Post by caridwen on Mar 25, 2015 16:06:26 GMT
Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who published a paper in 1943 titled “A Theory of Human Motivation”. This famous paper details a hierarchy of human needs in priority, with each step or rung being dependent on the satisfaction of the step before it. Until all of our basic needs are met, we won’t allow ourselves to even consider approaching self-actualization – which is the state of mind and level of consciousness where we enable ourselves to chase our real goals and aspirations with confidence and gusto.
I’ve found this paper and theory to be very empowering in terms of my own personal consciousness development and growth, and I’m quite certain others will find value in this information as well. I’m also excited to share my own experiences of moving through this hierarchy, and how I dealt with the setbacks in each stage along the way.
It’s been said and documented that we humans will not allow ourselves to move towards the process of self-actualization until the prior four steps are achieved – particularly security and safety. I want to help you understand why these steps are an excellent outline for personal consciousness development and growth, but also why they aren’t 100% fool-proof because how you perceive these things ultimately determines what you’re going to get out of them/what they’re going to do for you.
Outlined below are Maslow’s five human needs in their proper order, how you can use each to your maximum benefit, and how to move through each and allow yourself to achieve the state of actualization so you’re able to start setting and chasing the goals that truly drive you.
Stage 1: Physiological Needs
Physiological needs are those that are required and essential for continued human survival. If you aren’t able to meet these needs, your physical body can’t even function, and you stop living all together. This is indeed a fundamental step in this process, and should be met first.
These needs include food, air, water, and shelter, and even things such as clothing and the state of your metabolism. If you’re unable to meet these needs sufficiently, then you don’t really have much going for you. You need to eat and keep yourself alive, my wonderful friends ; ).
This should be a fairly easy one to knock out, especially if you live in the Western world. Having access to clean water, food, and shelter without a life-or-death struggle on the daily is a privilege many people take for granted. Not really much happened for me personally at this stage. Nothing else can really be said here (don’t worry, I’m about to go from 0 to 60 on the next stage).
Stage 2: Safety Needs
Once you feel you’ve satisfied your physiological needs, you’re motivations will shift and you’ll naturally begin seeking to increase personal safety. It’s in the direct absence of sufficient safety that people develop serious mental health issues such as PTSD and other various traumas. War is a perfect example of this. Notice how in terms of the economy, safety becomes more about job and income security instead of protecting the village from enemy fire.
Safety needs include (but aren’t necessarily limited to) personal security, financial security, health and well-being, and having some sort of “safety net” or “back up plan” in place should your “primary resources fail”.
This is the stage where I started getting ballsy; I’m not even going to sugarcoat this. There were times where I’ve deliberately left good paying secure employment for projects and ideas that were complete crapshoots. Even though I accepted and expected incredibly uncomfortable consequences because of my choices, oddly enough those situations were never, ever as bad as I’d imagined them to be. Oh well, I quit a decent paying job. I always seemed to find another one very quickly (to the constant amazement of family and friends) – regardless of the state of the economy.
The difference now is that I’ve grown beyond employee consciousness, and I’m now actively pursuing freelance work and diversifying my portfolio. Several streams of income is a lot more secure than one, and I would never have gained the experience required to make use of that knowledge if I didn’t jump in like I did. You’re not in a very secure position if your only stream of income can be turned off or taken away entirely with the two words “You’re fired”, or the five words (my personal fave) “We’ve gotta let you go”.
I can tell you from experience not to get too obsessed with achieving material security, because time and time again, I’ve found that once I prioritize my true goals and passions, the universe always aligns opportunities for me to create that security. It never fails. Your level of consciousness is what’s going to determine how capable you are of allowing yourself to see and understand this, however.
Stage 3: Love/Belonging Needs
Once you’re physiological and safety needs are met, your focus will naturally shift to seeking love and belonging. This need is especially strong in children, and can even motivate them beyond the prior levels of physiological and safety needs right from the get go. Negligence of love and belonging towards the individual can directly cause states of depression and other emotionally traumatic experiences.
Family, intimacy, and friendship are all high-order examples of this stage. We seek to belong to groups, clubs, organizations, teams, and other affiliations – no matter how large or small the number of people involved. Social anxiety and introversion are two more symptoms of the human individual not receiving sufficient love and appreciation by family, friends, and peers. Some individuals desire this stage so strongly, they place it before the prior three entirely.
This is another one I’ve been lucky enough to have pretty much since day one. There were plenty of times when my parents, friends, and significant others would object to my decisions in regards to my path with a heart. After taking their advice for so many years with things like college and work, I soon understood that I have completely different drives and aspirations, and I stopped following their advice all together. Your happiness should never be dependent on someone else being happy with you.
One piece of invaluable insight I want to offer you though, is to become more conscious of the way in which you relate to people and ideas, especially when it comes to belonging, love, intimacy, etc. Notice how people who are insecure repel people who would otherwise be a perfect match, because they are resonating with scarcity rather than abundance. You see this everywhere with couples who are co-dependent. When you demand love and affection come from just one single source that meets your very narrow standards, you “block out” all the other wonderful sources waiting to shower you with affection and appreciation. This principle also works in exactly the same manner with regards to money.
This ties in directly with the following stage…
Stage 4: Esteem Needs
We value the opinions of others, and we want to feel recognized and valued for our work and contributions to society. People with low self-esteem will most often seek validation and respect from others before they’re able to feel good about themselves. These types are also the ones to seek fame and notoriety, because they thrive on external validation in order to feel valued by others. These things alone will not help an individual achieve true self-esteem until they accept who they truly are, and not what others want or need them to be.
Maslow labels “lower” esteem as the need for respect from others, and “higher” self-esteem as the need for respect from yourself. Eventually the higher will naturally override the lower, and you’ll gravitate towards respecting yourself with greater and greater severity. This is because the “higher” involves prioritizing motivations that begin arising from within you, rather than being a demand from your environment upon the previous four steps.
This one’s closely linked to the previous step for me. I was always naturally insecure all the way from grade school through high school, but I was never anti-social. When it came time for college, I got sucked onto following that path with my friends. When I started showing signs of resistance, everyone around me objected. That was one of the hardest steps for me to personally overcome, and it did take years to finally settle and become fully congruent with my passion path.
The hardest part for me was knowing what I didn’t want (college), while not having the greatest sense of clarity, certainty, or confidence towards what I did want. It took me several years of “free form” self-experimentation to develop the skills and competencies required to become congruent enough with my goals that I could actually begin putting the rubber to the road.
All of this is now working fully in my favor, as the veil of ambiguity finally subsided once I acquired enough knowledge on the subjects I needed to learn to accomplish the goals I’ve set for myself. 99.9% of the information that I’ve learned on the subjects which are actively pushing me towards my goals on a daily basis, I learned online. I can’t believe my first year of college was almost eight years ago, and everything I want to know is now available for free. This is the information age, and it makes plenty of people uncomfortable that other people (see what they’re focusing on?) aren’t paying for degrees and suffering through college anymore, yet still managing to make millions with online businesses and other ventures.
Notice where the former (you have to go to college to succeed!) group’s self-esteem is focused ; ).
Stage 5: Self-Actualization
“What a man can be, he must be.” -Abraham Maslow
Finally, we’ve made it! This is the level where you finally feel like you’re in the space to start tackling your real goals and aspirations driven by higher elements such as passion, excitement, and self-fulfillment. When you reach this stage, you feel an inescapable urge and desire to grow yourself as much as possible as soon as possible; growth and progress becomes the priority over the outlet you’re achieving it through. You recognize the medium as just a vehicle for your expression, and that you can indeed wield that expression through any number of vehicles.
This is the level of desire to express one’s creativity, quest for spiritual enlightenment, knowledge, and to give back to one’s society. Organismic theorist Kurt Goldstein calls this the “master motivation” or “master motive” for any organism: “The tendency to actualize itself as fully as possible is the basic drive…the drive for self-actualization.”
You finally stop feeding the lower emotions and impulses which capitalize and stalk the lower levels, because you’ve transcended them. You start the process of self-transcendence because you begin moving through your internal issues with a sense of intelligence and need to fulfill your potential. The four lower levels become secondary and peripheral, because you’re now driven by motivations which transcend and override the lack of consciousness that necessitates the lower levels to begin with.
The write-up for this stage is in the following section below:
Bonus Round! Meta-Motivation
Ready for the kicker?
You’re completely free to begin working at the stage of self-actualization at any moment in time, regardless of the state or current condition of the first four levels.
Ready for the REAL kicker?!
When you consciously prioritize self-actualization, the four lower levels work themselves out automatically. This is a fail-safe universal law. When you are self-actualized, you behave like a magnet to people striving for the same thing in their lives. These people will be throwing so many resources at you in exchange for your knowledge, insight, and experience, that you’ll always have those lower four levels met with great abundance.
You are not required to satisfy these four levels of need before you can begin focusing on your true goals and aspirations.
There is no law like schooling that says you must pass these levels in succession before you can graduate and truly start living your life.
Plenty of successful people have proven time and time again that your external circumstances ultimately don’t matter if you simply enable yourself to keep taking action forwards in spite of them.
You don’t require anyone else’s permission to start prioritizing what you truly want, other than your own.
This is a topic that will eventually require an article on its own, but for now we’ll make due with a brief explanation. Notice how in all of the steps outlined above, I was more or less defying or testing the limits of each of these basic needs. I didn’t even realize I was doing this until upon reflection years later. I’m not special or unique or magic or anything of the sort, but I do happen to fit all of the requirements of Maslow’s theory of “meta-motivation”, or the motivation to place self-actualization as top priority right from the get go – regardless of the state of the prior four steps.
This is a critical point that I don’t want to gloss over or have you simply misunderstand: there were times where I wasn’t just actively pursuing my self-actualization (regardless of the state of the prior four needs), but I’ve also consciously and actively traded in/ignored those needs for the ability to focus more intensely on self-actualizing.
Of course I wasn’t going around ignoring people that were important to me, or doing the opposite of everything on this list: I simply stopped letting the absence or fluctuation/uncertainty of their presence have any affect on my ability to take intelligent action towards my macro-level goals.
The difference between requiring permission externally from the first four basic needs and going straight for the gold is a conscious choice. What makes meta-motivation so unique is that people often don’t reach this conscious realization until after they’ve moved through all four stages first.
Please understand I’m not saying any of this to gloat or claim that I’m some cosmic being sent to purge humanity of self-destructive subconscious suggestion (though that would be a badass job title, would it not?), but rather to show you that at any point in time, you’re completely free to focus on your self-actualization regardless of the state or condition of the other four needs. You don’t need permission to prioritize your true goals, right now.
The more you believe that you do require X, Y, and Z to get started, the more you’ll most likely have to suck it up and move through these levels to strengthen and temper you hindsight.
This is another topic I want to dedicate an entire article to: how we either define security externally or internally.
Those who define it externally will be operating somewhere within the first four levels, because they require a certain (and arbitrary) threshold of external elements to be in good order before they can feel secure enough to move along to the next stage.
Those who define it internally understand that true safety is a result of your ability to consciously and intelligently respond to the present moment as it’s occurring. Nothing else is required. With this understanding and realization comes full permission to move full-speed ahead towards self-actualization. You could go broke countless times and/or have unstable income, and still work towards you true goals 110%.
The entire point of this article is to show and prove to you that you can indeed “level skip” Maslow’s hierarchy by developing your self-trust via failing intelligently through direct personal experience. Its worked for the countless others who’ve “level skipped” in the past, all of the “level skippers” who inspired me to get started on my path, and it continues to work for this “level skipper” (me) on a daily basis.
The universe could care less who follows dogma or behaves more morally; its function is to behave as unbiased an arena for consciousness growth and expansion as possible. Reality is completely neutral; WE choose how to perceive, interpret, and thus interact with it after the data reaches our neocortex (and gets filtered through all sorts of tasty, self-limiting beliefs and biases ; ) ).
Have faith in yourself and your passion path, because you can always “go back” a level and collect yourself until you feel you’ve satisfied that level enough to keep moving forward. Once you really get moving on your path, you’ll realize there’s no need for any sort of safety net, and you’ll wonder how the hell more people haven’t figured this out!
JUNE 16, 2014 By JASON DEMAKIS