Sports as a Mechanism for Reaching Your Potential: The Relationship between Positive Psychology and Sports

Abstract

People have been searching for the good life or personal well-being since the ancient Greeks. During this same period, people have been expressing themselves through sport, participating in games of athleticism as a means of discovering who they are and reaching their potential. This chapter examines the relationship between sports and a flourishing life. By examining sports as a mechanism of achieving specific traits of positive psychology associated with flourishing, the researcher is able to determine that sports are a matrix in which human potential can be nourished.