Living Up to Your Potential

With this Reflection I will be bringing this series to an end. Because I am continuing my research and modeling in this area, I could go on another year. Instead of doing that here, I’ll do that in some upcoming books. So, next week begins a new series that I am titling, Meta Reflections. So with this last entry, I thought I’d write a summary about self-actualization and Neuro-Semantics.

• — What are the core ideas in “self-actualization?”
• — What are the premises of self-actualizing one’s best?
• — Is self-actualization for everybody or just for those who happened to be interested in it?
• — Are you living up to your potential? Do you want to?

There are several core ideas to the concept of self-actualization. First and foremost is the idea that we humans are made to actualize our possibilities. And within that idea is the premise that it does not occur automatically or naturally, that we have to participate in the process. That is, that it takes consciousness or mindfulness, that we have to use our human form of “instinct,” namely our mind, in order to find and actualize our best.

Without the kind of information-loaded instincts that animals have, we only have “instinctoids” at best. Negatively, this lack of instinct means that we do not know how to be human. Maslow often said that we are the only species who do not know how to be the species that we are. Yet on the positive side, this means that we have an incredible degree of freedom within, freedom that allows us to participate in our nature and our becoming. We have a space within that leaves our development open to our own influence as well as the influence of others. So this creates great openness and freedom, and this is the foundation of our anxiety, restlessness, and responsibility.

Another core idea is that it is up to us to find, detect, unleash, and live up to the possibilities within us. We can resist it. We can deny it. We can accept or adopt limiting beliefs that interfere and sabotage actualizing our highest potentials. If we aim to only live a conventional life, we will not discover our unique contributions and will not live true and authentic to ourselves. If we make “pleasing others,” “getting along without any conflict,” saving face,” “being approved,” “not rocking the boat,” etc. as the most important thing in life, we will effectively prevent our own self-actualization.

Essential to the idea of self-actualization also is the role of human responsibility. Each of us is a responsible person who has to live his or her own life. No one can do this for us. Playing victim, believing in entitlement (that the world owes you, the government owes you, your family owes you, etc.), and playing your life small also sabotages self-actualization. To unleash potentials each of us has to acknowledge, accept, own, and act on our own inner response- powers. Only then will we take the initiative to discover our strengths and weaknesses and take action to discover what makes us most fully ourselves.

All of this may sound “selfish” or self-centered, yet that’s the paradox. Self-actualization, as the unique human adventure of discovery involves us, and is through us, yet ultimately it is not merely about us. To self-actualize, we first have to gratify our basic needs for life, safety, friendship and community, and a strong sense of self. That much is true. And when we do, and actually move into self-actualization, the deficiency of the lower needs shifts to a new dimension, a dimension of abundance. And from this sense of abundance, we experience a whole new level of motivation. Now life is not about gratifying needs in order to make the need go away. Now life is about expressing what we have to offer; it is about contributing.

In the level of self-actualizing we are looking to see how we can best express our unique contributions so that we create a meaningful life, a meaningful legacy, and make a difference. This level is often call “spiritual” because it does move us into the unique human dimension of purpose, intention, and meaning that gives our life spirit, that is, inspiration and direction. This is the dimension of philosophy and theology, our sense of why we are here.

When we move to this level, we discover that we self-actualize best as we find what we can contribute that expresses our uniqueness. In this, we transcend the narrow polarity of selfish or unselfish. Here we take care of ourselves so that we have more to give and contribute that expresses our unique gifts and perspectives.

Because self-actualization is about living up to your potentials, the heart of the training we call Accessing Personal Genius (APG) is a training specifically designed to facilitate this. Using the Meta-States Model, you discover your incredible self-reflexive consciousness so that you can rise up, take charge of the levels of your consciousness, and become mindful. With that, you can then access your inner powers, set frames through meta-yes-ing ideas, thereby transforming them into “beliefs.” With the ability to step back from our own processing, we become the architects of our nature, releasing possibilities through managing our meta-pleasures, welcoming our emotions for emotional intelligence, creating semantic frames that enhance our everyday life, and using our highest intentionally for being able to step in and out of a flow state.

In all of this, Neuro-Semantics is about embodying the highest and best meanings and intentions so that what we know in our mind becomes “our way of being” in the world and in relationships. This enables us to expand our understandings and then close the knowing-doing gap as we coach our body how to feel great ideas. And this unleashes potentials.

In this sense the models and patterns in Neuro-Semantics are all about unleashing our potentials so that we can move from the deficiency motivations to the level of abundance motivations. For ten years, APG has been the leading Neuro-Semantic training focused on unleashing potentials. Yet there is more. In the Meta-Coach Training System we have incorporated self-actualization a psychology as our model of choice. And because this psychology is unformulated as a model, we have made the one of our objectives in Meta-Coaching. The next step will be to release that model and to make explicit the unleashing of potential process, which we will do in the new workshop in 2007.

Self-actualizing our highest and best is built into our very nature and essence as human beings. We are not designed to merely live at the lower level, merely gratifying those needs. Doing so puts us at too low a level for the kind of meaning that activates that which is most human, most humane, and most significant in us.

Merely living for need gratification keeps us in the land of deficiency and scarcity and that puts us in competition with each other. It is moving up to actualize our highest and best that invites us to live in the land of abundance and contribution. This is where true “wealth” occurs, the inner wealth of experiencing a rich inner world of thought, emotion, speech, and behavior for relating, connecting, and making a difference. This is the land of the Being-values that are inherently healthy, respectful, and inspiring.

If you are ready to live up to your potential, then take full ownership of your powers for creating rich and wholesome meanings and then begin to embody those meanings in your very neurology so that they govern and inform your very way of being in the world.

In 2007 meet me in Portland, Oregon, Brisbane Australia, or Geneva Switzerland for the Ultimate Self-Actualization Workshop and experience a journey into the Construct, the Crucible, and the Zone of self-actualization.