Living Above the Deficiency Level

Here’s a Neuro-Semantic question about your own self-actualization:

• At what motivational level do you live your life?
• Do you live at the deficiency level or the abundance level?
• Do you know the difference each makes?

Deficiency Level

If we humans are driven and motivated by our needs, and the most surface and external needs are our biological needs, then using Maslow’s revolutionary Hierarchy of Needs model, this means that developmentally we move through the deficiency needs—the survival, safety, social, and self needs. In these “needs” we need something. We are needy.

These basic lower needs operate by deficiency. Hunger is a need for food; thirst is a need for water. We also need safety, security, affection, love, approval, respect, dignity, etc. In these needs, we are needy. We are demanding. “Feed me!” “Protect me!” “Love me!” “Respect me!” “Approve of me!” “Don’t reject me!” “Don’t criticize me!”

When we live at this level, we see the world and the world of other people in terms of satisfactions for our needs. People and things are objects for our satisfaction. We use food, money, people, work, and everything else psychologically to feel safe, loved, valued, etc. As a result it is impossible to see the world and others as they are. Instead, we see them through the clouded lens of what they can do for us.

Maslow said this is what prevents clear perception. He said this deficiency driven level of motivation is what lies at the heart of “jungle motivation.” By way of contrast, when we move beyond the “lower” needs and have a basic satisfaction of the first four levels (survival, safety, love and affection or social, and self needs for value, approval, and respect), the higher or meta needs emerge. Now an entirely different kind of motivation occurs.

Up to the Abundance Level

At this level, we no longer need. Maslow called this the meta-motivation level. This is the level where we experience the drive for self-actualization. Now we want and long for other things—beauty, form, justice, love, contribution, kindness, etc. Here there is no longer the inner demandingness of “Love me!” “Protect me!” etc. Here our motivation changes. We now shift our concern to that of expressing ourselves, being oneselves, growing, and actualizing our highest potentials.

This explains why self-actualizing people have a “more efficient perception of reality and more comfortable relations with it.” Why? Because they are not seeing the world or others through the clouded lens of deficiency. Maslow (1954, Motivation and Personality) wrote,

“The consequence is that they live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world. They are therefore far more apt to perceive what is there rather than their own wishes, hopes, fears, anxieties, their own theories and beliefs, or those of their cultural group.” (page 205)

When we move to the level of self-actualizing, we lose the inner demandingness of deficiency motivation and now live to be and to express ourselves, to find and express our gifts, passions, and potentials. In Neuro-Semantics, this is a description of the “genius” state where we become so absorbed in something outside of ourselves that we are able to let go of all of the inner structures of our Matrix—Self, Time, World, etc.

As we are no longer trying to do anything or get something from the world or others, we can see it more clearly. We are no longer a slave to our deficiency fears and hopes. We are free to just witness, just be, just experience. This allows us to be non-judgmental and solution focused rather than ego-centered. Now we can look at problems without caving in or having fight/flight responses. We just look at the problem from the perspective of solution—“How can we solve it?” While we work hard for solutions, it is not from a demandingness to be someone, approval, love, recognition, etc. but for the joy of discovery and solution. This also describes the “genius” state of self-forgetfulness.

In the flow state of genius, Self goes away. We get the ego out of the way. And because we don’t put the ego on the line, we’re no longer stumbling over it! What we do, our successes and failures, are not about us. They do not determine our worth, value, loveability, approval, etc. They are about some action or expression. Now we are free to explore, experiment, take risks, try things out, fail, succeed, try again, etc. No wonder this is the core of resilience!

Our Layers of Needs

Maslow’s work demonstrated that human motives are hierarchically structured. This means that their arrangement within the hierarchy are defined by their respective levels of urgency, intensity, and priority. Maslow used the word prepotency to describe how we experience the lower needs more intensely and urgently as we satisfy one, new needs emerge.

What was so revolutionary about Maslow’s theory of motivation? It is that all of our needs are basic and fundamental to us as human beings and that there are structured hierarchically. This means that the “lower” needs are not more any more “basic” or fundamental than the “higher” needs, only that they are earlier in ascendency.

In his day, traditional psychology (Freud’s psychoanalysis and Watson’s behaviorism) dismissed the “higher” motives as merely secondary. They did not see the higher needs as universal in the human species. This is what Maslow challenged and changed. The relative prepotency of the hierarchy of needs means that the higher needs are just as core, only less prepotent and later in emergence. They are there all along, they simply do not arise until other needs are satisfied.

Today, having lower and higher needs is so obvious that it seems insignificant. Who gets excited about that? We may even wonder, “So what? What difference does it make?” What are the implications of this? Of course we need survival needs of food, shelter, water, warmth, sex, oxygen, etc. in a more primitive way than we need love and affection or self-regard. It’s also obvious that we develop over the life-span to move beyond lower needs to higher needs.

In the 1940s and 1950s these facets were revolutionary. And yet even today there are still implications from the distinction between lower to higher needs that provides critically important distinctions for managing, leading, parenting, etc. What are these?

One of the most important has to do with profiling and identifying at what level of need are you living? If you are living at the lower needs, then deficiency will be the mechanism and factor that will mostly be governing and directing your experience and psychology. How is this? How does this work?

It works because the way the lower needs operately by satisfying deficiencies. We lack something, we need something. And that need of lack drives our entire mind-body-emotion system to scream and clamor for gratification. We feel pushed and driven from without by the lack to get what we need. We feel needy, and we are. Yet that needy feeling, arising from our deficiency, typically influences our thinking-and-feeling so that we think of the world as a place of limited resources.

As scarcity then becomes one of our frames, we see life and others in terms of scarcity.

“There’s only so much. When others have more, that takes away from what I have. It’s them or me. It’s win or lose. The world is a jungle. Ge what you can because others are always ready to take from you. Life is a red claw.”

This is the feel of deficiency motivation. It is the attitude of living at the level of the lower needs. This is true for survival, it is also time for safety, love and affection, and self-regard.

“There’s only so much. The more you have, the less I have.” “We have to divide equally to have peace.”

Because they are not based on deficiency and because you can never satisfy them, a whole new world arises when we move to the self-actualization needs. In fact, the more you get, the more you have to give and the more you want.

So, at what motivational level are you living?

• Deficiency or self-actualization?
• Inner neediness and demandingness or free expression?
• Do you see the world and others through the spectacles of your needs?
• Are you always processing what others say and do through what it means about you?
• Do you bring your inner needs and make demands of life and others?
• Or, are you able to see things as they are without judgment and projection?
• Are you ready to raise the level at which you live?

That’s what self-actualization is all about – and why we move there by the unleashing process.