Satisfying your basic needs changes you. Maslow described the process of becoming self-actualized in the following way:
“By definition, self-actualizing people are gratified in all their basic needs (of belongingness, affection, respect, and self-esteem). This is to say that they have a feeling of belongingness and rootedness, they are satisfied in their love needs, have friends and feel loved and love-worthy, they have status and place in life and respect from other people, and they have a reasonable feeling of worth and self-respect.
Working towards self-actualization requires a person to make full use of his or her talents, potentialities, and capacities . In such people many dichotomies in life become fused: duty and pleasure become the same thing, as does work and play, self-interest and altruism, individualism and selflessness. The self-actualizing person achieves his or her most authentic, mature, healthy, and self-fulfilling identity as a non-striving , non-needing, non-wishing fully human being. Maslow defines self-actualization as follows” Wow. Why not read that paragraph a second for a beautiful description of someone most of us want to be.
“Self-actualization means experiencing fully, vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption. It means experiencing without the self-consciousness of the adolescent. At this moment of experiencing, the person is wholly and fully human. This is a self-actualizing moment Self-actualization is a matter of degree in which little accessions are” accumulated one by one until finally one is what one has sought to be.’
While everyone has the potential to be a self-actualizer, only some actually succeed. There are multiple reasons for this discrepancy between potentiality and actuality . Some will be discussed in this chapter and others were discussed in Chapters 4 and 13. Recognizing the obstacles in your way, opening up to possibilities, and taking the necessary risks helps improve the odds of your success.
Each of us is free to make our life choices and live with the results. Maslow noted that each our life choices had consequences. Those who heeded their inner signals which resonated with their innate capacities were the ones most likely to achieve joy and satisfaction. “ No thanks, I’ll take the rotten apple “ is not the choice a wise and health person would make. Maslow describes the motivation for self-actualization as follows,
” What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization…It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”
