The Arc of (nearly?) Everything

What is it?

A simple graphic, that describes what seems to be a natural principle.

The principle is reflected in many common sayings, such as: ‘A little of what you like does you good’ and ‘There is a point of diminishing returns’, and ‘You can have too much of a good thing’.

That principle is simply you can have too much or too little of something, and in between is a place where flourishing happens.

In general, it looks like this:

The exact shape of the curve can be whatever you experience it as being.

To be clear from the outset: this for personal insight and use and it can certainly also be useful in team/organisational/community settings. As you read more, please ensure you see and remember the Five Freedoms. Your insights and conclusions are yours. As, collectively, are your team’s, your organisation’s, or your community’s. Others may come to different insights and conclusions. This is an invitation to think and is certainly not about telling anyone else what to think.

How does it work?

It is best explained simply by giving examples:

If I don’t eat, I’ll starve. If I eat too much, I’ll have health issues.

If I don’t exercise, I won’t be fit. But I can exercise so much that it damages my body, or other things I need to pay attention to in life don’t get what they need.

For most things, there can be a place of too little, but there can also be negative consequences if things just keep increasing. And in between is a place where we can flourish.

Can you give some examples?

The list is practically endless. And for anything we look at people may have a range of thoughts, so I’m not saying that the following applies to everyone. Here goes, just to give a flavour:

And so it goes on: How much should I practice something before doing it for real? How much time should I spend on social media? Or reading a book? How much time/attention should I spend with this person? Too little can be a problem, too much can be a problem, and the flourishing happens in between.

Does the horizontal line (the x – axis) always have to be about ‘less’ and ‘more’?

No. For many people there are situations when they are balancing between polarities.

So, they may be looking at how happiness, or effectiveness, or whatever they are using for the smiley and sad faces changes between say:

• Discipline and Freedom
• Courage and Caution
• Creativity and Constraint

At this point, some people experience this as becoming multidimensional – from 2D to 3D or more.

Does it apply at work?

Absolutely. How much time should I spend on emails? How much marketing should I do? How much should I be thinking about this? How much voicing my thoughts should I do? How much listening? How much travelling? How high do I want to go with my career? These can all have too little, too much, and a flourishing in between.

Does it apply in teams?

Absolutely. How many people should be in the team? How long should team meetings be? How often should we meet? How long should we spend on this topic? How many different disciplines/geographies/stakeholders should be represented? How much research should we do before we meet or before we decide? Or adherence to timekeeping? What able holding each other to account? In each case, what’s too little? What’s too much?

And looking at team dynamics – Can we be too supportive, or too challenging? When are we being too individual or too collaborative?

For all of these: Where are we now? How do we wish to be? How are we judging this? (Productivity? Impact? Productivity? Joy? Customer satisfaction? Employee satisfaction?)

How will we know when we are where we want to be?

A conversation to discover how people are naming the axes and where people feel the team is on the Arc can reveal useful information, insight into disagreements, and guidance on how to retain/regain team flourishing.

How did this graphic come about?

In the late 1990’s I was on a leadership development course. The trainer said something that intrigued me, “A weakness is a strength overplayed”. By first profession I was an engineer, and so I sought for a visual way to describe this. And hence the graph. Originally, I called this the Graph of Everything but in time two things became apparent: The real message is that things tend to follow an Arc, and that it is important to be able to say that for some things this arc does not apply.

What do the smiley and sad face mean?

That’s up to you. And they can change depending upon what you are looking at. Maybe it’s about more or less happiness. Or fulfilment. Or impact. Or success (and exploring how you measure success can also be insightful and helpful). Or maybe it’s about efficiency. Or effort. Or peace of mind. Or financial reward. Or reputation.

And for some people it can be the smiley and sad face can represent a duality. E.g.

• Happiness and frustration. (Or maybe their duality is between happiness and regret. Or happiness and disappointment. Or …)
• Love and fear. (Or love and frustration. Or love and loneliness. Or…)
• Ease and Effort. (Or ease and struggle. Or ease and stuckness. Or…)

Note that whatever you choose as the smiley and sad faces for this vertical line (y-axis) can also follow a curve. For example, if I don’t pay any attention to happiness, will I be happy?

But if I obsess about happiness and wish to be happy all the time and see any sadness as a failure, will I be happy? The same could be true if your smiley face is about fulfilment, success (in whatever way that means for you), impact, results etc – between the ‘not paying attention’ and the ‘being obsessive’ there is a place where flourishing can happen.

Is the Arc always a smooth curve?

Not at all. You decide the shape for each situation. For one thing you’re looking at it may be that you curve rises quickly and stays high for a long time before falling. Or maybe it takes quite a lot of something before the curve rises for you. Or maybe none is not good, a few is great, and any more is too many.

Does it raise challenging questions?

Absolutely. How about:

How caring should I be with this person? Can I care too little? Can I care too much? For most people, the answer to those last two questions is ‘Yes’, though consciously recognising that there can, at times, be too much care, maybe leading to stifling the other person’s growth or freedom, or ‘marshmallowing’ or incurring a personal cost that doesn’t help the situation or other consequences, can sometimes be difficult to acknowledge.

The essence of ‘A weakness is a strength overplayed’ is that the strength is usually positioned as a ‘good thing’. But this is implying things can go wrong if they are overplayed.

For example:

• Too much courage and I can become foolhardy.
• Too much patience and I can get frustrated, miss opportunities, not communicate something that could really help someone of a situation.
• Too much empathy and I may become emotionally too close, lose perspective and objectivity, or emotionally exhaust myself, and not be able to best serve the person I’m trying to support.

So, a good thing is only a good thing when it’s the right amount.

As Shakespeare wrote, ‘”There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”’ (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2)

What about looking at negative things?

It certainly creates interesting things to think about.

For example, I might label stress as a bad thing. And certainly, it is if there’s too much of it. But when I think about it, some stress can be good by giving me motivation, focus maybe, and even excitement.

Fear is usually thought of as a bad thing. And living constantly in fear can be terrible. But if we were truly fearless we’d get into all sorts of crazy situations. It’s the fear of hurt or loss that causes us to pause, and that can save a lot of time, energy, maybe money, maybe emotions and even life.

I spent a lot of my life really giving myself a hard time whenever I felt angry. Then I realised that anger was, for me, a rising of energy when I felt that something I deeply cared about was being abused. I wondered – what would I be if I never got at all angry? Effectively, I would have stopped caring. It then becomes a question of what to do with that energy – maybe let it out in some way that I believe to be helpful to the situation, and sometimes just a message to self, ‘Thanks, it’s good to know we care, but that won’t be useful right now.’

As Aristotle put it in The Nicomachean Ethics, “Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – this is not easy.” Daniel Goleman used this quote at the start of his seminal work, ‘Emotional Intelligence’.

So, when you work with this you may find that some things you’ve labelled as ‘Bad’ shift in your thinking. And you may decide that many things are neither good nor bad in themselves, but it’s about how much, when etc.

Does it apply to everything?

This is a matter of personal opinion. Which is why I describe it as ‘The Arc of (nearly?) Everything’.

There will be something for most people where it is ‘never’ or ‘always’ or ‘more is always good’ for example.

Areas where these can definitely appear include (but are certainly not limited to):

• Religious beliefs and practices
• Political beliefs
• Personal biology (e.g., if you have a nut allergy just one nut can be a huge problem)
• Personal Ethics (e.g., a meat free diet)
• Community/Organisational ethics and practices
• The law that applies in that place/situation

The Five Freedoms

It is important to let whoever is exploring with the Arc decide:

• What they are applying to the horizontal (x-axis) line: This can be more or less of something or between a duality (e.g., between ‘My ideas’ and ‘Their ideas’)
• What the smiley and sad face mean for them, in this situation
• What the shape of the Arc is for them, in this situation
• Whether the Arc actually applies here, or if it’s ‘Always/Never/None/More is always good’.
• Where their Flourishing Zone is (this can be alternative described as ‘Where here is ‘good enough’/’just fine’ for you?’)

In practice – The Flourishing Zone

It’s natural to want to be towards the top of your Arc. I used to describe this as ‘The Flourishing Point’ – at the peak. It was a conversation with a wonderful coach, Rashmi Shetty, that highlighted something important. Around the top of the Arc appears there can be a wide range horizontally (what you are doing) that has very little practical effect on the vertical axis (what you want). So, instead of a point it’s more useful to think of a ‘Flourishing Zone’.

The image below hopefully makes this easy to see.

There may be times when you need to be aiming to be at the absolute peak. For most other situations this is saying it’s probable that you have room to manoeuvre, you don’t have to be perfect, and ‘Good enough is good enough’.

In Practice – The Gap

My culture tends to promote the idea that ‘more is better’. Do more, be more, own more, see more, work harder, go faster etc. The Arc show us that if we begin with little, then ‘more’ tends to lead to ‘better’ but then in reality things flatten out and can indeed go down again as consequences kick in.

The image below shows how this Gap can appear between where we think we ought to be, and what we are actually experiencing.

I notice that many respond to this by using trying harder with the ‘more is more’ thinking and doubling down on what’s no longer working, often blaming other people and events as the reason for not being as happy/productive/successful/healthy/(whatever they are using for the vertical axis) as they wish to be. And the situation just gets worse. When people recognise the pattern is actually an Arc, rather than a ‘more is more’ straight line, it can be a real eye opening moment, and the beginning of a powerful conversation.

The Arc in the world

I’ve been using the Arc in my professional work for many years. It was shared with selected coaches around the world in the summer of 2024. This enabled me to hear other professionals’ views around its efficacy, and also how to I/we/they can communicate and share it. The conversations were hugely positive.

After 3 further ‘private’ viewings, to small groups of invited international coaches, to deepen learning about how professionals relate to this, and how they can use it, and integrate it with their work, its first fully public appearance was with The London Coaching Group in April 2025. And it was published in Coaching at Work magazine’s May/June 2025 edition.

From here we are supporting people to freely use and share it, so that it can be useful to as many people as possible.

Next steps

You are welcome to download the Arc of (nearly?) Everything as a .pdf here.

Feel free to play with this yourself, and maybe with a thought partner or as a team. And feel free to share this with others.

If you’d like help and resources beyond what is available here that could help you share with colleagues, your team, maybe a community you’re involved in, please get in touch and we’ll see what we can put together for you and the wider world.

As a professional coach or consultant you may want to explore this with other professional colleagues before taking to your clients. We are putting together experiential opportunities just for this. Drop us your email here and we’ll make sure you know about the latest events and news.