The PIESSEO Theory Explained

The Piesseo theory is actually better represented by a radar graph, and one day I’ll make one and update this article.

For now the big circle surrounding by the dimensions of well-being is you.

The black circle in the middle represents ideal balance between these various qualities in your life.

I’m not the first to propose such a model, though my seven dimensions are a little bit more in depth than the 4 often recommended by others (physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual – seem to be most common).

It isn’t new and it isn’t really mine. I stole it from economists and framed it in the context of fitness.

There is nothing wrong with their models, I’ve just observed how intricate environmental, social and occupational influences tend to be in my own coaching practice.

It is almost more often that these factors are the biggest contributing factors to weight gain, or frustration with weight loss or muscle mass gain attempts.

If you’re lifestyle skews too far in one direction, it can impact your ability to focus on the physical realm in particular. My domain.

How the PIESSEO Theory Works

At various points in our life, this black dot changes its position within the larger circle, it also gets bigger or smaller. So we can observe something like this:

This representation indicates someone presently living life on a far more social realm of well-being. Lots of hanging out with friends and as a result at the expense of other aspects of their life and well-being.

Less focus on work, or on controlling their environment, and often on maintaining their physical health.

The Piesseo theory states that a person can only focus so much of their attention on improving or maintaining any one realm of well-being without excluding other areas of well-being. There just isn’t enough mental bandwidth, to do everything at once.

The point of this is to offer an image up, that relates to the fact, that whenever we put a lot of our energy into one realm of our life — the model doesn’t really matter — we sacrifice something elsewhere.

I see it time and time and time again:

• Person A (above), spends a lot of time drinking, eating poorly, etc… to socialize. Often at the expense of their physical realm.
• Person B, spends a lot of time working to advance their career: At the expense of their physical realm.
• Person C, spends a lot of time working to improve intelligence (education): At the expense of their physical realm.
• Person D, has emotional issues like emotional eating, that impacts their physical realm.
• Person E, grows up in poverty and as a result their access to physical skill improvement is limited.
• Etc…etc…

Sometimes you can improve one with another. For instance socializing can lead to improved occupational outcomes, if the socializing is based around the occupational realm.

Maybe improved occupational outcome (better job, more time off, etc…) can improve physical well-being or a person’s environmental status (access to a gym, etc…).

However, this is typically limited to 2-3 things at a maximum.

The lesson is, that for you to have success with physical objectives like fat loss, or muscle mass gain, you often have to look at where you’re spending the majority of your time already. Then, whether or not that is supportive or destructive towards your fitness objective.

In the example above, it might hard to make progress with fitness, if you feel the need to go out and socialize at every opportunity you have. Excessive socializing could make you skip workouts, or make poor food decisions.

On the flip side, feeling a part of a community at your gym and doing a lot of your socializing at a gym, could be very supportive of your fitness objectives.

Piesseo Theory and Opportunity Cost

Economists refer to this very same principle as ‘Opportunity Cost,’ basically devoting your attention heavily to one thing, means missing out on another.