What Do Self-Actualizing People Want?

In the well-formed outcome pattern and in all forms of coaching, question number one is, “What do you want?” We have this week been driving that question home in the Coaching Mastery (ACMC) training as we’ve been teaching the art of getting a KPI (key performance indicator) for a coaching sessions and as we have been learning the Change Dance on the Axis of Motivation.

What do you want?, as a question, begins the exploration into motivation and drive. It begins the exploration into a person’s Matrix of need, desire, hope, fear, agenda, intention, and outcome. It begins the upward or meta-adventure into a person’s matrix of frames and feelings. And so we repeat the question, level upon level. What do you want? And when you get that, what are you going for? Eventually we ask the ultimate what questions, When you get that highest value completely and fully, what does that give you?

If you’ve been in a Neuro-Semantic training, you recognize this as the Intentionality Pattern as well as the Pleasure pattern—patterns which simultaneously elicit values. That is, they elicit a hierarchy of your belief frames about what you value and consider highly significant and important. Simultaneously, they elicit your being-values.

Ah yes, being-values. These are the values of being in contradistinction to doing or achieving. These are the things that we value as significant not because of what they give us or lead to but because of the experience itself. Maslow described them as being “purposeless and useless.” They were not means values to get to some other end-value, but an end in themselves. They are experiences where we just “be” and express ourselves.

Maslow had many other ways of describing these being-values. He said that the being-values were descriptions of the world as perceived in peak experiences. We experience being-values in these times when we are at our best and doing what’s most important. He even created a hypothesis: about them, asserting that the B-values (being-values) are what most people deeply yearn for in their lives and in this they are the “deep satisfiers.” In Further Reaches Maslow wrote that we experience and feel the B-values as the meaning of life.

“I would go so far as to claim that these B-Values are the meaning of life for most people, but many people don’t even recognize that they have these meta-needs. Part of the counselors’ job may be to make them aware of these needs in themselves.” (p. 43)

Imagine that! The meaning of life for us, the meaning that we feel and yearn for, are the very being-values that occur in the self-actualization level. And if the meaning of life is to experience them, then this requires a change of consciousness, a change of state, a change of orientation. So no wonder we call this kind of change —transformation.

Yet it doesn’t stop there. Maslow also applied being-values to work.

“What we call good jobs and good working conditions on the whole help to move people toward the B-Values. People in the most desirable jobs most often value highest the possibilities for self- actualization.” (135)

In the Neuro-Semantic Meta-Coaching we speak about this (i.e., good job, good working conditions, etc.) as the external resources (along with the internal resources) that we access and mobilize in order to actualize our full potentials. Such may facilitate for us the self-actualizing orientation and movement.

So what are these being-values? What are yours? Here is Maslow’s list of the most basic being- values.

• 1) Truth: honesty, reality, nakedness; simplicity, richness; essentiality, oughtness, beauty, pure, clean and unadulterated completeness.
• 2) Goodness: rightness, desirability, oughtness, justice, benevolence, honest.
• 3) Beauty: rightness, form, aliveness, simplicity, richness, wholeness, perfection, completion, uniqueness, honesty.
• 4) Wholeness: unity, integration, tendency to oneness, inter-connectedness, simplicity, organization, structure, order, not dissociated, synergy, homonomous, and integrative tendencies.
• 4a) Dichotomy-transcendence: acceptance, resolution, integration or transcendence of dichotomies, polarities, opposites, contradictions, synergy.
• 5) Aliveness: process, not-deadness, spontaneity, self-regulation, full-functioning, changing and yet remaining the same, expressing itself.
• 6) Uniqueness: idiosyncrasy, individuality, non-comparability, novelty, quale, suchness, nothing else like it.
• 7) Perfection: nothing superfluous, nothing lacking, everything in its right place, unimproveable, just-rightness, just-so-ness, suitability, justice, completeness, nothing beyond, oughtness.
• 7a) Necessity: inevitability, it must be just that way, not changed in any slightest way, and it is good that it is that way.
• 8) completion: ending, finality, justice, it’s finished, no more changing of the gestalt, fulfilment, finis and telos, nothing missing or lacking, totality, fulfillment of destiny, cessation, climax, consummation closure.
• 9) Justice: fairness, oughtness, suitability, architectonic quality, necessity, inevitability, dis-interestedness, non-partiality.
• 10) Simplicity: honesty, nakedness, essentiality, abstract unmistakability, essential skeletal structure, the heart of the matter, bluntness, only that which is necessary, without ornament, nothing extra or superfluous.
• 11) Richness differentiation, complexity, intricacy, totality, nothing missing or hidden, all there, non-importance, i.e., everything is equally important.
• 12) Effortlessness: ease, lack of strain, striving, or difficulty, grace, perfect and beautiful functioning.
• 13) Playfulness: fun, joy, amusement, gaiety, humor, exuberance, effortlessness.
• 14) Self-sufficiency: autonomy, independence, non-needing-any-thing-other-than-itself- in-order-to-be-itself. self-determination, environment transcendence, separateness, living by its own laws.

For your own self-actualization, you will want to find your own list, prioritize them, run both ecology and quality control checks your life with them. You might also compare them against this list for a reality check. After all, Maslow’s research indicated that healthy self-actualizing people also tend to be good choosers, that they tend to choose things that promote health and well-being in all dimensions of life.

“Real choice is enhanced by freedom from social pressure. The hierarchy of values, in which the B-values are the highest, is in part determined by the hierarchy of basic needs, by the prepotency of the deficit-needs over growth-needs. An expectable, highly probably preference for B-Values rests in principle upon prior gratification of lower, more prepotent values.” (140)

“The B-Values, seen as gratifications of meta-needs, are then also the highest pleasures or happinesses that we know of.” (317)

So, what do self-actualizing people really want? We want the values that are being or growth values, that’s what we really want. We have within a drive to self-actualize by living the being- values. We are inwardly driven to express these significant values and that’s what unleashes ever-new potentials.

Here’s to your self-actualization!