WHERE DO YOU GET ALL YOUR ENERGY?

As you probably know or can imagine, I often get a lot of personal questions at trainings and/or in interviews. And I’m fine with that. After all I have made apply to self one of our key distinctions in Neuro-Semantics and have been proclaiming for years that “apply-to-self” is built into the recursive and reflexivity of the Meta-States Model. In addition to that, we have made the theme of implementing what you know, and closing the knowing-doing gap another key facet of everything we’re doing in Neuro-Semantics. So getting personal questions about how I do things, or handle various facets of life, seems par for the course.

Now of all the personal questions that I receive in trainings and interviews, the energy question comes up a lot. “Where do you get all your energy?” or “How do you keep your energy up?” People seem surprised that I easily handle 12 to 14 hour training days, or do them 8 days consecutively (Meta-Coaching) or 14 days (NSTT).

Now for years I have not really understood these questions. I suppose it is like anything that habituates. Once you get use to the habituation of something, you don’t notice it. That’s what habituation means—it is outside of conscious awareness and so just assumed as “the way it is.” And that’s how generally the way I experience my “energy.” For years also, the only way I knew how to answer the question was to say something on the order of taking care of the basics of health, fitness, and energy: “Well, I eat moderately, simply, stay with what I know and like, I get some cardio- vascular exercise as well as some weight training everyday, and I always aim to get seven to eight hours of sleep every night.”

More recently, with the development of the Self-Actualization Assessment Scale, I have begun to discover and understand other facets of my energy. The Self-Actualization Assessment Scale is the scale that I created in partnership with Tim Goodenough after the Self-Actualization Workshop, Unleashing Leadership, in South Africa last year. Tim began the conversation by asking how to assess each and every level of the hierarchy of needs so that we could obtain pre- and post- measurements to enable people to effectively assess where they are and their next step. Then at the NS Leadership Summit in San Francisco this past January, we ran our first prototype run of the assessment scale.

From using the assessment scale now with a lot of people, I began realizing that a person’s sense of physical-emotional-motivational vitality is first and foremost a matter of adequately finding and using the “true satisfiers” for the biological-psychological needs. And that’s what lead to the development of the newest Self-Actualization Workshop, Unleashing Vitality.

In Self-Actualization Psychology we begin from the premise that human beings are innately motivated. You don’t need to “motivate” people. That presupposes they are not already motivated. But they are. We all are. We are born with all kinds of motivational energies within us. The problem is never “Why aren’t you motivated?” It is, “What are you motivated to do or not do?” “How are you handling your motivational energies?” “How effective are you in satisfying your innate biological-psychological needs with true gratifiers?”

With us humans, since we are without instincts, we do not know innately or instinctively how to accurately and adequately gratify our needs, we have to learn. And because of that, we can mis- learn. We can then waste a lot of energy trying to gratify our needs with things that will not satisfy them and when that happens, then you truly have a problem—one of wasting energy. Conversely, when you discover how to gratify the basic needs, you release all kinds of energies for the higher needs.

That’s what I’ve been discovering about myself. Over the years I’ve happened upon some effective ways of gratifying the basic needs via my eating and exercising (Games Fit and Slim People Play, 2001). That has enabled me to avoid needless waste of energy with psycho-eating, psycho-spending, and other psycho-activities. That has also allowed me to tap into some of the higher needs and to experience at least some of the vitality of those needs.

Above and beyond the basic needs, vitality is a function of vision, intention, and actualizing your highest and best. That’s because when you move to the higher self-actualizing needs, you enter into another domain. You move from the realm of deficiency (the mechanism that governs the lower needs) into the realm of abundance. And a sign of this is that you don’t burn out with activities. Now you are so awakened to your own unique contributions and creativity that you find yourself experiencing more and more energy and vitality for the things that truly matter to you. At the higher levels, there’s an ongoing energy infusion from the peak experiences that your synergy of meaning and performance produces.

“Where do I get all of my energy?” Well, I think it is a fortunate combination of getting to work in this field with Self-Actualization Psychology. I think it is from having to happened upon and discovered some of the basic principles that govern the unleashing of vitality and potentials.

If you’re interested in increasing your own personal energy and vitality, my recommendation is to get to the first two Self-Actualization Workshops—

• Unleashing Vitality — learn how to use the Hierarchy of Needs as embedded in the Neuro-Semantic Matrix Model so that you can develop your base, seek your peak and then live the vitality.

• Unleashing Potentials — learn how to use your Construct of Meaning-Making to create great meanings, suspend old meanings, and actualize your meanings in behavior, enter the Crucible to transform needs, emotions, and old meanings, and then synergize your meanings and performances for peak experiences and performances in the genius state of flow (the Zone of self-actualization).