The athlete’s experience of flourishing

Abstract

Positive psychology aims to study what makes life worth living. However, one of its key concepts, flourishing, is described as being mentally healthy, while for others it involves other positive psychological constructs such as growth, generativity, optimal functioning and resilience. This diversity suggests a lack of conceptual clarity. Descriptions have originated from investigations into subjective well-being and psychological functioning, with quantitative methods having dominated empirical research. The current study aims to provide an empirically derived conceptualisation of flourishing through qualitative methods. Inductive content analysis was carried out on semi-structured interviews with national or development team athletes competing at international level with an average age of 21.3 years. Findings characterised flourishing firstly, by internally-focused attributes, feelings and affective states; and secondly, by the fulfilment of areas of life which are perceived as important to the athlete. Overall, flourishing is described as an individually-specific notion of optimal well-being, which shares factors contributing to subjective well-being and to happiness. Strengths and weaknesses of the study and implications for applied practitioners are discussed along with directions for future research.