Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization

by Scott Barry Kaufman

Also listen to my talk with Scott – Listen Here 

Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman’s provides a roadmap for finding purpose and fulfillment–not by striving for money, success, or “happiness,” but by becoming the best version of ourselves, or what Maslow called self-actualization. While self-actualization is often thought of as a purely individual pursuit, Maslow believed that the full realization of potential requires a merging between self and the world. We don’t have to choose either self-development or self-sacrifice, but at the highest level of human potential we show a deep integration of both. Transcend reveals this level of human potential that connects us not only to our highest creative potential, but also to one another.

This is one of my most highlighted books of all time )and I left a lot out of it). This recap is long for a reason, a good reason. Is there anything more important than growing ourselves in order to be of greater service to others? I’m not sure there is and the insights in this book can help us on our path towards growth or as Abraham Maslow called it “Self-actualization”. I’d recommend reading the entire book to fully grasp these concepts and to take advantage of the exercises many of which I did not include in this. 

Also great my notes on Motivation and Personality by Abraham Maslow 

 

Introduction: A New Hierarchy of Needs

• Through his research on self-actualizing people, Maslow discovered that those who are reaching the full heights of their humanity tend to possess the characteristics most of us seek in life; they tend to be altruistic, creative, open, authentic, accepting, independent, and brave.
• Maslow viewed the role of the teacher, therapist, and parent as horticulturists, whose task is to “enable people to become healthy and effective in their own style.”
  • “we try to make a rose into a good rose, rather than seek to change roses into lilies. . . . It necessitates a pleasure in the self-actualization of a person who may be quite different from yourself. It even implies an ultimate respect and acknowledgement of the sacredness and uniqueness of each kind of person.”

• Within the humanistic psychology framework, the healthy personality is considered one that constantly moves toward freedom, responsibility, self-awareness, meaning, commitment, personal growth, maturity, integration, and change, rather than one that predominantly strives for status, achievement, or even happiness.
  • **Many of the things we’re trained to go after in life (in the west) during our childhood are not the things that actually bring us fulfillment in life. 

Sources of Well-Being 

• More positive emotions (higher frequency and intensity of positive moods and emotions, such as contentment, laughter, and joy, in one’s daily life) 
• Fewer negative emotions (lower frequency and intensity of negative moods and emotions, such as sadness, anxiety, fear, and anger, in one’s daily life)
• Life satisfaction (a positive subjective evaluation of one’s life overall) 
• Vitality (a positive subjective sense of physical health and energy) 
• Environmental mastery (the ability to shape environments to suit one’s needs and desires; to feel in control of one’s life; to not feel overwhelmed by the demands and responsibilities of everyday life)
• Positive relationships (feeling loved, supported, and valued by others; having warm and trusting interpersonal relationships; being loving and generous to others) 
• Self-acceptance (positive attitudes toward self; a sense of self-worth; liking and respecting oneself) 
• Mastery (feelings of competence in accomplishing challenging tasks; a sense of effectiveness in accomplishing important goals one has set for oneself)
• Autonomy (feeling independent, free to make one’s own choices in life, and able to resist social pressures) 
• Personal growth (continually seeking development and improvement, rather than seeking achievement of a fixed state)
• Engagement in life (being absorbed, interested, and involved in one’s daily activities and life) 
• Purpose and meaning in life (a sense that one’s life matters, is valuable, and is worth living; a clear sense of direction and meaning in one’s efforts; a connection to something greater than oneself) 
• Transcendent experiences (experiences of awe, flow, inspiration, and gratitude in daily life)

Becoming fully human is about living a full existence, not one that is continually happy. Being well is not always about feeling good; it also involves continually incorporating more meaning, engagement, and growth in one’s life—key themes in humanistic psychology.

• Maslow emphasized that we are always in a state of becoming and that one’s “inner core” consists merely of “potentialities, not final actualizations” that are “weak, subtle, and delicate, very easily drowned out by learning, by cultural expectations, by fear, by disapproval, etc.,” and which can all too easily become forgotten, neglected, unused, overlooked, unverbalized, or suppressed.
• Maslow made it clear that human maturation is an ongoing process and that growth is “not a sudden, saltatory phenomenon” but is often two steps forward and one step back.
• Another common misconception is that the needs are isolated from one another or don’t depend on one another in any meaningful way. Again, this couldn’t be further from what Maslow’s theory actually stated: “[The human needs] are arranged in an integrated hierarchy rather than dichotomously, that is, they rest one upon another. . . . This means that the process of regression to lower needs remains always as a possibility,
  • The English humanistic psychotherapist John Rowan used the analogy of Russian nesting dolls to illustrate Maslow’s notion of an integrated hierarchy: each larger doll includes all the smaller dolls but also transcends them.

• Modern-day presentations of Maslow’s theory often leave out this critical notion of an integrated hierarchy and instead focus on the stage-like pyramid—even though in his published writings Maslow never actually created a pyramid to represent his hierarchy of needs.

 

DEFICIENCY VS. GROWTH

• Maslow argued that all the needs can be grouped into two main classes of needs, which must be integrated for wholeness: deficiency and growth. 
• Deficiency needs, which Maslow referred to as “D-needs,” are motivated by a lack of satisfaction, whether it’s the lack of food, safety, affection, belonging, or self-esteem.
• The “D-realm” of existence colors all of our perceptions and distorts reality, making demands on a person’s whole being: “Feed me! Love me! Respect me!” The greater the deficiency of these needs, the more we distort reality to fit our expectations and treat others in accordance with their usefulness in helping us satisfy our most deficient needs.
• Distinguishing between “defensive-wisdom” and “growth-wisdom,” Maslow argued that the Being-Realm of existence (or B-realm, for short) is like replacing a clouded lens with a clear one. Instead of being driven by fears, anxieties, suspicions, and the constant need to make demands on reality, one is more accepting and loving of oneself and others. Seeing reality more clearly, growth-wisdom is more about “What choices will lead me to greater integration and wholeness?” rather than “How can I defend myself so that I can feel safe and secure?”

❝The human condition isn’t a competition; it’s an experience. Life isn’t a trek up a summit but a journey to travel through—a vast blue ocean, full of new opportunities for meaning and discovery but also danger and uncertainty. In this choppy surf, a clunky pyramid is of little use. Instead, what is needed is something a bit more functional. We’ll need a sailboat.❞

• As we sail through the adventure of life, it’s rarely clear sailing. The boat itself protects us from seas that are rarely as calm as we’d like. Each plank of the boat offers security from the waves. Without it, we’d surely spend all our energy trying to stay above water. While even one plank is better than nothing, the bigger the boat, the more waves you can endure. Likewise in life, while safety is an essential foundation for feeling secure, adding on strong connections with others and feelings of respect and worthiness will further allow you to weather the storms.

❝Note that you don’t “climb” a sailboat like you’d climb a mountain or a pyramid. Instead, you open your sail, just like you’d drop your defenses once you felt secure enough. This is an ongoing dynamic: you can be open and spontaneous one minute but can feel threatened enough to prepare for the storm by closing yourself to the world the next minute. The more you continually open yourself to the world, however, the further your boat will go and the more you can benefit from the people and opportunities around you.❞

• And if you’re truly fortunate, you can even enter ecstatic moments of peak experience—where you are really catching the wind. In these moments, not only have you temporarily forgotten your insecurities, but you are growing so much that you are helping to raise the tide for all the other sailboats simply by making your way through the ocean.
• The needs that comprise the boat itself are safety, connection, and self-esteem.

3 NEEDS FOR SELF-ACTUALIZATION (GROWTH)

• EXPLORATION LOVE PURPOSE
• Maslow preferred the term “fully human” to capture what he was really trying to get at. To help clarify this point, I have broken self-actualization—and therefore growth—into three specific needs for which there is strong contemporary scientific support: exploration, love, and purpose.

Exploration

• At the base of growth is the spirit of exploration, the fundamental biological drive that all growth needs to have as its foundation. Exploration is the desire to seek out and make sense of novel, challenging, and uncertain events. While security is primarily concerned with defense and protection, exploration is primarily motivated by curiosity, discovery, openness, expansion, understanding, and the creation of new opportunities for growth and development.

Transcendence 

• At the top of the new hierarchy of needs is the need for transcendence, which goes beyond individual growth (and even health and happiness) and allows for the highest levels of unity and harmony within oneself and with the world. Transcendence, which rests on a secure foundation of both security and growth, is a perspective in which we can view our whole being from a higher vantage point with acceptance, wisdom, and a sense of connectedness with the rest of humanity.

❝While we each travel in our own direction, we’re all sailing the vast unknown of the sea.❞

• Irvin Yalom, “Even though you’re alone in your boat, it’s always comforting to see the lights of the other boats bobbing nearby.”

Four “givens of existence” that Yalom argues all humans must reconcile: 

(1) Death: the inherent tension between wanting to continue to exist and self-actualize and the inevitability of perishing, 

(2) Freedom: the inherent conflict between the seeming randomness of the universe and the heavy burden of responsibility that comes with the freedom to choose one’s own destiny,

(3) Isolation: the inherent tension between, on the one hand, wanting to connect deeply and profoundly with other human beings and be part of a larger whole and, on the other hand, never fully being able to do so, always remaining existentially alone, and 

(4) Meaninglessness: the tension between being thrown into an indifferent universe that often seems to have no inherent meaning and yet wanting to find some sort of purpose for our own individual existence in the incomprehensibly short time we live on the planet.

 

THE GOOD LIFE 

I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience. —Martin Buber, as quoted in Aubrey Hodes, Martin Buber: An Intimate Portrait (1971)

No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!” . . . It is . . . an agonizing, hazardous undertaking thus to dig into oneself, to climb down roughly and directly into the tunnels of one’s being. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator (1874)

• The good life is not something you will ever achieve. It’s a way of living. As Carl Rogers noted, “The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.”
• This process won’t always bring feelings of happiness, contentment, and bliss, and it may even sometimes cause pain and heartache. 
• It’s not for the “faint-hearted,” as Rogers notes, as it requires continually stretching outside your comfort zone as you realize more and more of your potentialities and launch yourself “fully into the stream of life.” 
• Just like it takes courage to open your sail on a sailboat and see where the winds will take you, it takes a lot of courage to become the best version of yourself.

“I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away.”

I found that ten characteristics stand the test of scientific scrutiny and are all significantly related to one another (in other words, those who score high in one characteristic tend to also score high in the others as well). To take the self-actualization test, go to selfactualizationtests.com.

Truth Seeking, Acceptance, Purpose, Authenticity, Continued Freshness of Appreciation, Peak Experiences, Humanitarianism, Good Moral Intuition, Creative Spirit, Equanimity 

CHARACTERISTICS OF SELF-ACTUALIZATION 

Truth Seeking 

• (e.g., “I am always trying to get at the real truth about people and nature.”) 

Acceptance 

• (e.g., “I accept all of my quirks and desires without shame or apology.”) 

Purpose 

• (e.g., “I feel a great responsibility and duty to accomplish a particular mission in life.”)

Authenticity 

• (e.g., “I can maintain my dignity and integrity even in environments and situations that are undignified.”) 

Continued Freshness of Appreciation 

• (e.g., “I can appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may have become to others.”)

Peak Experiences 

• (e.g., “I often have experiences in which I feel new horizons and possibilities opening up for myself and others.”) 

Humanitarianism 

• (e.g., “I have a genuine desire to help the human race.”) 

Good Moral Intuition 

• (e.g., “I can tell deep down right away when I’ve done something wrong.”) 

Creative Spirit 

• (e.g., “I have a generally creative spirit that touches everything I do.”) 

Equanimity 

• (e.g., “I tend to take life’s inevitable ups and downs with grace, acceptance, and equanimity.”)

• Self-actualization scores were associated with multiple indicators of well-being, including greater life satisfaction, curiosity, self-acceptance, positive relationships, environmental mastery, personal growth, autonomy, and purpose in life. Self-actualization also predicted job performance, job satisfaction, and reports of greater talent, skill, and creative ability across a wide range of fields, from the arts and sciences to business and sports.

4 Categories of Self-actualization

exploration, love, purpose, and transcendence. Together, the first three enable growth. At the base of growth is exploration, which all other growth needs draw on.

CHAPTER 4 Exploration 

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth or power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility! —Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1843)

• The need for exploration—the desire to seek out and make sense of novel, challenging, and uncertain information and experiences—is an irreducible fundamental need. 
• A central problem of existence is managing uncertainty and reducing the entropy and disorder in our lives, which is always increasing. 
• While facing increasing uncertainty can be a source of great anxiety, as Maslow noted, the unknown also has its delights. In fact, it’s often necessary to leave the safety of familiarity, at least to some extent, in order to grow. It takes courage to grow.
• Maslow believed that if people are inwardly free, they will more often than not choose wisely, in a healthy and growth-oriented direction. 
  • To Maslow, this is how the psychology of being and the psychology of becoming can be reconciled. Just by being yourself and shedding your defenses and fears and anxieties, you move forward and grow.

“Our healthy subjects are generally unthreatened and unfrightened by the unknown. . . . They accept it, are comfortable with it, and, often are even more attracted by it than by the known.”

• Maslow noted, one way of coping with anxiety is to render our deepest fears “familiar, predictable, manageable, controllable, i.e., unfrightening, and harmless . . . to know them and to understand them.” In this way, increasing knowledge doesn’t only help us grow, it can also serve as an “anxiety-reducing function.”

Stress Tolerance

• The willingness to embrace the inherent anxiety of a new, unexpected, complex, mysterious, obscure event. Stress tolerance demonstrated the strongest correlations with every single dimension of well-being they measured, including happiness; meaning in life; satisfaction of the needs for mastery, autonomy, and relatedness; and the existence of a lot of positive emotions in daily life.

SOCIAL EXPLORATION 

• We humans are social animals, and engagement in social life is necessary for health and well-being.
• In a set of revealing studies, Geneviève L. Lavigne and her colleagues found two clear orientations that relate to the need for belonging: a growth orientation, which is driven by curiosity, sincere interest in learning about others, and a desire to learn about oneself, and a deficit-reduction orientation, which is driven by an overly high need to feel accepted and to fill a deep void in one’s life.

Growth Orientation

• The growth orientation to belonging was associated with a wide range of growth-oriented outcomes, including higher levels of secure attachment, past positive social interactions, resiliency, commitment toward an important relationship, and self-disclosure in relationships. 

Deficit-Reduction

• In contrast, the deficit-reduction orientation was associated with various outcomes that stunt growth, including higher levels of social anxiety, social comparison, anxious-attachment style, a need for attention, and loneliness.

☆Choose growth 

ADVENTURE SEEKING

• (Read the book for the full encapsulation of Alex’s brain) While Alex Honnold likely has a genetic predisposition for adventure seeking—adventure seeking is correlated with genes that code for dopamine production—he certainly wasn’t born fearless. Honnold noted that when he first started free soloing, he faced great fear.
  • After enough of these growth experiences, though, he trained himself to be fearless. As he put it in an interview, “My comfort zone is like a little bubble around me, and I’ve pushed it in different directions and made it bigger and bigger until these objectives that seemed totally crazy, eventually fall within the realm of the possible.”

• Scientists define “adventure seeking” as the willingness to risk physical, social, and financial safety for varied, novel, exciting, intense, and challenging sensations and experiences. Adventure seeking is part of a larger personality trait called “sensation seeking,” which also includes things such as the drive to engage in new sensory experiences (e.g., taking psychedelics), susceptibility to boredom, and being extremely impulsive.
• Exploration with great insecurity can lead to antisocial behaviors, but security without exploration can lead to frustration and boredom. 
  • One recent study among young children found that while high levels of exploration combined with low levels of self-control emerged as a liability for externalizing behavior—maladaptive behaviors directed outward to the environment—the reverse was also true: high levels of self-control combined with low levels of exploration was also a liability for externalizing behavior. Too much of an imbalance of one over the other can lead to destructive outcomes.

• One does not have to be traumatized by trauma; one can grow from trauma. Another recent study found that adventure seeking is associated with increased resilience (measured as increased positive emotions and life satisfaction) among those who had experienced trauma. This association was partly explained through effective coping. High-adventure seekers are more likely to use a problem-focused coping strategy, which allows them to see stressors in their life as manageable.
  • *MUST READ BOOK-  The Upside of Stress 

 

POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH

In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning. —Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)

• • “posttraumatic growth” to capture this phenomenon, defining it as the positive psychological change that is experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances.

• These seven areas of growth have been reported to spring from adversity:

• Greater appreciation of life 

• Greater appreciation and strengthening of close relationships 

• Increased compassion and altruism 

• The identification of new possibilities or a purpose in life 

• Greater awareness and utilization of personal strengths 

• Enhanced spiritual development 

• Creative growth

Viktor Frankl put it, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

• It is precisely when the foundational structure of the self is shaken that we are in the best position to pursue new opportunities in our lives.

• Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski argued that “positive disintegration” can be a growth-fostering experience. After studying a number of people with high psychological development, Dabrowski concluded that healthy personality development often requires the disintegration of the personality structure, which can temporarily lead to psychological tension, self-doubt, anxiety, and depression. However, Dabrowski believed this process can lead to a deeper examination of what one could be and ultimately higher levels of personality development.

☆A key factor that allows us to turn adversity into advantage is the extent to which we fully explore our thoughts and feelings surrounding the event. Cognitive exploration—which can be defined as a general curiosity about information and a tendency toward complexity and flexibility in information processing—enables us to be curious about confusing situations, increasing the likelihood that we will find new meaning in the seemingly incomprehensible.

• Many of the steps that lead to growth after trauma go against our natural inclinations to avoid extremely uncomfortable emotions and thoughts. However, it’s only through shedding our natural defense mechanisms and approaching the discomfort head on, viewing everything as fodder for growth, that we can start to embrace the inevitable paradoxes of life and come to a more nuanced view of reality.
• This process of transformation can certainly be excruciating, but rumination, in conjunction with a strong social support system and other outlets for expression, can be very beneficial to growth and enable us to tap into deep reservoirs of strength and compassion we never knew existed within us.
• Instead of trying everything we can to inhibit or “self-regulate” those emotions, experiential avoidance—avoiding feared thoughts, feelings, and sensations—paradoxically makes things worse, reinforcing our belief that the world is not safe and making it more difficult to pursue valued long-term goals.

OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE

• For both Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, the height of self-actualization was creativity, and one of the key drivers of creativity was openness to experience. Carl Rogers simply defined openness to experience as “the opposite of psychological defensiveness.”
• Rogers conceptualized openness to experience as a mode of cognitive processing where one is open to all of one’s personal experiences, receiving conflicting information without forcing closure, tolerating ambiguity, and seeing reality clearly without imposing predetermined categories onto the world.

INTELLECT: FINDING YOUR WAY BACK TO SHORE 

Slipping into “craziness” is frightening only for those who are not fully confident of their sanity. —Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

• In my doctoral research, I found only a moderate relationship between IQ and intellectual curiosity: there were plenty of people with sky-high IQ scores but little intellectual curiosity, and plenty of people with a lot of intellectual curiosity but with lower IQ scores. Long-term studies have found that even though IQ is a strong predictor of academic achievement, intellectual curiosity is also a significant predictor of academic success, independent of IQ.

THE CREATIVITY PARADOX 

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. —Ernest Becker 

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad. —Salvador Dalí

• As Nobel Prize–winning chemist Linus Pauling put it, “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.” This often requires the ability to flexibly switch between seemingly contradictory modes of thought.
• Creative, self-actualized individuals are very human. Despite their high levels of self-actualization, they clearly still wrestled with many of the same problems of human existence that we all do. Nevertheless, they were very passionate about their work, and in solving problems within their domain, they often drew on their intuition and imagination just as much as, if not more than, their rationality and deliberate reasoning. This was just as true for the comedians as it was for the physicists.

CHAPTER 5 Love

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. —Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956)

• Unfortunately, society has deeply underestimated those who, just by being who they are, bring joy and light to everyone they meet.
• Humans not only have a need for belonging and connection, but also have a need to feel as though they are having a positive impact in the lives of other people. 
• To have the capacity to give love to those whom we don’t even have direct contact with, or feel a personal connection to, is a major pathway to a life of greater health, vitality, meaning, and growth as a whole person, not to mention a way of feeling more secure.

B-LOVE & D-LOVE

• Maslow explicitly distinguished ‘needing love’ from ‘unneeding love’ and referred to the former as D-love (deficiency love) and the latter as B-love (‘love for the being of another person’).
• Instead of needing, B-love is admiring, and instead of striving for satiation, B-love usually grows rather than disappears. As a result, B-love is typically a more enjoyable experience, as it is intrinsically valuable (not valuable as a means to some other end). 
• Maslow wrote: “B-love is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, a richer, ‘higher,’ more valuable and subjective experience than D-love (which all B-lovers have also previously experienced).”
• Similarly, in his book The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm argues that mature love is an active, not a passive, process; an attitude, not a feeling. The beauty of viewing love as an attitude, or an orientation toward others, is that you don’t need to wait until you have “positivity resonance” with another person before acting lovingly toward them.

This is why I find it necessary to distinguish B-love from the need for connection. As a person matures, and the needs of others become just as important as the needs of one’s self, a person gradually transforms the idea of love from “being loved” into “loving,” from a state of dependency in which one is rewarded by being loved to a loving orientation in which one is capable of loving the world at large.

PORTRAIT OF A B-LOVING PERSON 

• Self-actualizers have no serious deficiencies to make up and must now be looked upon as freed for growth, maturation, development, in a word, for the fulfillment and actualization of their highest individual and species nature. What such people do emanates from growth and expresses it without striving. They love because they are loving persons, in the same way that they are kind, honest, natural, i.e., because it is their nature to be so spontaneously . . . as a rose emits perfume, as a cat is graceful, or as a child is childish. —Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality

Self-Transcendent Values

•  B-loving people are high in universal concern (commitment to equal opportunity, justice, and protection for all people), universal tolerance (acceptance and understanding of those who are different from oneself, and promoting harmony and peace among diverse groups), trustworthiness and dependability for close loved ones, and benevolence and caring toward close friends and family.
• The greatest character strengths of B-loving people are 
  • Kindness
  • Love
  • Zest for life
  • Gratitude
  • Perspective
  • Forgiveness
  • Social intelligence
  • Appreciation
  • Teamwork
  • Hope
  • Fairness
  • Curiosity
  • Judgment
  • Humility
  • love of learning
  • Humor
  • Spirituality. 

B-loving people also score high on some agency-related traits, such as grit, industriousness, productiveness, organization, and responsibility.

• Healthy Compassion B-loving people tend to enjoy caring for others and believe it’s important to help alleviate the suffering of people from all walks of life. 
• What’s more, their motives are genuine: they are likely to endorse growth-fostering motives for helping others, such as “I like helping others because it genuinely makes me feel good to help others grow,” “A main reason why I help others is a desire for personal growth,” and “A main motivation why I give to others is to increase my openness to new experiences.” 
• B-loving people also tend to have grown up in environments in which helping others was highly valued (but their own personal needs were also valued).
• While B-loving people tend to score high in affective empathy, they tend to score low in pathological altruism—the tendency to place another’s needs above one’s own in a way that may cause harm. They have the capacity to accurately assess the real needs of others but not get swept away by their empathy in a way that is unhealthy or even damaging to themselves and others. This ability is due, in part, to their cognitive empathy as well as their healthy coping mechanisms.

 

In George Vaillant’s massive seventy-five-year Harvard study, he found that five mature coping mechanisms were associated with greater growth, positive mental health, warm human relationships, and successful careers (i.e., healthy adaptation to life). B-loving people tend to focus on each of the following strategies when they feel that burnout is near: Anticipation, Suppression, Humor, Sublimation, and Altruism 

Anticipation: 

• Realistic anticipation of or planning for future inner discomfort. According to Vaillant, “Anticipation permits the person to become aware of an event before it happens and thus attenuate associated anxiety and depression.” Examples include: “When I have to face a difficult situation I try to imagine what it will be like and plan ways to cope with it” and “If I can predict that I’m going to be sad ahead of time, I can cope better.”
  • Very helpful in my own life has been visualization 

Suppression: 

• Intentionally avoiding thinking about disturbing problems, desires, feelings, or experiences until a later time when they can more maturely be processed and integrated. Valliant found this was the coping mechanism that was most closely associated with successful adaptation—but was also the one most at risk for overuse.

Humor: 

• The use of humor to allow one to cope and yet still focus on the job that needs to get done. Mature coping (B-humor) is not self-derogatory and doesn’t involve distraction or displacement away from the issue at hand.
• Freud also believed that “humor can be regarded as the highest of these defensive processes,”

Sublimation: 

• Expression of aggression through pleasurable games, sports, hobbies, romance, and creative expression.

Altruism: 

• Getting pleasure from giving to others what you yourself would like to receive. For example: “I get satisfaction from helping others, and if this were taken away from me, I would get depressed”

 

Healthy Self-Love

• Maslow wrote that “we must not assume that selfish or unselfish behavior is either good or bad until we actually determine where the truth exists. At certain times, selfish behavior is good, and at other times, it is bad. It also may be that unselfish behavior is sometimes good and at other times bad.” 
• Maslow argued the need to distinguish between healthy selfishness, which is rooted in psychological abundance and the motivation to become a unique person and to learn, grow, and be happy, and unhealthy selfishness, which is rooted in psychological poverty, neuroticism, and greed.

Quiet Ego 

• The self can be our greatest resource, but it can also be our darkest enemy. On the one hand, the fundamentally human capacities for self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-control are essential for reaching our goals. On the other hand, the self has a perpetual desire to been seen in a positive light. The self will do anything to disavow responsibility for any negative outcome. 
• B-loving people are much more likely to express the following four deeply interconnected facets of the quiet ego, which any of us can cultivate in ourselves:

Detached Awareness. 

• Those with a quiet ego have an engaged, nondefensive form of attention to the present moment. They are aware of both the positives and negatives of a situation, and their attention is detached from more ego-driven evaluations of the present moment. Rather, they attempt to see reality as clearly as possible.
• This requires openness and acceptance to whatever one might discover about the self or others in the present moment while letting the moment unfold as naturally as possible—an important component of mindfulness. It also involves the ability to revisit thoughts and feelings that have already occurred, examine them more objectively than perhaps one was able to in the moment, and make the appropriate adjustments that will lead to further growth.

Inclusive Identity

• People whose egos are turned down in volume have a balanced or more integrative interpretation of the self and others. They understand other perspectives in a way that allows them to identify with the experience of others, break down barriers, and come to a deeper understanding of common humanity. If your identity is inclusive, you’re likely to be cooperative and compassionate toward others rather than working to help only yourself.
• Even if all you learned is how much you still believe in your own viewpoint, you still treated the person as human first.

Perspective-Taking

• By reflecting on other viewpoints, the quiet ego brings attention outside the self, increasing empathy and compassion. Perspective-taking and inclusive identity are intertwined, as either one can trigger the other. For instance, realizing what you have in common with others can stimulate a greater understanding of their perspective.

Growth-Mindedness

• Turning down the dial on one’s ego also allows for a mindset of personal growth. An interest in changing oneself over time increases the likelihood of prosocial behaviors because it causes one to question the long-term impact of their actions in the moment and to view the present moment as part of an ongoing life journey instead of a threat to one’s self and existence.

The goal of the quiet ego approach is to arrive at a less defensive and more integrative stance toward the self and others, not lose your sense of self or deny your self-esteem needs.

 

Healthy Authenticity 

• B-loving people are authentic, but in a healthy fashion. I believe it’s critical to distinguish between unhealthy authenticity (D-authenticity) and healthy authenticity (B-authenticity). As Adam Grant points out, “Nobody wants to hear everything that’s in your head.”
• Healthy authenticity does not mean walking around all the time spontaneously telling everyone whatever you’re feeling and thinking (that’s just foolish). Healthy authenticity does not mean incessantly talking about yourself and your greatest accomplishments (that’s just narcissism). Healthy authenticity does not mean spontaneously giving in to your darkest impulses (that’s just dark triad). Healthy authenticity does not mean fiercely protecting your values like you’re defending a fort (that’s just stubborn and inflexible).
• Instead, healthy authenticity, of the sort that helps you become a whole person (B-authenticity), involves understanding, accepting, and taking responsibility for your whole self as a route to personal growth and meaningful relationships. 
  • Healthy authenticity is an ongoing process of discovery, self-consciousness, and responsibility taking and is built on a secure foundation of a personality structure not dominated by the needs for safety, connection, and self-esteem. Springing from exploration and love, healthy authenticity allows you to truly face the unknown deep within yourself, accept the totality of your being, and become better at trusting that “alive, unique, personal center of ourselves,” as the German psychoanalyst Karen Horney put it

The main components of healthy authenticity are self-awareness, self-honesty, integrity, and authentic relationships.

WHOLE LOVE 

Mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality. . . . In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two. —Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

• Romantic love doesn’t have to be perfect. By forgiving our own foibles as well as accommodating those of our partner, we connect with our common humanity and foster growth in ourselves and our partner.
• Self-actualizing lovers maintain their strong individuality yet also transcend themselves, allowing for a more complete and transcendent love experience.
• In Motivation and Personality, Maslow has a chapter titled “Love in Self-Actualizing People,” in which he notes that “self-actualizing love shows many of the characteristics of self-actualization in general.” I refer to self-actualizing love as whole love, an enduring loving relationship that is continually and reciprocally in a state of health, growth, and transcendence. Whole love may never be attainable, but we can all strive toward it. 
• One key aspect of whole love is the healthy integration of the need for individuality and the need for connectedness. In discussing self-actualizing love, Maslow points out that “self-actualizing people maintain a degree of individuality, of detachment, and autonomy that seems at first glance to be incompatible with the kind of identification and love that I have been describing.” Indeed, most of us fear that by becoming too close to another person, we will lose our individuality and sense of self, and there is an entire literature on the potential for “role engulfment” when entering a relationship, in which a person’s identity becomes based on the role as a good relationship partner, causing detachment from others roles, goals and priorities in life.
• But this fear is transcended in whole love. For one, role engulfment is most likely to exist among those who are obsessively passionate about their relationship. For those who are harmoniously passionate about their relationship—where their relationship feels freely chosen, makes them feel good about who they are as a person, and is in harmony with the rest of the activities in their life—their relationships show greater personal growth. 
• A key to maintaining such a harmonious relationship is exercising a certain degree of healthy selfishness in the relationship, which Maslow describes as “a great self-respect, a disinclination to make sacrifices without good reason.” Maslow notes that self-actualizing lovers demonstrate “a fusion of great ability to love and at the same time great respect for the other and great respect for oneself.” Becoming a whole person requires setting appropriate boundaries and balancing one’s own needs with the needs of others. 
• But perhaps the clearest way this paradox is resolved in whole love is by acknowledging that both partners can be interested in helping each other grow in their own direction. As Maslow notes, this requires not needing each other: “They can be extremely close together and yet go apart when necessary without collapsing. They do not cling to each other or have hooks or anchors of any kind. . . . Throughout the most intense and ecstatic love affairs, these people remain themselves and remain ultimately masters of themselves as well, living by their own standards even though enjoying each other intensely. 
• The self-actualizing lover does not cling or push away, but witnesses, admires, and helps the other person grow. 

• Another core aspect of self-actualizing love is having a renewed sense of awe and wonder for your partner.
• Maslow argues that “in self-actualizing people the quality of the love satisfactions and the sex satisfactions may both improve with the length of the relationship.”
• Research shows that couples can overcome boredom and stagnancy of passion in relationships by engaging in joint participation of self-expanding activities that are novel, arousing, and exciting, and that provides new information and experiences.*Research shows to boost this go on exciting dates. 

Attention 

• Sharon Salzberg, renowned Buddhist meditation teacher and author of Real Love, what she thought about this paradox, and she told me the following: “Obviously, romantic relationships are extremely complex, but from a meditative point of view, it’s also interesting just to look at the simple role of attention. How often do we stop paying attention to our partner? You know, any amount of complacency, or taking someone for granted. Mystery doesn’t necessarily only come from that sense of excitement. It doesn’t only come from the unknown, it also comes from discovery, sometimes, as we discover each other.”
• The moment we take our partner for granted, and assume that we have them forever, is the moment we stop discovering and admiring the depths of their full humanity.

B-Sex

• But here’s the thing: not all sexual motives are equally conducive to sexual satisfaction and growth as a whole person. Our sexual activities seem to form their own hierarchy, ranging from D-sex (sex used as a way of temporarily fulfilling a deficiency in one’s basic needs) to B-sex (sex used for the purposes of growth and deeper fulfillment). Again, one important variable that helps determine one’s placement on this hierarchy is the functioning of the attachment system. Those who are most securely attached in their relationships (i.e., those with the lowest levels of attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance) tend to report the highest levels of sexual satisfaction.
• Research shows that people with elevated levels of social anxiety report less satisfying sexual experiences; they report experiencing less pleasure and feelings of connectedness when sexually intimate compared to those who are not socially anxious. When you are preoccupied by self-evaluation or relationship insecurity, it’s difficult to fully enjoy the sexual moment.

EROS & SEXUALITY 

• A critical distinction, made many times throughout human history, is between eros and sexuality. While the mere physical act of sexual intercourse can be driven by many potential needs, eros has a very specific function: to grow and express the depths of one’s love. Sexuality is about stimulation and release, whereas eros is about imagination and possibility. 
• As Rollo May notes in Love & Will, “The essence of eros is that it draws us from ahead, whereas sex pushes us from behind.” Similarly, Maslow noted that sexuality among self-actualizing lovers is “used as a foundation stone upon which higher things are built.”
• Just like life, growth often takes time, and the fusing of B-love with B-sex can be an especially important path to growth as a whole person.

☆Is love all you need? Interestingly, in my analysis of all the needs in this book, love was most strongly correlated with growth. Love is extremely important, if not most important, for becoming a whole person. Still, there’s good reason to believe that love is not all we humans need.

CHAPTER 6 Purpose

Self-actualizing people are, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside of themselves. They are devoted, working at something, something which is very precious to them—some calling or vocation in the old sense. They are working at something which fate has called them to somehow and which they work at and which they love, so that the work-joy dichotomy in them disappears. —Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971)

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable. —Seneca

• From his close-up observations, Maslow realized the immense potential of the workplace for testing his ideas about self-actualization and world betterment. The experience “opened up to me a body of theory and research which was entirely new to me and which set me to thinking and theorizing.” Before it, Maslow had deemed education the best means of improving the human species, but “only recently has it dawned on me that as important as education perhaps even more important is the work life of the individual since everybody works. . . . The industrial situation may serve as the new laboratory for the study of psychodynamics, of higher human development, of ideal ecology for the human being.”6
  • Charles Koch on the Psychology Podcast was very good and hits on this (Also read Maslow on Management) https://open.spotify.com/episode/7op6KLJaVB2hNNZ5I34BUO?si=HUOWWeLWR9K7QoOJMfUx-w&nd=1
  • “Summer Notes on Social Psychology of Industry and Management,” which, to Maslow’s delight, Kay offered to publish as a book. In October 1965, Eupsychian Management: A Journal

• The ordinary dichotomy between inner and outer is also resolved, according to Maslow, because the cause for which one works is “introjected” and becomes part of the self so that “the inner and the outer world fuse and become one and the same.” Maslow argued that such synergy is most likely to occur under ideal conditions, such as the case with McGregor’s Theory Y, in which workers have an abundance of autonomy, cooperation, support, and trust.
• Maslow also noted his disdain for those “youngsters” who believed that self-actualization is all about impulsivity and doesn’t require hard work. “They all seem to want to wait passively for it to happen without any effort on their part,” he noted. “Self-actualization is hard work. . . . It involves a calling to service from the external, day-to-day world, not only a yearning from within.”
• “Hard work and total commitment to doing well the job that fate or destiny calls you to do, or any important job that ‘calls for’ doing.”

Maslow, those who were most self-actualized pursued their calling, not happiness. Nevertheless, he pointed out that happiness often comes as a result anyway: “Happiness is an epiphenomenon, a by-product, something not to be sought directly but an indirect reward for virtue. . . . The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important.”

THE NEED FOR PURPOSE 

Man’s search for meaning is a primary force in his life. . . . There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are “nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations.” But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my “defense mechanisms,” nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my “reaction formations.” Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values! —Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1959)

• The need for purpose can be defined as the need for an overarching aspiration that energizes one’s efforts and provides a central source of meaning and significance in one’s life. Having a purpose often causes a fundamental reordering of the most central motives associated with the self. Things that once preoccupied you suddenly cause you little concern and may even seem trivial.
• “The actualizing person is busy with the concerns to which he has chosen to commit his living and seldom stops to assess his happiness,” says Bugental. “It seems only the neurotic and the unhappy that expend their concern explicitly and directly on their happiness. . . . Happiness is a state that is pushed away by the hand that would grasp it but that tends to accompany the person who is alive to his own being.”

★In an unpublished essay from 1964 called “The Psychology of Happiness,” Maslow argued for the need to redefine, and enrich, the entire concept of happiness. Contending that we must learn to give up happiness as the goal of life, he argued that it is a privilege of existence to have “worthwhile pain”—childbirth, loving someone very much even though you suffer their troubles as well, being tortured over your craft. Good living and happiness, Maslow contended, must be redefined to include such instances of “miserable privileges”: “Perhaps we can define happiness as experiencing real emotions over real problems and real tasks.”

• One of the most important concepts in the entire book

• Another key aspect of purpose is that it is energizing. Having a purpose fuels perseverance despite obstacles because perseverance is seen as worth the effort. As Nietzsche said: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
• Frankl noted that “man is originally pushed by drives but pulled by meaning. . . . Man’s primary concern is his will to meaning!” When the primary will to meaning is frustrated, according to Frankl, our energies are projected into the will to power, and if that need is frustrated, energy is projected into the will to pleasure.
• The purpose of life is not based on asking questions about life but answering the questions, or calls, that come from life. 
• Later, in his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl wrote poignantly about how he witnessed that the ones who were most likely to survive in the concentration camps were those who believed there was a task waiting for them to fulfill. He argued that those who see a greater meaning in their lives are able to “transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement.”
• Maslow often wrote about purpose as akin to having a calling. While the notion of a calling has religious connotations, many people report feeling “called into the future” regardless of their religiosity. Science confirms that seeing one’s work as a calling is related to satisfaction in life.
• Finally, having a purpose involves responsibility. By committing to a higher aspiration, you are accepting responsibility for the consequences of your actions as you embark on the journey to fulfill your purpose.

He wanted to be able to look at himself in the mirror and be proud of who he saw.

• The hallmark characteristic of the self-actualizing person may be the ability to strive for a purpose that will make one unpopular with the neighboring environment, particularly if the environment is unhealthy, hostile, or dangerous.

Maslow argued for getting in touch with your “intrinsic conscience,” one based upon the accurate perception of your own nature, destiny, capacities, and calling in life. But what if you don’t feel you have a calling? Or what if you have the wrong calling, one that is actually thwarting your growth, making you unhealthy, and not a good fit with your best selves? Or what if you do have the ideal calling, but you can’t seem to be able to reach your goals?

STRIVING WISELY 

• What is not worth doing is not worth doing well. —Abraham Maslow, Eupsychian Management (1965)
• Merely having a purpose is not enough for growth. There are many overarching strivings that we can consciously set for ourselves that don’t actually help us grow as a whole person and, in many cases, can be downright detrimental to our self-realization. Research suggests that it’s crucial to choose the right goals for you.
• One thing that Sheldon and his colleagues has shown is that while selecting and progressing toward one’s personal strivings is conducive to well-being, the content of one’s strivings also matters. Goals that are conducive to growth—mastery, self-improvement, creativity, connection, contribution to society—are likely to lead to greater well-being than goals concerned with status and driven by insecurity—attaining power, money, self-esteem, appearance, or popularity.
  • Most of what we’re taught to strive for growing up *at least in the west, don’t actually contribute to our real growth. 

• Ideally, our strivings would be organized in such a way that they are supportive of our “ultimate concern” and help us become a better whole person. Self-regulation researchers emphasize that goal-directed behavior is hierarchically organized, from concrete, short-term, actionable goals on up to the most abstract, longer-term, overarching life goals.
• If we’ve chosen our purpose wisely, we can intentionally shift our priorities and reorganize our strivings so that they help serve a common purpose, enabling us to transcend our current selves and move toward our best possible selves. The importance of having a clear image of our possible self cannot be overstated.

 

At the twenty-five-year follow-up, one of the most important predictors of creativity was the extent to which the participants “fell in love with a future image of themselves” in their youth. This single variable out predicted every single measure of school performance Torrance and his colleagues included in their study.

• “life’s most energizing and exciting moments occur in those split seconds when our struggling and searching are suddenly transformed into the dazzling aura of the profoundly new, an image of the future.”

Goal Hierarchy of Personal Strivings

• Therefore, the wisest path in life is to deliberately commit to a goal that is expressed in your vision of your future self and is highly integrated with your other strivings. 
• You may have to consciously change habits that no longer serve the broader vision of who you could become. Indeed, your goal hierarchy doesn’t have to consist solely of things on your to-do list; equally important is your not-to-do list. This may include something like “gracefully say no to opportunities that don’t resonate with me at a deeper level.”
• Whatever your hierarchy, make sure that your various strivings and goals are organized to bring you closer to realizing your best possible self and help you to avoid the many (often seductive) distractions and external demands that are likely to keep you from your more overarching goals.

The Why of Purpose 

Under ideal conditions there would be isomorphism, a mutual selection between the person and his [self-actualizing] work (his cause, responsibility, call, vocation, task, and so forth). That is, each task would “call for” just that one person in the world most uniquely suited to deal with it, like a key and a lock, and that one person would then feel the call most strongly and would reverberate to it, be tuned to its wavelength, and so be responsive to its call. There is an interaction, a mutual suitability, like a good marriage or like a good friendship, like being designed for each other. —Abraham Maslow, Eupsychian Management

• It’s entirely possible to adopt a growth goal but still not feel that it’s really you.
• Sheldon found that we can gain insight into the motivations underlying our strivings by consciously reflecting on the reasons why we chose certain goals.
  • What are you reading, where are your interests directed? Unearth your motivations… 

• Your motivational quality can range from total amotivation (just feeling like you’re going through the motions) to external pressure, to internal pressure, to personal value, to intrinsic motivation, in which you find inherent satisfaction and enjoyment in your work. Those who have the highest quality motivation are those who highly value what they are doing and get inherent satisfaction from doing it.
• What separated those with self-determined strivings from those who felt controlled? His early studies suggested that those who felt the greatest autonomy in their strivings were those who were more open to experiences and more mindful of their inner experience. They also scored higher on a test of self-actualization.
• Further studies found that the strivings that most accurately represent an individual are “self-concordant goals.” A large body of research suggests that choosing self-concordant goals has important implications not only for setting off an upward spiral of growth, fulfillment, and well-being but also for the amount of effort you are willing to put into the striving—and the likelihood that you will eventually attain the goal.
• There are many reasons why you may be striving toward something that doesn’t really suit you. For one, Sheldon found those who reported less self-concordance in their strivings—i.e., less of a fit with their intrinsic interests and values—were more reliant on external influence. Indeed, there are many societal pressures (e.g., parents, friends, social media, etc.) that can strongly influence your commitments and strivings. As a result, you can end up in situations or jobs that you may consciously value, or think you “should” value, but you don’t actually value at a deep level.
• We often operate so much at the level of our “rational self” (who we “should” be) that we lose touch with our “experiential self” (who we actually are). But the experiential self often has considerable wisdom about who we are and, more importantly, who we could become. We shouldn’t be ashamed of these signals; we should embrace them with full acceptance and understanding.
• There are hazards in skipping right to purpose without working on other areas of growth. Modern research suggests that underlying violent extremism is the dominant need for personal significance—the desire to matter, to “be someone,” and to have meaning in one’s life. Merely having a purpose is not always healthy. It is entirely possible to choose a striving that brings out the worst in yourself and others because it is motivated by a desperate, never-ending quest to fill a deficiency in one of the security needs, whether it’s safety, belonging, or self-esteem.
• According to research, the most growth-fostering purpose is one that is built on a strong foundation of a secure environment, belonging, connection, and a healthy self-esteem, and is driven by exploration and love. It requires a deep integration of many needs.
• In the book Some Do Care.56 According to Colby and Damon, “moral exemplars” are: Principled/virtuous: They show “a sustained commitment to moral ideals or principles that include a generalized respect for humanity; or a sustained evidence of moral virtue.”
  • 1. a sustained commitment to moral ideals or principles that include a generalized respect for humanity, or a sustained evidence of moral virtue 
  • 2.a disposition to act in accord with one’s moral ideals or principles, implying also a consistency between one’s actions and intentions and between the means and ends of one’s actions 
  • 3.a willingness to risk one’s self-interest for the sake of one’s moral values 
  • 4.a tendency to be inspiring to others and thereby to move them to moral action 
  • 5.a sense of realistic humility about one’s own importance relative to the world at large, implying a relative lack of concern for one’s own ego

Consistent: They have “a disposition to act in accord with one’s moral ideals or principles, implying also a consistency between one’s actions and intentions and between the means and the ends of one’s actions.” Brave: They show “a willingness to risk one’s self-interest for the sake of one’s moral values.”

Inspiring: They have “a tendency to be inspiring to others and thereby to move them to moral action.” Humble: They demonstrate “a sense of realistic humility about one’s own importance relative to the world at large, implying a relative lack of concern for one’s own ego.”

• So what did they find? In one sense, all of the influential figures were cut from a similar cloth: they were all highly agentic in their goal pursuits. Indeed, psychologist Andrea Kuszewski has pointed out that the common thread between heroes and villains is their capacity for toughness, bravery, risk-taking, and rebelliousness.
• The moral exemplars demonstrated “enlightened self-interest,” showing an integration of the agency and communion drives in such a way that advancing their own interests necessarily involved helping others. This is strikingly similar to Maslow’s conceptualization of synergy.
• The influential figures were also extremely diverse in their ultimate purpose.
• For most of us, the greatest source of growth, energy, and wholeness comes about when our agentic drive to realize the deepest part of us is harmoniously integrated with our drive to have a positive effect on others—whether it’s through mastering a craft, giving birth to an artistic creation, inspiring leadership, or being involved in a humanitarian organization.
• We tend to be most happy, persistent, productive, and high-performing when we both feel self-determined and are motivated to make a positive impact. As Sheldon put it, “The happiest person is the person doing good stuff for good reasons.”

 

Bringing it all together, striving wisely involves choosing overarching strivings that (a) really fit your deepest growth impulses, (b) feel enjoyable and are freely chosen, (c) help you move toward a future self that will continue to grow and contribute to society, and (d) are well integrated with your other strivings in life as well as your other basic needs.

PURSUING WISELY 

• If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities. —Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

The following characteristics are essential for living your purpose in the way that will lead to optimal health, growth, and well-being: 

• SMART Goals 
• Grit and equanimity 
• Harmonious passion 
• Exercising your signature strengths 
• Hope Being supported 
• Knowing when to move on

SMART Goals 

1) specific, 2) measurable, 3) achievable, 4) relevant, and 5) time-specific.

Grit and Equanimity 

• Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental resources. . . . Men the world over possess amounts of resource, which only exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use. —William James, The Energies of Man
• Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word “happy” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity. —Carl Jung, The Art of Living

 

• To live your purpose, it’s important to recognize that your deepest passions develop and grow over time. Living your purpose consists of an ongoing, cyclical process of passion and perseverance.  One recent study found that the more one’s calling grew over a two-year period, the more it was likely to be lived during the third year.
• This is why it’s so important to not view your passion and interests as already fully formed and simply in need of being discovered. People who believe that interests are relatively fixed are more likely to lose interest when things get difficult and are therefore more likely to give up too soon. Just because you are striving wisely does not mean that it’s going to be easy to live your highest strivings.
• We found a ZERO correlation between having a diversity of interests and being inconsistent in your interests—but a significant positive correlation between having diverse interests and persevering in the face of adversity. In other words, having a number of projects on the go that you are excited about doesn’t mean that you will be any more likely to give up on them.
• Having a diversity of interests was strongly related to the exploration drive, as well as higher levels of health, life satisfaction, self-acceptance, purpose in life, personal growth, feelings of wholeness, positive relationships, autonomy, stress tolerance, psychological flexibility, work satisfaction, work performance, creativity, and a drive to make a positive impact on the world.
• Inconsistency of interests was negatively related to many of these outcomes. 
• Our research clearly shows that you can have a diversity of interests and yet still remain extremely consistent in your most deeply valued interests. In fact, grit in combination with exploration and love (including healthy self-love) make it more likely that you will have the drive to persevere among setbacks.
• Far from an obsessive pursuit of one’s long-terms goals no matter the consequences, an important component of equanimity is radiating warmth and openness as you encounter the inevitable stressors of life. The Buddha characterized the person with equanimity as “abundant, exalted, immeasurable, without hostility and without ill-will.”
• Equanimity also consists of a cultivation of mindfulness and observation, of not pursuing one’s purpose with blinders on but constantly being open to new information, constantly seeking wisdom and honest awareness of reality, and constantly monitoring your progress and impact on your own personal growth as well as the impact on others.
• A third aspect of equanimity is balance, stability, and centeredness. Equanimity draws on inner strength, grounded in healthy authenticity and the most alive center of your being. The more secure you are in who you are, the more likely you will be to withstand the inevitable roadblocks on your journey to pursue who you most wish to become.

Harmonious Passion

• It’s also important to take stock of whether you have become so driven in pursuit of your purpose that it has eclipsed other sides of yourself or pushed aside other activities that aren’t directly related to your purpose but also bring you a sense of growth and wholeness.

Exercising Your Signature Strengths 

• As you live your purpose, make sure that you are continually using your greatest personality strengths in new and different ways. 
• Multiple studies suggest that the more you can find new and different ways to use your signature strengths in your daily life, the greater your well-being and the lower the likelihood of experiencing anxiety and depression. The more authentic you feel as you are pursuing your purpose, the more likely you will be to stand up straight in the face of hard knocks because you are driven by a solid core deep within.

Hope 

• • There may be some character strengths that we’d all benefit from cultivating. Two that are universally worth cultivating on the path to purpose have already been discussed: exploration and love. Another is hope. The hope I am referring to is not optimism, which is limited to the expectation of a positive future. Instead, it consists of both the will and ways to get to your goal.
  • Charles Snyder and Shane Lopez have found that the more energized you are by your goal and the more you can imagine possible roadblocks and devise strategies to overcome obstacles, the more hope you will have and the less likely that roadblocks will stunt your growth.

• A hope mindset fosters belief that MULTIPLE paths are possible to get where you want to go and helps you remain FLEXIBLE when any one pathway seems blocked. Hopeful people are more likely to interpret failures as opportunities for growth, attribute setbacks to a poor strategy rather than a character flaw, summon multiple resources and strategies for handling setbacks, and recognize the potential barriers to goal attainment.

• In one recent study, which tracked a number of personality strengths over the course of a year, hope emerged as the only strength that uniquely buffered against the negative impact of traumatic life events on well-being.

Being Supported 

• Even the most explorative, loving, and purposeful individual will have difficulty fully self-actualizing in an unsupportive environment.
• Environmental support involves two components that work together to help bring out the best in people: enlightened leadership and enlightened culture.

Enlightened Leaders (great checklist for leaders to print out and look at daily) 

• Enlightened leaders lead by example. They set high standards for performance, work as hard as anyone else in the organization, and articulate clearly, with genuine enthusiasm, a compelling purpose or vision of the future for the organization.

• Enlightened leaders are good at informing employees. They make explicit links between the tasks of the job and the broader purpose and vision of the organization, make clear their expectations, and give honest and fair answers in response to their employees’ concerns.

• Enlightened leaders trust employees, explicitly stating their confidence and belief that the employees will meet their high expectations.

• Enlightened leaders engage in participative decision-making, downplaying power hierarchies, encouraging and giving all employees an opportunity to voice opinions, and using feedback to make decisions in the workplace.

• Enlightened leaders are good at coaching employees, providing help when necessary, teaching employees how to solve problems on their own, telling employees when they are performing well, helping them stay on task, and sometimes seeing greater possibilities for them than they may even see in themselves.
• Enlightened leaders show that they care about their employees, finding the time to chat with individual employees and get their feedback, figuring out ways of increasing well-being and meaning in the workplace, and assigning tasks that are challenging and will continually help their employees grow, develop, and feel a sense of authentic pride.

Enlighted Culture 

• An enlightened culture is autonomy-supportive. 
  • Those who are in autonomy-supportive environments feel as though their decisions are freely chosen and that their most committed goals and highest strivings are self-endorsed, rather than a result of external rewards or obligations to follow the orders of a manager. Of course, some tasks are assigned by managers, but the key factor is that the person is provided with clear and meaningful explanations for why they are doing something, rather than feeling controlled or pressured to engage in a task, and employees feel some choice in how they manage their task.
• Recent research suggests that the more people feel psychologically free (autonomy), the more they take personal responsibility for their actions and the more likely they are to accept blame for their failures.
• An autonomy-supportive environment also involves coworker support: coworkers or peers are interested in one another’s growth and freedom and share expertise and knowledge, even helping someone who falls behind schedule or is having difficulty reaching their most deeply cherished strivings.
• Such a culture also displays minimal cynicism. Everyone gives everyone else the benefit of the doubt and is continually trying to see the best in others. People aren’t interacting with others only to get something from them, but they truly admire others and care for their growth, development, and freedom.
• They allow for a certain degree of job-crafting, whereby employees have some say in designing their job to allow growth, engagement, job satisfaction, resilience, purpose, and well-being. 
  • Job crafters can redesign how they perform tasks, increasing social connection while engaging in their task, and reframe their task as something more meaningful and beneficial to society. The restaurant chef can become an artist. The nurse can become a therapist. Even the most seemingly limited jobs can afford opportunities for job crafting.
  • Job-crafting also has the potential to satisfy one’s unanswered callings, or a longing and passion for an occupation other than the one they are currently working in.

• At the end of the day, if you find yourself in a culture that is too inhibiting of your growth and freedom, and in which you feel as though you have little opportunity to live your purpose or strike a healthy balance of other passions in your life, it might truly be time to move on. Indeed, knowing when an occupation or purpose is no longer serving your growth is also an essential part of becoming a whole person. Sometimes the best thing for your growth and development is really just letting go. Far from quitting, it is the smart move because it frees up our limited resources to be applied to alternative choices that foster new purpose and promote future development.

CHAPTER 7 Peak Experiences

• Maslow observed that peak experiences occurred in a wide range of people and seemed to have many triggers—whether an excellent athletic or music performance, creative experience, aesthetic perception, the love experience, sexual experience, childbirth, moments of insight and understanding, religious or mystical experience, or overcoming a profound challenge—“any experience that comes close to perfection.”
• What’s more, it seemed that the greater a person’s psychological health, the greater the frequency of such experiences, the higher their height, and the greater the intensity and the illumination.
• I would like you to think of the most wonderful experience or experiences in your life; happiest moments, ecstatic moments, moments of rapture, perhaps from being in love, or from listening to music or suddenly “being hit” by a book or a painting, or from some great creative moment. First list these. And then try to tell me how you feel in such acute moments, how you feel differently from the way you feel at other times, how you are at the moment a different person in some ways.
• What was cognition like in the throes of the peak experience, these “transient states of absolute Being”? 
• Maslow outlined seventeen characteristics, including: 
  • Complete absorption 
  • Richer perception 
  • Disorientation in physical time and space 
  • Intrinsic reward of the experience 
  • Ego transcendence 
  • Dichotomy transcendence 
  • Momentary loss of fears, anxieties, and inhibitions 
  • Greater acceptance and forgiveness of oneself and others 
  • Heightened aestheticism, wonder, awe, and surrender 
  • Fusion of the person and the world

Maslow noticed that for people in their highest moments, the true, the good, and the beautiful “are so highly correlated that for all practical purposes they are said to fuse into a unity.”

THE SCIENCE OF TRANSCENDENT EXPERIENCES

• Yaden’s 2017 review article, “The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience,” co-authored with Jonathan Haidt, Ralph Hood, David Vago, and Andrew Newberg—a dream team of experts—in Review of General Psychology. The article integrates the growing psychological literature on self-transcendent experiences.
• The researchers define transcendent experiences as “transient mental states marked by decreased self-salience and increased feelings of connectedness.” Further studies since Newberg’s earlier work have confirmed that people reporting mystical and out-of-body experiences show decreases in activation of the superior and inferior parietal lobe, as well as the nearby temporo-parietal junction—a cluster of brain regions that represent self-other boundaries and egocentric spatial awareness.
• “This line of reasoning emphasizes how most fears and anxieties come from the prospect of damage to one’s physical or social self. Therefore, when the self temporarily disappears, so, too, may some of these fears and anxieties.” 
• At its most extreme, transcendence is a feeling of complete unity with everything (“Absolute Unitary Being”)⭕, including other humans (the social environment), as well as all of existence, nature, and the cosmos (the spatial environment).* James observed that one extreme outcome from mystical experiences can be the feeling of being at home in the universe.
• But not all transcendent experiences are mystical. There are a variety of transcendent experiences that differ in their intensity and degree of unity with the world. There is a “unitary continuum,” ranging from the experience of becoming deeply absorbed in an engrossing book, sports performance, or creative activity (what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as the flow experience), to experiencing an extended mindful meditation retreat, to feeling gratitude for a selfless act of kindness, to merging with a loved one, to experiencing awe at a beautiful sunset or the stars above, to being so inspired by something—whether an inspiring role model, virtuoso performance, intellectual idea, or act of moral beauty—that you have a “transcendent awakening,” all the way up to the great mystical illumination.

 

HEALTHY SELF-LOSS

• However, in transcendent moments of self-loss, there is often a heightened sense of pure Being, and the experience often feels “realer than real.”
• Healthy self-loss does not involve fear. Rather, it is characterized by curiosity and openness to the present moment and one’s inner experience.
• Having a substantial quieting of the ego is strongly related to having a strong, not weak, sense of self and with increased, not weakened, authenticity. Indeed, those with the quietest ego defenses often have the strongest sense of self. As the Buddhist Harvard psychotherapist Jack Engler put it, “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.”
• Maslow tried to make sense of this seeming paradox, noting that “the greatest attainment of identity, autonomy, or selfhood is itself simultaneously a transcending of itself, a going beyond and above selfhood. The person can then become egoless.” While Maslow admits that he doesn’t fully understand the paradox, he attempts to further describe the particular aspect of self that becomes transcended in these moments: “[There is] the total loss of self-consciousness or self-observation which is normally with us but which we feel to lower in any absorption or interest or concentration or distraction, or being taken ‘out of ourselves,’
• “The fact is that self-actualizing people are simultaneously the most individualistic and the most altruistic and social and loving of all human beings. The fact that we have in our culture put these qualities at opposite ends of a single continuum is apparently a mistake that must now be corrected. These qualities go together and the dichotomy is resolved in self-actualizing people.”

AWE: THE EVERYPERSON’S SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 

The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy. —Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

• The authors argued that there are two main cognitive appraisals that are central to awe experiences: the perception of vastness and the struggle to mentally process the experience. Vastness need not be perceptual, such as seeing the Grand Canyon, but can also be conceptual, such as contemplating eternity. Awe is an unusual and complex emotion because it mixes emotions that don’t tend to go with each other, such as ecstasy and fear.
• “Natural scenery” was described as the most frequent trigger, although other triggers were also represented: great skill, encounter with God, great virtue, building or monument, powerful leader, grand theory or idea, music, art, epiphany. The second most represented trigger was the “other” category. Consistent with what Maslow observed, a number of the write-in responses referred to childbirth as a trigger for intense awe experiences.

MIND-ALTERING INTERVENTIONS

•  It may be that these drugs [especially LSD and psilocybin] . . . could be used to produce a peak-experience, with core-religious revelation, in non-peakers, thus bridging the chasm between these two separated halves of mankind. —Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences
• Psychedelics have helped addicted smokers quit smoking; terminal cancer patients face death with less depression and anxiety and even increased well-being and life satisfaction;66 treatment-resistant depression (TD) patients decrease their levels of anxiety and increase their mood and openness to experience; and veterans substantially lower their PTSD and intrusive flashbacks. (MDMA-assisted psychotherapy also shows promise in treating PTSD as well as improving social anxiety among autistic adults.)67 In the case of depression, psilocybin therapy may show even more progress in improving mood and openness to experience than traditional antidepressant treatment.

 

CHAPTER 8 Theory Z: Toward the Farther Reaches of Human Nature

 Human life will never be understood unless its highest aspirations are taken into account. —Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality

• Healthy transcendence is an emergent phenomenon resulting from the harmonious integration of one’s whole self in the service of cultivating the good society.
• This view of transcendence, which I believe is the healthiest form of transcendence, is not about leaving any parts of ourselves or anyone else behind or singularly rising above the rest of humanity. Healthy transcendence is not about being outside of the whole, or feeling superior to the whole, but being a harmonious part of the whole of human existence.
• It’s also not a level any human ever actually achieves, but it is a north star for all of humanity. In a nutshell: healthy transcendence involves harnessing all that you are in the service of realizing the best version of yourself so you can help raise the bar for the whole of humanity.
• Maslow proposed that transcenders are “metamotivated” by higher ideals and values that go beyond the satisfaction of basic needs and the fulfillment of one’s unique self. These metamotivations include a devotion to a calling outside oneself, as well as a commitment to the ultimate values, or the B-values, the values of Being. Maslow’s list of B-values includes truth, goodness, beauty, justice, meaningfulness, playfulness, aliveness, uniqueness, excellence, simplicity, elegance, and wholeness.

 

Maslow’s Characteristics of Transcenders (pg 221 for complete list) 

• Transcenders are less “happy” than the healthy ones. They can be more ecstatic, more rapturous, and experience greater heights of “happiness,” but they are as prone—or maybe more prone—to a kind of cosmic sadness or B-sadness over the stupidity of people, their self-defeat, their blindness, their cruelty to one another, their shortsightedness.
• Perhaps this comes from the contrast between what actually is and the ideal world that the transcenders can see so easily and so vividly, and which is in principle so easily attainable. Perhaps this is a price these people have to pay for their direct seeing of the beauty of the world, of the saintly possibilities in human nature, of the nonnecessity of so much of human evil, of the seemingly obvious necessities for a good world; for human goodness rather than for higher IQs or greater expertness at some atomistic job, etc.
• Transcenders find that increasing knowledge is associated with an increased sense of mystery, awe, humility, ultimate ignorance, reverence, and a sense of oblation. Most people pursue knowledge to lessen mystery and to reduce anxiety. But for peak experiencers and transcenders in particular, as well as for self-actualizers in general, mystery is attractive and challenging rather than frightening.
• The Theory Z worldview is full of awe, beauty, wonder, savoring, exploration, discovery, openness, holistic perception, unconditional acceptance, gratitude, B-love, B-humility (honest assessment of one’s capacities rather than hiding one’s self), B-playfulness, ego transcendence, synergy, unity, intrinsic motivation for work, and a motivation for the ultimate values in life.
• The Theory Z worldview is strikingly similar to the modern psychological research on wisdom. Wisdom is often conceptualized in psychological literature as involving an integration among cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions. This includes the ability to accept multiple perspectives, to respond nondefensively when challenged, to express a wide array of emotions in order to derive meaning, to critically evaluate human truths, and to become aware of the uncertain and paradoxical nature of human problems.
• Wisdom tends to increase with age and is most common among those with high levels of openness to experience, the capacity for self-examination and introspection, a motivation for personal growth, and the willingness to remain skeptical of one’s self-views, continually questioning assumptions and beliefs, and exploring and evaluating new information that is relevant to one’s identities.
  • Imagine if schools weren’t only a place to learn standardized academic material but were also places full of wonder, awe, and self-actualization—as well as hope for humanity.

 

THE PLATEAU EXPERIENCE 

• The great lesson from the true mystics—from the Zen monks, and now also from the Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologists—is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s back yard. —Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences
• One inner conflict that dogged his life was an insatiable need to be connected and liked by others, and for others to validate his sense of importance. Yet he also had a grandiose side in which he saw himself as a Messiah who “felt the great weight of responsibility & authority on my shoulders . . . & felt the responsibility of being the authority so heavily that it threw me into tension & exhaustion.” According to Becker, we all face the same conflict to some degree—between wanting to be God-like but also yearning to be part of a larger whole.
• By embracing his own full humanness and opening himself up to a deeper connection with the everyday world, Maslow eventually found his greatest peace, deepest sense of completion, and confidence that future generations would carry on his life’s work and vision.

Live More in the B-Realm 

• I was able to track down some of the B-exercises that Maslow was working on during the last few years of his life.
  • Sample things. 
  • Keep your eye on the ends, not only on the means.
  • Fight familiarization. 
  • Seek fresh experiences. 
  • Solve the Deficiency-problem (i.e., don’t always regard the Deficiency-realm as prepotent over the Being-realm). 
  • Get out of the Deficiency-world by deliberately going into the B-realm. 
  • Seek out art galleries, libraries, museums, beautiful or grand trees, and the mountains or seashore.
  • Cultivate periods of quiet, meditation, “getting out of the world,” and getting out of our usual locality, immediate concerns, apprehensions, and forebodings. 
  • Periodically get away from time-and-space concerns, away from clocks, calendars, responsibilities, demands.
  • Go into the dreamy state.
  • Perceive the eternal, intrinsic laws of the cosmos. To accept or even love these laws is Taoistic and the essence of a good citizen of the universe. Embrace your past. Embrace your guilt rather than running from it. 
  • Be compassionate with yourself. Be understanding, accepting, forgiving, and perhaps even loving your foils.
  • Smile at yourself.
  • Ask yourself: How would this situation look to a child? To the innocent? To a very old person who is beyond personal ambition and competition? 
  • Try to recover the sense of the miraculous about life. For example, a baby is a miracle. Think, for that baby now, “anything could happen” and “the sky is the limit.” Cultivate that sense of infinite possibility. 
  • To better appreciate your own present life situation, compare yourself not with those seemingly luckier than you but rather with others less fortunate than you. You musn’t be ashamed to be good in a cynical world. 
  • Never underestimate the power of a single individual to affect the world. Remember, one candle in a cave lights everything. 
  • In order to regain authentic dignity and pride, try not concealing, not relying on external signs of validation (uniforms, medals, a cap and gown, labels, social roles). Show yourself as ultimately naked and self-revealing. Show your secret scars, shames, and guilts. 
  • Remember, it took one child in the fairy tale to say “The emperor has no clothes!’ and then everyone saw it. 
  • Do not let anyone force roles on you. That is, do not act the way other people think that a doctor, minister, or teacher should act if it is not natural for you.… 
  • Do not conceal your ignorance. Admit it. 
  • Engage in deliberate, experimental philanthropy. If sometimes you are no good for yourself (depressed, anxious), at least you can be good for someone else. If you find yourself becoming egoistic, arrogant, conceited, or puffed up, think of mortality. Or think of other arrogant and conceited people and see how they look. 
  • Contemplate people who are admirable, beautiful, lovable, or respectworthy. Try narrowed-down absorption or close-up fascination with the small world—for instance, the anthills, insects on the ground. Closely inspect flowers or blades of grass.
  • Use the artist’s or photographer’s trick of seeing the object in itself. For instance, frame it and thereby cut it away from its surroundings, away from your preconceptions, expectations, and theories of how it should look. Enlarge the object. Or squint at it so you see only general outlines. Or gaze at it from unexpected angles, such as upside down. Look at the object reflected in a mirror. Put it in unexpected backgrounds, in out-of-the-ordinary… 
  • Be with babies or children for a long period of time. They are closer to the Being-realm. Sometimes, you can experience the Being-realm in the presence of animals, like kittens, puppies, monkeys, or apes. Contemplate your life from a historian’s viewpoint—one hundred or even one thousand years in the future. Contemplate your life from the viewpoint of a nonhuman such as it might appear to an ant. 
  • Contemplate your daily life as though being seen from a great distance, such as from a remote village in Africa.
  • Look at the same person or situation as if viewing for the very last time; imagine, for instance, that the person is going to die before you see him or her again. Think as vividly as you can how you would feel, what you would truly lose, and about what you would be sorry. Would you have any regret or remorse? How would you conduct an effective good-bye 
  • Imagine yourself to be dying—or to be on the edge of execution. Then imagine how vivid and precious everything and everyone looks. Imagine vividly saying good-bye to each of the persons you love best. 

AFTERWORD 

And it hit me: this is what life is about. Each of us is capable of transcendence in this brief, suffering, and yet sometimes miraculous lifetime. While we should not strive for perfection, each of us is capable of transcendence in this brief, suffering, and yet sometimes miraculous lifetime. We each have the potential to be a guide to future generations, to help them fill out the rest of the pages in their own style.

 

APPENDIX I Seven Principles for Becoming a Whole Person

• Wholeness is an aspiration, not a destination; it’s a process, not a state that is ever achieved.
• The process of becoming a whole person is an ongoing journey of discovery, openness, and courage, in which you reach higher and higher levels of integration and harmony within yourself and with the outside world, allowing greater flexibility and freedom to become who you truly want to become. Since you are always in a state of change, you are always in a state of becoming.

PRINCIPLE #1: ACCEPT YOUR WHOLE SELF, NOT JUST YOUR BEST SELF

• We each contain multitudes. For personal growth, I believe a better question you should ask yourself is:“Which potentialities within me do I most wish to spend my limited time cultivating, developing, and actualizing in this world?”
• In order to have the greatest freedom in answering that question, you must plumb the depths of your own consciousness and accept your whole self.
• People judge their positive behaviors as more authentic than their negative behaviors even when both behaviors are consistent with their personal characteristics and desires. What we think of as our true self really just seems to be our most valued self.
• Contrary to common sense, we don’t feel most authentic when we are simply acting in accord with our actual nature, warts and all. Regardless of our individual personality, we all tend to feel most authentic and connected to ourselves when we are feeling content, calm, joyful, loving, self-accepting, sociable, free, competent, making progress toward a goal, mindful of the present moment, and open to new experiences. 
  • In other words, we tend to feel most authentic when our basic needs are being met and we feel as though we have freely chosen to behave in a particular way and are assuming ownership of our subjective experiences.

• Due to this strong link between feeling authentic and engaging in socially desirable behaviors, what people think of as their true self may actually just be what people want to be seen as. According to social psychologist Roy Baumeister, when the way others think of you matches how you want to be seen, you will feel authentic and satisfied. As he notes, it’s not enough for people to simply convince themselves that they have positive traits; people also tend to need others to hold them in the same high regard. If you think back on your own personal experiences of when you’ve felt most authentic, you can probably recall moments of glow when your most valued characteristics and talents were also being valued by others.
  • *going to not fully agree with this. I’d argue that certain times I’m proudest of were when I stood up to my values and went against others so they were not in agreement. To me living in alignment with your values when everyone else is going the other ways is one of the foundations of authenticity.  

• I believe we each have best selves—aspects of who we are that are healthy, creative, and growth-motivated—that make us feel most connected to ourselves and to others.*
• The more we can drop our social facades and the defenses that we erect to protect ourselves, the more we open ourselves up to greater opportunities for growth, development, and creativity.
• An important first step to getting in touch with your best self is becoming aware as much as possible of your whole self and accepting the totality of your being. This includes accepting all of the aspects of yourself that you dislike and are too quick to disown.
• Of course, acceptance doesn’t necessarily mean liking. It’s perfectly reasonable to be repulsed by your intense desire to eat a stack of glazed donuts topped with cheese, for instance. However, as Carl Rogers noted, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” Part of acceptance is taking responsibility for your whole self, not just the aspects of your mind or your actions that you like or make you feel the best about yourself.*

 

PRINCIPLE #2: LEARN TO TRUST YOUR SELF-ACTUALIZING TENDENCY

• At a very young age, we feel hungry, or tired, or fearful, but are often given messages by well-meaning (and, sadly, often not-so-well-meaning) parents and other caretakers that “if you feel that way, I won’t love you.” This can happen in a number of subtle and unsubtle ways anytime an expression of a need is disregarded as not as important as the needs of the caretaker.
• And so we start acting how we should feel, not how we actually feel. As a result, so many of us grow up being constantly swayed by the opinions and thoughts of others, driven by our own insecurities and fears of facing our actual self, that we introject the beliefs, needs, and values of others into the essence of our being. Not only do we lose touch with our real felt needs, but we also alienate ourselves from our best selves.
• According to Rogers, the fully functioning person: Is open to all of the elements of their experience, Develops a trust in their own experiences as an instrument of sensitive living, Is accepting of the locus of evaluation as residing within themselves, and Is learning to live their life as a participant in a fluid, ongoing process, in which they are continually discovering new aspects of themselves in the flow of their experience.
• Rogers believed that when people are inwardly free to choose their deepest values, they tend to value experiences and goals that further survival, growth, and development, as well as the survival and development of others.

 

PRINCIPLE #3: BECOME AWARE OF YOUR INNER CONFLICTS 

• To have conflicts is human. Conflicts with others, conflicts with ourselves.
• Our inner conflicts typically penetrate the boundaries of self and cause us to take out our frustration and aggressive impulses on others. Our inner conflicts are a significant component of our struggle toward self- realization.
• If sometimes it feels as though there are multiple personalities within you that are constantly warring with one another, well, that’s because there are multiple personalities within you that are constantly warring with one another! Each of us contains a bundle of dispositions, emotional tendencies, values, attitudes, beliefs, and motives that are often contradictory and incompatible.
• Human beings, like every other living organism on the planet, are cybernetic systems—simply put, we are goal-directed systems. As such, humans have multiple, often conflicting goals, some of which are conscious, many of which are not. Each of our goals has its own imagined future of what the world would look like with the goal completed, and it has some representation of the steps to be taken that will hopefully allow us to reach the goal.
• While our vision of the future is not always clear, it nevertheless drives behavior and how we experience the world. We are constantly comparing our present experiences with where we want to be, directing our attention to the most relevant features of the world that will help us reduce the discrepancy between our current state and our goal state.
• Many of our goals are preprogrammed into our DNA because they increased the survival and reproduction of our distant ancestors. However, it’s important to recognize that the more we engage in a particular “sub-self”—or evolved component of the mind—the stronger that sub-self becomes and the quicker it is to activate in the future. Vice versa, the less we engage in that corner of the mind, the weaker the signal.
• Just knowing that all of us face these conflicts should make us more forgiving of our own foibles as well as the foibles of others.
• Walt Whitman was right, humans contain multitudes.

PRINCIPLE #4: LOOK OUT FOR LOPSIDED DEVELOPMENT 

• Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung argued that a major goal of therapy is to help move a person toward the “path of individuation,” in which one accepts the inherent contradictions within themselves so that they are able to fulfill their unique potential. 
• Jung proposed a general principle—the principle of enantiodromia—“running counter to”—which states that the presence of any extreme element in one’s personality also produces the opposite extreme in order to restore balance, even though the contradiction may remain hidden in the shadows of the subconscious.
• Karen Horney extended Jung’s ideas and identified a number of lopsided patterns of human social behavior, which she referred to as “neurotic trends.” Horney argued that these trends are attitudes toward other people and life that provide a feeling of safety and security during times of confusion and distress but which ultimately stunt growth.
• She grouped a large number of these trends under three main categories: 
  • (a) The extreme need for compliance and to be liked by others (“Moving Toward People”), 
  • (b) The extreme need to be antagonistic toward others and to constantly be rebellious (“Moving Against People”), 
  • (c) The extreme need to become detached from people and always prove one’s capacity for self-sufficiency (“Moving Away from People”).

• To be sure, it is perfectly normal and healthy to desire the affection and adulation of others, to value your solitude, and to want to express frustration and anger when your needs are thwarted. The problem is when these needs become so outsize that they become compulsive and have the ability to seize upon the whole person.

PRINCIPLE #5: CREATE THE BEST VERSION OF YOURSELF 

All of us retain the capacity to change, even to change in fundamental ways, as long as we live. —Karen Horney, Self-Analysis (1942)

• Horney argued that people also have to be willing to undergo extensive self-analysis and put in the considerable effort and hardship required for growth. Only then, she argued, can they begin the process of growing, gradually, by becoming more consciously aware of the triggers of their neurotic trends, testing their irrational beliefs, and changing their maladaptive attitudes about the world through experience and insight.
• Maslow echoed this approach to therapy when he wrote, “The process of therapy helps the adult to discover that the childish (repressed) necessity for the approval of others no longer need exist in the childish form and degree, and that the terror of losing these others with the accompanying fear of being weak, helpless and abandoned is no longer realistic and justified as it was for the child. For the adult, others can be and should be less important than for the child.”
• It does mean that, given favorable conditions, you have the potential to become the best you in the whole entire world. Put another way, no one else in the entire world has as much potential to become you than you.
• During the process of becoming, you still very much create yourself.
• Recent research shows that while enduring personality change isn’t easy, people really can change their personality in very substantial ways throughout life with intentional effort and therapy, as well as by making changes to one’s environment that have long-lasting influences on one’s personality, such as changing one’s job, social roles, or relationship partners, or by adopting new identities.
• For instance, everyone craves at least some solitude throughout the day, but some prefer a lot more solitude throughout the day. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t think of personality as something cast in stone or always consistent.
• Throughout the course of the day, everyone fluctuates in their personality and even their intellectual functioning quite a lot. Personality psychologist William Fleeson has found that people fluctuate in their personality traits throughout the day just as much as people differ from one another. Acting out of character is actually quite common.
• Even those we consider “saints” display many different levels of moral behavior throughout the day; they just display a much higher frequency of moral behaviors throughout the day compared to other people. As psychologists Dawn Berger and Robert McGrath put it, it’s better to think of virtue “as something we must continuously pursue rather than a state we ever achieve.”
• This emerging understanding of personality is consistent with the humanistic psychology emphasis on experience. Viewing personality as our daily pattern of experiences, or states, we can talk about the experience of being extroverted, the experience of being moral, the experience of being cruel, the experience of being neurotic, etc., thus integrating the psychology of personality and the psychology of being.
  • *Experiencing not being. You are not introverted but you’re experiencing introversion

• We are only “extroverted,” “caring,” “conscientious,” “neurotic”—even “intelligent”—to the extent to which our repeated patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors say we are. While genes can certainly have a strong influence on our patterns of behavior—we have what personality psychologist Brian Little refers to as our “biogenic” nature—there is nothing sacred or unalterable about being a certain way; with enough adjustments to these patterns over time, we literally change our being.
• Of course, this doesn’t mean personality change is easy. Trying to change yourself too quickly can be very draining, and you have to want to change.
• Indeed, one study found that introverts who were comfortable with their introversion showed higher levels of authenticity than introverts who reported a greater desire to be more extroverted. The introverts who were more self-accepting were able to achieve a level of well-being that came close to the level experienced by extroverts.
• The key here is that for long-lasting personality change, you must want to change and be willing to follow through on your personality change goals and actively and successfully implement behaviors to change yourself. The good news, though, is that by making enough changes to our states over time, we are capable of making long-lasting changes not only to our traits but also to our most valued goals in life.

PRINCIPLE #6: STRIVE FOR GROWTH, NOT HAPPINESS.

• This process often involves experiencing uncomfortable emotions fully and accepting and integrating them with the rest of human experience. This is why I personally prefer terms that describe the emotional experience—such as “exuberant,” “comfortable,” “uncomfortable,” and “painful”- instead of outright labeling the emotions as positive or negative. 
• Many emotions that make people uncomfortable or are painful to bear can be incredibly conducive to growth, just as the more comfortable or even ebullient emotions can sabotage our growth. 
• The point is to embrace the full richness and complexities of our emotional landscape and bring them to a healthy integration. 
• As Carl Rogers observed in his psychotherapy practice, “It seems to me that clients who have moved significantly in therapy live more intimately with their feelings of pain, but also more vividly with their feelings of ecstasy; that anger is more clearly felt, but so also is love; that fear is an experience they know more deeply, but so is courage. 
• And the reason they can thus live fully in a wider range is that they have this underlying confidence in themselves as trustworthy instruments for encountering life. 
• The good news is that when people consistently move in the direction of growth, feelings of happiness and life satisfaction tend to come along as an epiphenomenon of growth.
• In other words, the best route to happiness and life satisfaction is through transcending your egoistic insecurities, becoming the best version of yourself, and making a positive contribution to the world around you. 
• Consider the Dark Horse project, a long-term Harvard University study that looked at people who achieve impressive success that nobody saw coming.79 Their list of “dark horses” include in-home chefs, master sommeliers, puppeteers, life coaches, embalmers, dog trainers, and air-balloon pilots. How did these trailblazers reach personal fulfillment and success? 
• The researchers found that the key to their success was that they stayed focused on growing the things they cared most about, and they paid little attention to how they were doing in comparison to others or to traditional definitions of success.80 They were able to find fulfillment and achievement by cultivating their unique interests, abilities and circumstances. 

 

PRINCIPLE #7: HARNESS THE POWER OF YOUR DARK SIDE

• Carl Rogers noted that a common fear among his patients was that therapy would “release the beast” within themselves as they remove their defenses and fully experience previously unknown aspects of themselves. However, Rogers found that just the opposite actually occurs: “There is no beast in man. There is only man in man, and this we have been able to release.”
• May believed that the healthy integration of hostility, aggression, and anger was essential for growth, not by avoiding the potential for evil but by directly confronting it.
• While May believed we have the potential for both good and evil, he agreed with the other humanistic psychologists of the day that the environment can play an important role in helping to guide these potentialities in healthy directions.

One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again. 

—Abraham Maslow