Actualizing Yourself Through Accessing Personal Genius

The idea of self-actualization is simple and profound. It speaks about making real and actual all that you are capable of becoming, experiencing, having, feeling, thinking, choosing, giving, and contributing. It might surprise you that the term was not first used by Abraham Maslow but by Kurt Goldstein in his work with brain damaged soldiers. In the 1940s he noticed and documented the body and the mind’s ability to regenerate, to re-organize, to self-organize and to move forward to self-actualizing its possibilities for health.

Carl Rogers used a different term. He talked about people becoming fully functioning as human beings. Obviously both were focusing on the bright side of human psychology, on the possibilities, the potentials, the innate tendency for growth and that was an absolute paradigm shift from the psychology they had learned.

While Rogers focused on therapy and developed Client-centered Therapy using three key tools: empathy, unconditional positive regard, and congruency, Maslow turned his focus to modeling self-actualizers. He wanted to know what made them tick, what made them different, their patterns, their traits and qualities, and their ways of thinking. Out of that came the language of peak experiences —those near-mysterious moments when one “is all there,” completely absorbed in something that gives one tremendous pleasure, commitment, and presence.

If this then is one thing that facilitates self-actualization, then consider what we have in the APG training. When I originally designed that training, I did not put it together with Maslow’s distinctions or models in mind, but I very well could have. Instead I depended more on the work of Robert Dilts’ Strategies of Genius along with Grinder and DeLozier. From them I collected as many prerequisites of genius as I could find and then used them as the very qualities that we would meta-state as layers until we create the genius state of total engagement.

When I first began presenting APG, I would often do a little quiz with the participants by inviting everyone to brainstorm “the prerequisites of genius.” What are the qualities? What are the characteristics? When we complete that then I gather up those qualities into the very states that we meta-state during APG.

If you wanted to experience more self-actualization, how would you go about it? What enables you to make real and actual your inner potentials? The meta-stating format in APG training enables us to texture our state with the following qualities:

• Day 1: Power, energy, ownership, validating what’s significant, dis-validating what’s not welcomed, acceptance, appreciation, a sense of awe, pleasure, and pleasuring in our pleasure.
• Day 2: Aligning concepts, developing a better relationship to any and all “concepts” that we have built semantic constellations around, taking charge of our meaning-making, taming the dragons, accepting emotions, translating great ideas into the body, and using imagination for creative problem solving.
• Day 3: Setting high intentions, aligning attentions to intentions, focus, boundaries, screening, alignment, and congruency.

So there you have the content that we meta-state ourselves with in APG to create a Genius Matrix. And do you think that will unleash potentials? You can count on that! We begin to tap into the possibilities when we take ownership of our mind-body-emotion system as meaning- makers. Then, as the framers, we set the frames. That frees up so much energy. Simply stopping all of the interference that goes on in our heads by “turning our energies against ourselves” (the structure of most Dragons) releases so much energy that sometimes people are amazed at how well they feel for the first time in years.

They feel more playful, more childlike, more able to take pleasure in all kinds of things, more able to stop and enjoy each and every day, to seize the present moment. And of course, all of that releases even more potentials. Playing with the As if frame, the miracle pattern, and the ability to step back from our own experiences facilitates more creativity.

This stepping back skill that’s inherent in the Meta-States model leads one to become truly aware of the executive level of your mind and the place where “spiritual” or meaning intelligence begins, with intentionality. Here we can stopping wasting all of the energy that goes into the distractions of responding to every attention as we strengthen our intentions allowing them to become attractor frames.

What else releases potentials? Beliefs —powerfully positive and robust beliefs that support us, others, and what we can develop and contribute to the world. For this we Meta-No the limiting and toxic beliefs and Meta-Yes the empowering ones. And given that it is “beliefs all the way up” the Matrix, this puts us truly in charge of ourselves and our self-actualization.

What does Neuro-Semantics offer to the vision of self-organization? Much! And APG is just the beginning. Perhaps that explains why some people completing APG (and maybe after two or three exposures) begin to unleash potentials in a truly magical way.

By the way, do you know that the Meta-States model is the cure for NLP? To this day, NLP suffers from the inability to “apply to self.” Why? Apart from the meta-States Model, NLP does not have a way to handle reflexivity — our self-reflexive consciousness. But with Meta-States, there is now a cure.