching goals and flourishing within the coach’s professional scope, while therapy can include the assessment and treatment of mental health conditions. Coaches should refer or collaborate with appropriate professionals when client needs move beyond their competence or coaching agreement.

How do you use positive psychology without ignoring negative emotions?

You use positive psychology without ignoring negative emotions by exploring difficult experiences honestly before looking for strengths, resources, alternative perspectives, or next actions. Positive emotion can broaden a conversation, but it should not be used to erase disappointment, anger, grief, fear, or other relevant experiences.

Can positive psychology help clients achieve goals?

Positive psychology can support goal pursuit by connecting goals to strengths, meaning, accomplishment, agency, and workable pathways. Snyder’s Hope Theory is especially useful when a client knows what they want but is struggling either to see a route forward or to generate the determination to act.

How can coaches measure whether positive psychology coaching is working?

Coaches can measure progress by combining behavioral evidence with changes in flourishing. Track what clients do, then review whether positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment, agency, or other agreed indicators are changing in the direction the client wanted.

How Can Positive Psychology Strengthen Your Coaching Practice?

The use of positive psychology can allow us to better motivate and encourage our clients to complete what they have set their minds to. Positive psychology can help to uplift your clients, giving them hope to persevere when things might not be going the way they planned and encouraging them to continue on the right path when they experience a success. While it is perfectly acceptable to address and talk about failures, it is important to do so from a broad and positive context.

Positive psychology uses an optimistic approach to help everyday people to live happier and more rewarding lives, and it is easy to see how this discipline can be of use when it comes to life coaching. When working with clients from a perspective of positivity, we are better able to create a trusting relationship, help our clients to create realistic and achievable goals, and empower real change. Ultimately, positive psychology can allow us to achieve our own professional goal of helping our clients to live more fulfilling and successful lives.

Sources

Butler, Julie, and Margaret L. Kern. “The PERMA-Profiler: A Brief Multidimensional Measure of Flourishing.” International Journal of Wellbeing, vol. 6, no. 3, 2016, pp. 1-48. International Journal of Wellbeing

Fredrickson, Barbara L. “What Good Are Positive Emotions?” Review of General Psychology, vol. 2, no. 3, 1998, pp. 300-319. PubMed Central

International Coaching Federation. ICF Code of Ethics. International Coaching Federation, 2025. International Coaching Federation

Niemiec, Ryan M. “Finding the Golden Mean: The Overuse, Underuse, and Optimal Use of Character Strengths.” Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 2019. VIA Institute on Character

Park, Nansook, Christopher Peterson, and Martin E. P. Seligman. “Strengths of Character and Well-Being.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, vol. 23, no. 5, 2004, pp. 603-619. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology

Seligman, Martin E. P., and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. “Positive Psychology: An Introduction.” American Psychologist, vol. 55, no. 1, 2000, pp. 5-14. PubMed

Seligman, Martin E. P., Tracy A. Steen, Nansook Park, and Christopher Peterson. “Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions.” American Psychologist, vol. 60, no. 5, 2005, pp. 410-421. PubMed

Snyder, C. R., et al. “The Will and the Ways: Development and Validation of an Individual-Differences Measure of Hope.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 60, no. 4, 1991, pp. 570-585. PubMed