About Self Actualizing — 12 Ideas

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Self Actu­al­iz­ing — Self Actu­al­iz­ing means being in charge of one’s wife through both accep­tance and trans­for­ma­tive action.

For more on this top­ic, read:

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Self actu­al­iza­tion is a term made famous by Abra­ham Maslow, who exten­sive­ly researched men­tal health and human poten­tial. You can read more about self actualization.

Maslow arranged human beings’ needs like a ladder. 

• The most basic needs, at the bot­tom, were phys­i­cal — air, water, food, sleep. 
• Then came safe­ty needs — secu­ri­ty, sta­bil­i­ty — fol­lowed by psy­cho­log­i­cal, or social needs — for belong­ing, love, acceptance. 
• At the top of it all were the self-actu­al­iz­ing needs — the need to ful­fill one­self, to become all that one is capa­ble of becoming. 

Maslow thought that any unful­filled needs low­er on “the lad­der” would inhib­it the per­son from climb­ing to the next step. Some­one dying of thirst quick­ly for­gets their thirst when they have no oxy­gen, as he point­ed out. Peo­ple who dealt in man­ag­ing their high­er needs were what he called self-actu­al­iz­ing peo­ple. Bene­dict and Wertheimer were Maslow’s mod­els of self-actu­al­iza­tion, from which he gen­er­al­ized that, among oth­er char­ac­ter­is­tics, self-actu­al­iz­ing peo­ple tend to focus on prob­lems out­side of them­selves, have a clear sense of what is true and what is pho­ny, are spon­ta­neous and cre­ative, and are not bound too strict­ly by social con­ven­tions.

[from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow]

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Self-Acceptance

We pro­ceed from the assump­tion that peo­ple are, at all stages of their devel­op­ment, both OK, and com­plete. This is what we mean by accep­tance, or bet­ter, self-acceptance. 

That this is not the nor­mal belief is obvi­ous. We are trained from birth to judge our­selves as “lack­ing” and also “wrong, bad, and/or evil.”

Most simply want symptom removal, which is interesting.

When I ask what they want in place of the symp­tom, most say some­thing like, “I just don’t want this [pain, depres­sion, faulty rela­tion­ship, anger, etc.] anymore.” 

It’s like ask­ing some­one, “What do you want for sup­per?” and hear­ing, “I don’t want steak.” Neg­a­tive state­ments are a prob­lem, because it is impos­si­ble to list all of the things we don’t want.

All things clients name, like anger, depres­sion, sad­ness, being judge­men­tal — these things are actu­al­ly symp­toms of just one thing — a lack of resources for doing things dif­fer­ent­ly.

In oth­er words, sit­u­a­tion ‘a’ hap­pens, and you react with anger. Sit­u­a­tion ‘b,’ (which is total­ly dif­fer­ent from sit­u­a­tion ‘a’,) arises,and you react with anger. And so on.

Unpacking, this means,
“No matter what arises, the only thing I know to do is
to get angry.”

Think about it. The solu­tion is not to elim­i­nate anger. The rea­son? Well, what will take its place? 

Rather, one must begin with accep­tance. “Here I am, at this stage in my life, and when con­front­ed with a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion, I have trained myself to respond with anger. This is no longer work­ing for me, so I will instead teach myself to [engage in anoth­er behaviour.”]

This new behaviour falls under the category of
transformative action.

  We call it this to dif­fer­en­ti­ate it from mind­less action. The way out of the fog of rep­e­ti­tion is to engage in thought-ful behav­iour (behav­iour that has been designed, through rea­son, to accom­plish the end goal.)

Let’s say you have this goal:

to stop fight­ing with your part­ner, and then to deep­en the rela­tion­ship through ele­gant communication.

You could see this as a two step goal.

The first step is to notice both your anger, and when you are begin­ning to fight.

Let’s call this self-knowing.

It’s amaz­ing how many peo­ple do not have a clue what they are doing. 

I once spent 20 min­utes in a group lis­ten­ing to a woman accuse the oth­er mem­bers of the group of not let­ting her speak, and how every­one always inter­rupt­ed her, and kept her from speaking. 

Now, she was nev­er once inter­rupt­ed in 20 min­utes, oth­er than for the leader to encour­age her to keep talk­ing.

She was so clear­ly invest­ed in her belief that she was unaware that she was receiv­ing exact­ly what she craved.

Once you notice that you have moved down a path you want to stop trod­ding, you stop your­self. With­out judge­ment. This is the tricky part, as, to say it again, we’ve been trained from birth to crit­i­cize our­selves for our sup­posed failures.

If you think about it, however, criticism is a poor motivator. It’s much better to notice, then stop, the errant behaviour.

Here comes step two: 

Self-responsibility.

Not only do I accept that I am who I am, (up to and includ­ing the present moment, where I “stopped myself,”) but I am now at the trans­for­ma­tive action cross­roads. I can avoid fight­ing, and this is a great improve­ment, but falls short of the sec­ond part of the goal: to deep­en the rela­tion­ship through ele­gant com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

In order to accom­plish this part of the goal, I have to now move my lips in anoth­er way altogether.

So,

1. I notice, and
   I stop myself from engag­ing in non-help­ful behaviours.
2. I remem­ber my goal and imple­ment it.

The self-respon­si­bil­i­ty require­ment makes the choice to act a solo job.

Thus, I deep­en the rela­tion­ship through ele­gant com­mu­ni­ca­tion, regard­less of what my part­ner is doing.

Most­ly, peo­ple fight this. “How can I improve my rela­tion­ship if my part­ner refus­es to co-operate?” 

I want to assure you that, 100% of the time, such a question is a cop out.

It’s a cop out because how you self-actu­al­ize is 100% about how you act, and how you choose to define your real­i­ty. It does not, and nev­er has, had any­thing to do with the behav­iour of another.

In the end, all we can ever do is what we do as individuals.

Get this! Any­one can choose to com­mu­ni­cate with any­one, and it does not require that the oth­er per­son com­mu­ni­cate back, give per­mis­sion, or change their behaviour.

Now, granted, it’s easier if both parties are on the same page, but it’s not required.

And wait­ing for oth­ers to co-oper­ate in your self-growth project is set­ting your­self up for a long, long wait. Great excuse, though. I can’t do this until every­one else behaves. Good luck with that.

Yet, I see this all the time. Peo­ple annoyed with their part­ner, par­ents, kids, boss­es, whomev­er, and stomp­ing their lit­tle feet­sies up and down, exclaim­ing, “Why can’t they see how unhap­py they are mak­ing me, and do it my way?”

It’s as if they never grew up, and are still expecting magic to change the rest of the world, so they can stay the same.

We urge self-respon­si­ble, trans­for­ma­tive action. All the time, no excus­es, no wait­ing, no blam­ing, judg­ing or crit­i­ciz­ing. There is what does not work (stop doing it!) and what does (start doing it!) Plain and simple.

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