The Power and Wonder of Unleashing Potentials

Yes, I’ve written another book. I tried to avoid it, but you know how it goes when you get passionately fascinated by something and then step in and out of the genius flow state, suddenly you find yourself with a manuscript in hand. Well, at least that seems to be more true for me having been through the patterns of the APG training.

Anyway it is entitled, Unleashed. I’m currently playing around with some sub-titles for the book. One is What they didn’t Tell you about Self-Actualization and the other is The Construct, the Crucible and the Zone, another is, How to Unleash your Highest Potentials for Peak Performance.

What is the focus of this new book? It is on the how of self-actualization. How do we actualize our highest and best? And of course, my inspiration for it all was the vision of Abraham Maslow who set forth the initial vision:

“Every baby has possibilities for self-actualization but most get it knocked out of them. I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away. The average man is a human being with dampened and inhibited powers.” (174)

What is self-actualization? It is being fully human. It is being an ordinary person with nothing taken away from you! How about that? It is get over, and releasing, anything and everything that interferes with us growing to full maturity. It is releasing everything that dampens and inhibits our powers. It is as Carl Rogers put it, being a “fully functioning human being” or “becoming a person.”

This vision of self-actualization by Maslow and Rogers was not about becoming extraordinary. The vision is to become everything that you already have the latent potential to become. That’s different. That’s why it is not about adding things to you, it is about reclaiming all that you already have.

In the 1940s Maslow began his “Good Human Beings” research, looking for people who were psychologically healthy and who developed the full range of their potentialities. This eventually grew into his modeling of self-actualizers. By 1950 he had developed a paradigm shifting model about human Motivation and Personality (the name of his 1954 classic). The following comes from his 1956 paper to the American Association of Psychology.

“Self-Actualizing people, those who have come to a high level of maturation, health, and self- fulfillment, have so much to teach us that sometimes they seem almost like a different breed of human beings. But because it is so new, the exploration of the highest reaches of human nature and of its ultimate possibilities ... is a difficult and tortuous task.”

At that time, this was absolutely revolutionary. No one had studied psychologically healthy, productive, and actualizing people before. No one had explored the bright side of human nature. This was cutting-edge. Eventually it led Maslow to write his third book, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. What was so revolutionary about this?

Namely that Maslow was asserting that there is a certain sense in which these extraordinary, whole, healthy person is the only genuine representatives of human nature and psychology. If the self-actualizing person is not an ordinary person with something added, but an ordinary person “with noting taken away,” then the self-actualizing person is a full human being. This is then a description of the regular or ordinary person who has been unleashed from all of the man- made restraints of society, the human being without “dampened and inhibited powers and capacities.” This makes the self-actualized person synonymous with human nature in general.

Wouldn’t you say that this is quite a vision that he established? Yet there is more to it.

“But the truth which we can see more and more clearly is that man has infinite potentiality, which, properly used, could make his life very much like his fantasies of heaven. In potentiality, he is the most awe-inspiring phenomenon in the universe, the most creative, the most ingenious.”

For Maslow and the other pioneers fo the human potential movement, being creative, authentic, unique, and self-directing was part and parcel of the farther reaches of human nature—it’s what within us already. It only needs to be unleashed. No wonder that he constantly asserted that “human nature for centuries has been sold short!” There is within all of us a tendency, an “instinct,” and a predisposition to actualize our highest potentials.

“Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often expect that a new discontent and restless will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he, individually, is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write. What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature. This need we call self-actualization.” (1954, p. 46)

This has numerous consequences and implications. It explains why we are never satisfied. Just as soon as we gratify one need, another emerges and we feel dissatisfied again. We are inherently restless. Have you noticed that? Restlessness is part of our nature, it is not something to be despised or eliminated. It is the basis of our full humanity. Restlessness and its emotional component, anxiety, is to be embraced, welcomed, and enjoyed. This is essential if you want to unleash your potentials.

In the studies of creativity, this is described as embracing ambiguity and being able to live with non-closure. If, however, somewhere along the way you “learned,” or concluded, that you don’t like non-closure, ambiguity, anxiety, restlessness or worse, that you created a belief that such is bad or unacceptable, you then created a frame against such and yet in doing so you dampened and inhibited your potentials.

To be creative is to be self-actualizing. When you are actualizing your highest and best potentials, you are becoming more creative not only in what you do, but more importantly in what you are. That’s why creativity is par and parcel of self-actualization.

Have you sold yourself short? Are you living life having dampened and inhibited some of your best potentials? Are you ready to unleash new possibilities? Are you ready to awaken the genius within and learn how to step into the flow state of total engagement at will? If so, you’re ready for Neuro-Semantics —for the revolutionary advances that you can make in unleashing your potentials by meta-stating yourself with the prerequisites of genius.

Here’s to your highest and best! May you be fully unleashed from any dampening and inhibiting!