The 12 traits of “flourishers”

This is one of the many gems from sociologist Corey Keyes‘s keynote at the 6th Conference on Emerging Adulthood. He was explaining the concept of flourishers: those individuals who report that “every day” or “almost every day” they experience happiness, but less so for emotional reasons (feeling happy) than from psychological and social ones (positive functioning). He listed out the twelve traits that are much more pronounced in flourishers than the rest of the population, and I’m eager to share them with you:

Flourishers…

• don’t procrastinate
• have a high degree of self-control 
• feel highly capable
• are deliberate (They know what they want out of life.)
• have a high disposition to apologize (At this point I start raising my eyebrows because I’m five for five.)
• have a malleable mindset about their own intelligence (They know that they don’t know everything and are open to being wrong.)
• have higher levels of curiosity (They like to explore and expose themselves to new and challenging situations.)
• they have an OCEAN personality
  • open (Again, they’re intellectually curious and open to novelty.)
  • conscientious (Again, they are disciplined and planful.)
  • extroverted (This is where I start docking points.) (Also, why do psychologists spell it with an ‘A’?)
  • agreeable (They’re compassionate and cooperative.)
  • not neurotic (Go ahead and dock some more points here.)
• have an initiative for personal growth (They want to grow and they have a plan for how to go about it.)
• learn from adversity
• are motivated by mastery of the process rather than the outcome (They aren’t motivated by money; they’re all about the journey.)
• feel loved and cared for

Keyes delineates these traits because he is committed to promoting a concept of mental health that is more solid and robust than our current understanding of it as the “absence of mental illness.” He suggests that we design our interventions with an eye to cultivating these traits in our young people. If we truly want to set them up for a life beyond subsistence or even “settling” (this is Keyes’s term for the complacency of the merely “happy”), then we must go above and beyond independent living and job skills and aim for the personal and professional fulfillment of our youth.

For this reason I especially like the last trait. One of the many things I admire about The Brotherhood/Sister Sol is the fact that they codify love in their theory of change and mission. We don’t talk about love with our young people nearly as much as we should.