SELF-ACTUALIZATION

How do you benchmark self-actualization, that is, “living a self-actualizing life?” That was the question and Maslow answered it by say it is—

• First, Become fully engaged and present to life as your way of being.
• Second and third: Exercise your power of choice by living responsibly as you choose growth and choose your way of being as you learn to listen to your own internal voice.
• Fourth and fifth: Exercise courageous responsibility.
• Sixth and seventh: Develop disciplined Spontaneity.

Now for the eighth benchmark.

8) Opening yourself up to self-discovery knowledge

“Finding out who one is, what he is, what he likes, what he doesn’t like, what is good for him and what bad, where he is going and what his mission is— opening oneself up to himself— means the exposure of psychopathology. It means identifying defenses, and after defenses have been identified, it means finding the courage to give them up. This is painful because defenses are erected against something that is unpleasant. But giving up the defenses is worthwhile.” (47)

This is how to self-actualize and therefore a benchmark of living the self-actualizing life. It begins by a deep and intimate opening yourself up to yourself—to really get to “know thyself” in every aspect. It is becoming open to your innate powers, to your unique gifts and talents, to your right to be yourself and to be unique. And this takes courage. It takes courage to both identify your typical defenses and to give up those defenses. Because those defenses are expressions of psycho- pathology— of an inner sickness, when we are not at our best, when we are avoiding ourselves, hiding from ourselves.

That courage is the pathway to self-actualization. It is repression, rejection, judgment, fear, avoidance, etc. that holds us back and that blocks becoming fully all that we can become. Conversely, it is the willingness to risk and to discover our full humanity, however fallible it is, that enables us to step into authenticity, into being more fully an authentic self.

Now there are many, many defense mechanisms and yet in this passage Maslow especially focused on one defense mechanism, the one that he called desacralizing.

“Self-actualization means giving up this defense mechanism and learning or being taught to resacralize. And resacralize means being willing to see a person ‘under the aspect of eternity,’ as Spinoza says, or to see him ... as the sacred, the eternal, the symbolic.” (48)

Sacralizing is to make sacred, that is, special, honorable, important, and precious. So de-sacralizing is to take that away, it is to discount that which is valuable, it is to eliminate the positive and the precious, and it is to treat the world as entirely mundane and secular. Conversely, the benchmark for living the self-actualizing life is to learn to see the world in its specialness and to live in the world as if “under the aspect of eternity.”

“Self-actualization is a matter of degree, or little accessions accumulated one by one. Too often our clients are inclined to wait for some kind of inspiration to strike so that they can say, “At 3:23 on This Thursday Is became self-actualized!” People selected as self-actualizing subjects, people who fit the criteria, go about it in these little ways: They listen to their own voices; they take responsibility; they are honest; and they work hard. They find out who they are and what they are, not only in terms of their mission in life, but also in terms of the way their feet hurt when they wear such and such a pair of shoes and whether they do or do not like eggplant or stay up all night if they drink too much beer. All this is what the real self means. They find their own biological natures, their congenital natures, which are irreversible or difficult to change.” (49)

Now isn’t that paragraph shocking?! “Self-actualization is ... little accessions accumulated one by one.” It’s not a big thing. Not a world-shaking, paradigm shifting, or revolutionary thing ... it is the accumulation of many little things. It is not an earthquake that suddenly, out of the blue, grabs you by the lapel or a message from heaven written boldly in the sky. Self-actualization is more down-to- earth than that. It’s being human. It’s being fully alive and fully human in all of our fallibilities and everyday concerns. It is living true to ourselves and becoming increasingly more and more authentic.

With these benchmarks we now have a very concrete way to think about this big word “self- actualization,” and to be able to measure this experience in our lives. And when you pull together the benchmarks that maslow listed, we have a description of the self-actualizing life.

• Become fully engaged and present to life as your way of being.
• Exercise your power of choice by living responsibly.
• Choose to grow by discovering your way of being by listening to your own inner voice.
• Exercise courageous responsibility.
• Develop disciplined spontaneity.
• Open yourself up to self-discovery as you get to know yourself.

The Neuro-Semantic way of making this actual and real in our lives includes —

• Accessing your personal “flow” or “genius” state (the APG pattern and Intentionality).
• Using the “Power Zone” pattern, Responsibility To/For pattern.
• Meta-Stating Self with Acceptance, Appreciation and Esteem to distinguish being and doing.
• Meta-Stating fears with various resources to generate the gestalt state of courage
• To create a compelling future and an action play (Well-Formed Outcome pattern) and then to use the Mind-to-Muscle pattern to close the knowing-doing gap.