EIGHT WAYS TO SELF ACTUALIZE
1. Experience things fully, vividly, selflessly. Throw yourself into the experiencing of something: concentrate on it fully, let it totally absorb you.
2. Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth): Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.
3. Let the self emerge. Try to shut out the external clues as to what you should think, feel, say, and so on, and let your experience enable you to say what you truly feel.
4. When in doubt, be honest. If you look into yourself and are honest, you will also take responsibility. Taking responsibility is self-actualizing.
5. Listen to your own tastes. Be prepared to be unpopular.
6. Use your intelligence, work to do well the things you want to do, no matter how insignificant they seem to be.
7. Make peak experiencing more likely: get rid of illusions and false notions. Learn what you are good at and what your potentialities are not.
8. Find out who you are, what you are, what you like and don’t like, what is good and what is bad for you, where you are going, what your mission is. Opening yourself up to yourself in this way means identifying defenses–and then finding the courage to give them up.
All of us are familiar with Maslow and his self-actualization chuva. As a psych graduate, maslow is present in all my subjects. But never do I really understand it, how it works. I know it by the book, but not by practise in the real world.
I stumble on this today at this link, and i’m in a ‘who-am-i’ mode again, the endless search of who-am-i-in-this-world. And, I hate that kind of state because it would make my self-confidence go down to negative 0.000000143. but hear me, maslow and your self-actualization s*ht, not this time! you’re not getting any piece of my scattered brain!
i will self-actualized myself. Okay, so to the bullet list — I believe that I’m working on 1, 4 and 5 (those in bold fonts) — testing the waters, and slipped off, from time to time, but then still manage to pull back myself into living those ideas out.
those in red fonts, 2 and 6, are things that I feel are very far from my reach yet! I badly want to get over with number 2!!! I hate you number 2. SO hear me #2, you will have soon a piece of my scattered brain!!! i will own you soooooooonnnnnnnnnn!!!!
Number 8, I can live without you! sorry, but you’re not that popular to me! You make yourself so out of reach. it’s your fault! =)
now, i want to compare notes. tell me which in the bullet list you have ticked off?!?