New Models of Actualization for Peak Performances

Before I encountered NLP, I had never really given all that much thought to the idea of modeling expertise, experts, or the most productive and brightest of people. But when I first read about the modeling approach, it immediately made sense.

“Dahhhh! [I said as I put my palm to my forehead]. Yes, of course! No need to focus on where every problem came from and what it means, just identify the structure and strategy of excellence and replicate that!”

So NLP hit a chord that resonated very deeply with me as it shifted the focus from problems to solutions, to accelerating learning and development by simply finding great models or exemplars and modeling what they do well. During my early years in NLP, I used Robert Dilts’ book NLP: The Structure of Subjective Experience as my NLP bible. I studied it chapter and verse to understand as fully as I could how to get the strategy of an experience.

Talk about excitement! Starting from the premise that there’s a structure of every experience, I was feeling like a child in a candy factory. What shall I model first? What experience do I most need? What expertise shall I take on and replicate in myself?

Having never heard of modeling as a discipline or study until I found it in NLP, I assumed that Bandler and Grinder invented it. But no. They didn’t. And in spite of some NLP P.R. that’s on the web modeling began long before NLP. Actually Maslow was modeling in the 1940s. When I read of Maslow’s seeking to understand the patterns of self-actualizing people in the 1940s and how he picked people as his models, I began to understand how the Human Potential Movement had created the intellectual atmosphere in which NLP grew and thrived.

Maslow wrote his masterpiece, Motivation and Personality in 1954. In that book he presented the full model from lower and higher needs, to meta-motivation, meta-pathologies, meta-needs, meta-values, meta-drives, and the prepotency of his Hierarchy of Needs. He created all of that by modeling. In that work he also described the focus of his modeling — peak experiences and peak performances. He wanted to identify what was going on inside of people who were having the most influence and the most impact in the world. [By the way, he also used the word meta and John Grinder, he could hardly write a paragraph without using it!]

In spite of all these wonderful things, Maslow became mis-directed in my opinion. What mis- directed Maslow was how the kind of consciousness that he found in self-actualizers and “peakers” (that was his term for them) —a consciousness that struck him as highly mystical and spiritual. To describe the self-reflexivity of these people and how they could “become one” with their subject of their absorption, he began to use more and more eastern metaphors, religious symbols, and terminology. Eventually, this led him to coin the term, “transpersonal” psychology and, in spite of being an avowed atheist, went off in that direction.

I think this mis-directed him and dispersed the power and focus of the Human Potential Movement. This happened, in part, because he moved on beyond “the third force” in psychology (e.g., the Human Potential Movement) and focusing on what he called “the fourth force” (e.g., Transpersonal Psychology) that eventually contributed to the Human Potential Movement fizzling out and eventually disappearing as a movement. Another consequence of him not completing his work on self-actualization and peak performances and moving on to the spiritual and mystical things of transpersonal psychology was that the movement began to splinter into dozens, even hundreds of competing camps.

By 1985 some of the key thinkers were writing in the Journals in Humanistic Psychology and saying at the Conferences that the Human Potential Movement never solidified in to an actual School of Psychology and was losing all of its momentum and focus. In my opinion what went wrong in all of the hustle and bustle and excitement of those days when so many new approaches and therapies and experiments in to human consciousness there were too many choices and so the heart and soul of self-actualization was not nailed down. It was not meta-detailed down to specifics because too many other exciting things were catching their attention.

Fast forward now 35 years. Not only is almost no one speaking about “self-actualization” as such or the structure of peak performances, no one has returned to the early models of Maslow to mine all that has proven durable in value. Realizing that my first thought is,

“What an opportunity! I don’t need to reinvent the wheel at all. So much of the foundational work about self-actualization has already been done. Let’s just see where it needs something and see what we have learned in the past 35 years and continue the original vision.”

So that’s what I’ve been working on in the past 18 months. One of the first results of that has been the creation of the Self-Actualization Quadrants. These are made up of two axes, two axes that make up the heart and soul of Neuro-Semantics, namely Meaning and Performance. I think that this was actually revolutionary.

What was so revolutionary about this development? It supplied to the idea of Self-Actualization a key factor that Maslow knew about and yet overlooked— meaning. There are passages in his work indicating that Maslow struggled trying to figure out what was it that caused some needs (food, security, love, etc.) to lose all of its drive and what causes these same drives in others to become totally dominating. Using psychoanalysis and some behaviorism he worked to “explain” things, yet all the while neglecting the critical role of the meanings that we attribute to things.

Interested? Great, there’s a lot more to come.