A Guide to Self-Actualization: a process of which people fulfill their potential for goodness, and maximize internal growth.
Maslow Pyramid. Credit: Henry Rivers/ GettyImages
Animated Video Summary by Sprouts
Key Takeaways
What motivates human behavior?
According to psychologist Abraham Maslow, our actions are motivated in order to achieve certain needs.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology. It argues that there are five stages of human needs that motivate our behaviour. Abraham Maslow proposed his theory in 1943 after studying what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein or Eleanor Roosevelt.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs proposes that people are motivated to complete basic needs before moving on to higher growth needs.
As we satisfy our most basic needs, we are more motivated to seek out more complex needs at the top of the pyramid.
At stage one there are physiological needs.
Such as the need to breathe, eat, drink or sleep. The moment we got enough of that and we feel awake and our bellies are full, we get motivated by the next thing.
At stage two we want safety.
At stage three we seek love and belonging.
At stage four we look for esteem, self-confidence and respect from our peers.
At stage five we reach self-actualization.
Only if we breathe, and drink and eat and sleep enough and we feel safe and part of a group and still special, only then we can reach level five: self-actualisation.
Now we can relax, be creative, accept facts for what they are, give back or do whatever we want. No more pressure, unless of course there is trouble below.
If you are leader and believe in the theory, use it.
- First make sure everyone has eaten well. Then make them feel safe and help them belong to a group. Once they feel they belong, they are ready to stand out and excel.
- “Achieving self-actualization is somewhat rare: According to Maslow, <10% of the adult population has self-actualized, and those that do self-actualize will not necessarily remain in that state.”
Hierarchy of Needs
The first four needs are the “deficit” needs which are basic physical requirements.
After these are fulfilled, they can then move on to the next level of growth needs, eventually reaching the highest level of self-actualization.
All people are motivated to move up the hierarchy and attain self-actualization, but people are often slowed down by the inability of being capable of completing the lower needs.
Deficiency Needs
1. Physiological Needs the basic needs for food, warmth, shelter, sex, water and other body needs. If this physical and biological need is unfulfilled, people would not be able to trust the environment leading to anxiety and the inability to achieve growth to the next level.
2. Security Needs after physical needs are satisfied, his/her safety needs will come into play. This is the need for consistency, predictability, under control and familiar. If this need is not fulfilled then it will lead to feelings of doubt and shame, leading to a high need for discipline.
3. Social Needs The need for friendship, sexual intimacy, supportive and communicative family. If he/she cannot have these close relationships, one may have negative social emotions like guilt and have low extraversion values.
4. Esteem Needs people have a need to be respected, to have self-esteem, self-respect, and to respect others. They want to have meaningful work, sense of contribution, feelings of acceptance and have value. When this need is not fulfilled, he/she may feel beneath others or inferior.
Growth Needs
5. Cognitive Needs the need to increase their knowledge, to realize personal potential, increasing personal growth and experience the world around them. When not fulfilled it will lead to confusion and identity crisis.
6. Aesthetic Needs people appreciate and seek out the beauty and balance of life. They have the need to observe and take in their surroundings. This is a need to almost become one with nature and the environment, being able to indulge in the beauty of life.
7. Self-Actualizing Needs the instinctual need to realize one’s personal potential and, attaining personal growth, spiritual growth, striving to be the absolute best that they can be. When this need is fulfilled, one will have a desire to pass along their knowledge.
8. Transcendence Needs helping others to achieve self-actualization. Also known as, “spiritual needs”. When this need is fulfilled, he/she will have feelings of integrity. Serving a purpose in life that reaches an existence or experience beyond a physical level.
Self Transcendence: Maslow's Hierarchys Missing Apex
Video by Big Think
The highest level of human development in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is self-transcendence.
At the level of self-actualization, we strive to maximize personal potential.
At the level of self-transcendence, we favor service to others.
By focusing on things beyond the self—altruism, spiritual awakening, liberation from egocentricity, and the unity of being—we can serve a purpose in life that reaches an existence or experience beyond a physical level.
This leads to what Maslow called peak experiences; an emotional state where one feels intense joy, peace, well-being, and an awareness of ultimate truth and unity of all things.
"If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life."
Why Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs Matters
Video By The School of Life
Part of the reason why the description of these needs, laid out in pyramid form, has proved so persuasive is their capacity to capture with elemental simplicity a profound structural truth about human existence.
Maslow was putting his finger with unusual deftness and precision on a set of answers to very large questions that tend to confuse and perplex us viciously, particularly when we are young. Namely:
- What are we really after?
- What do we long for?
- How do we arrange our priorities and give due regard for the different and competing claims we have on our attention?
Maslow was reminding us with artistic concision of the shape of an ideal well lived life.
Proposing at once that we cannot live by our spiritual callings alone, but also that it cannot be right to remain focused only on the material either.
We need to be whole, both material and the spiritual realms to be attended to, the base lending support while the summit offers upward direction and definition.
Maslow was rebutting calls from two kinds of zealots: firstly, over-ardent spiritual types who might who might urge us to forget entirely about money, housing, a good insurance policy, and enough to pay for lunch.
But he was also fighting against extreme hard-nosed pragmatists who might imply that life was simply a brute process of putting food on the table and going to the office.
Both camps had — for Maslow — misunderstood the complexity of the human animal. Unlike other creatures, we are multifaceted, called at once unfurl our soul according to its inner — and to make sure we can pay the bills at the end of the month.
Operating at the heyday of American capitalism, Maslow was interestingly ambivalent about business. He was awed by the material resources of large corporations around him, but at the same time he lamented that almost all their economic activity was —unfairly and bizarrely—focused on honoring customers’ needs at the bottom of the pyramid.
America’s largest companies were helping people to have a roof over their heads, feeding them, moving them around, and ensuring they could talk to each other long-distance.
But they seemed utterly uninterested in trying to fulfill the essential spiritual appetites defined on the higher slopes of his pyramid.
Towards the end of his long life, Maslow expressed a hope that businesses could in time learn to make more of their profits from addressing not only our basic needs, but also and importantly our higher spiritual and psychological ones as well. That would truly be enlightened capitalism.
In the personal sphere, Maslow’s pyramid remains a hugely useful object to turn to whenever we are trying to assess the direction of our lives.
Often, as we reflect upon it, we start to notice that we really haven’t arranged and balanced our needs as wisely and elegantly as we might.
Some lives have an implausibly wide base: all their energy seems directed towards material accumulation.
At the same time, there are lives with an opposite problem, where we have not paid due head to our need to look after our fragile and vulnerable bodies.
Maslow was pointing us to the need for greater balance between the many priorities we must juggle.
Maslow’s beautifully simple visual cue is, above anything else, a portrait of a life lived in harmony with the complexities of our nature.
We should use it to reflect with newfound focus on what it is we might do next with our lives.
The Psychology of Self-Actualization
Video by Academy of Ideas
"What human beings can be, they must be."
In the early 20th century, Psychologists were primarily concerned with the sicknesses that afflict the human mind. Abraham Maslow, aware of this one-sided approach, saw it as grossly inadequate.
If the goal of Psychology is not just to rid us of illnesses, but also to help us flourish, then an understanding of what constitutes optimal psychological health is crucial. It is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology wrote Maslow, and now we must fill it out with the healthy half.
Maslow’s research led him to the conclusion that what demarcates the Psychologically flourishing from the sick and mediocre is the ability to self actualize.
In this video, Academy of Ideas explores what it means to self actualize and examine why most people struggle at this all-important task.
According to Maslow, humans are driven to satisfy what he called a hierarchy of needs.
Self-actualization occupies the pinnacle of this hierarchy and therefore we cannot begin to self actualize until we have satisfied our more basic needs.
These basic needs include the things necessary for our survival: such as food, water, and shelter.
As well as those things required for a basic modicum of Psychological health: such as safety love status belongingness and self esteem
Only after these basic needs are satisfied can we begin down the path of Self-actualization and strive in the words of Maslow to become everything one is capable of becoming.
"Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature.
This need we may call Self-actualization...it refers to man's desire for self fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become actually in what he is potentially."
When we begin the process of self actualization, mastery of self becomes our way of life. We view our psyche as a vast unexplored terrain, and are motivated to gain a greater knowledge of its inner depths.
Rather than being driven solely by wealth or status, we choose an ambitious and meaningful life mission.
As we strive to achieve our goals, we devote our energies to mastering the necessary skills and in the process, we actualize our latent potentials.
As our life becomes increasingly structured around the need to self actualize, Maslow discovered that we become more susceptible to peak experiences.
"Self-actualizing people have the wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wander, and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may have become to others."
Peak experiences have a deep therapeutic effect and can permanently transform our self-image in view of the world.
While they cannot be voluntarily stimulated, Maslow discovered that they arise spontaneously in self-actualizers far more frequently than in the majority of the population.
Implying that they are a byproduct of the personal growth that self-actualizers experience as they cultivate their skills and strive to realize their potential.
Another trait shared by self actualizers is their tendency to be free from the constricting need for social acceptance and the obsession many people have with social comparison.
Rather than looking to others for approval or to social standards or authorities to determine how to live, such individuals defer matters of judgment to their own conscience.
The French philosopher Montaigne who exhibited this characteristic captured it in the following line from his essays: “I have my own laws in my own court to judge me and I refer to these rather than elsewhere.”
"Self actualizers have become strong enough to be independent of the good opinion of other people, or even their affection. The honors, the status, the rewards, the popularity, the prestige, and the love they can bestow must have become less important than self development and inner growth."
With this basic understanding of self-actualization, we are left with an important question: if all of us can in principle self actualize, why do so few of us end up doing so?
Why in other words do most of us become more complacent, conformist to bitter and neurotic as we age, rather than more individualized, joyous, creative, and productive ?
Maslow spent much time deliberating this question and to answer it he suggested that there exist two regressive forces in the psyche which inhibit growth.
"We must understand that the dark forces are as normal as the growth forces."
Most of us will claim that actualizing our potentials is something we desire to do. In reality we are often far more attracted by the easy path of safety and comfort.
We avoid challenges which would lead to personal growth, refuse to face up to our fears, and remain passive in a manner which inhibits our capacity to self actualize.
The pull of these regressive forces places us in a dangerous position, for if we allow ourselves to succumb to them, then over time we will pay a steep price—Anxiety, guilt, shame, and self-hate will manifest and torture us internally.
But the presence of these symptoms does not necessarily mean that all is lost.
Rather as Maslow suggests, if we can learn to view these symptoms not as a sign that we are ill and in need of medication, but rather as a cry from the growth forces within—warning us that a change in our life is needed—we will have taken the first step toward becoming a self actualizer and thus one of those rare individuals who succeed in being human.
"He who belies his talent, the born painter who sells stockings instead, the intelligent man who lives a stupid life, the man who sees the truth and keeps his mouth shut, the coward who gives up his manliness, all these people perceive in a deep way that they have done wrong to themselves and despise themselves for it.
Out of this self punishment may come only neurosis, but there may come renewed courage, righteous indignation, increased self-respect because of their after doing the right thing; in a word, growth and improvement can come through pain and conflict."