[Neurons] 2008 Meta Reflections #8

[meta]

From: L. Michael Hall

2008 Meta Reflections #8

February 25, 2008







BEYOND HAPPINESS TO GLOBAL IMPACT


Recently Chuck (Charles) DesJardins, who is working on his doctorate, sent me an email with a series of questions about self-actualization. The questions are challenging and insightful. Among them were these:

Is self-actualization relevant to society?

If it is true that man has deficiency needs and being needs, so what?

What does knowing that do for us?

If there are models that can take a person from deficiency motivated to being-motivated, what does that do for us?

In the big scheme of things in today's crazy run-away world, so what?

How can self-actualization psychology make the world a better place?

How can this kind of psychology change the world?

Would actualizing individuals and groups do anything other than make people happy or can it have a global impact?

I told Chuck that these were great questions and that I wanted to address these questions as a Meta Reflection. So here goes.

In Maslow's original work on self-actualization, he began asking what would happen and what would be created if a thousand self-actualizing people and families got together? What kind of a society would they create? How would they organize things? What would their businesses be like? Their government? Their schools and ways of educating. Their newspapers and what they would consider "news?" How they would structure courts, police, and jails?

This led Maslow in his last years to focus on self-actualizing businesses and many social issues. Earlier he had been asking, "How good a society does human nature allow?" Later he shifted his focus to translating his ideas on the bright side of human nature to leaders, managers, and businesses. You can find a lot of this today in the reprinted book, Maslow on Management.

So yes, self-actualization is relevant for society. In fact, society in all of its forms and expressions depends upon have good, informed, and responsible people. In political theory we have heard for hundreds of years that it takes an informed and educated populace to have democracy. Dictators don't want thinking people who take the initiative and get involved and hold government responsible for what it does. That's why dictators hold thinkers and activists as political prisoners; they consider freedom of thought and speech too dangerous.

As I wrote two years ago in the series on Self-Actualization Reflections, Maslow launched his work on studying healthy people, self-actualizing people in order to understand human motivation and to provide leaders, politicians, and people a theory of human motivation that could explain why people would give up their higher values and needs to follow a Hitler.

So what does it do for us if we know how to take a person from deficiency motivation to being-motivation? Lots of things. This moves people from living in a jungle world of deficiency where people compete and strive to beat each other because there's not enough to go around. And it moves people to a world of abundance, cooperation, collaboration because there's more than enough to go around.

Deficient motivated people live in the world of animal nature un-modified by the higher human values. Being-motivated people live in the human world, the higher dimension of human experience of being-values: love, meaning, justice, abundance, music, beauty, mathematics, honor, contribution, legacy, etc. This is the psychology that can change the world. And it changes the world from the bottom-up, from one person to another who becomes enlightened about the greater good, the "spiritual" values of the being-values.

So does self-actualization of individuals and groups do anything other than make people happy? You bet it does. These lower-gratified people now move to the higher needs that create within them a new restlessness-a desire and need to make a global impact. Now they live with enough internal resources to give out of their inner abundance.

Maslow's vision about self-actualization went far beyond individual happiness. In The Farther Reaches of Human Nature he wrote this:

"The empirical fact is that self-actualizing people, our best experiencers, are also our most compassionate, our great improvers and reformers of society, our most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation (and also our best fighters for excellence, effectiveness, competence). And it also becomes clearer and clearer that the best 'helpers' are the most fully human persons. . . . The best way to become a better 'helper' is to become a better person." (p. 334)



USA Meta-Coaching, July 2008

Module I:  

            April 4-6, Portland Or.  Cat Wilson and Rich Aanrich    

            Apositiva:  cat at apositivechange.com or rich at apositivechange.com

            (503) 525-0595.



Modules II and III  --- Grand Junction Colorado, Ramada Inn

        July 1-3, 2008  APG --- Accessing Personal Genius

        July 5-12, 2008   Coaching Mastery

            Sponsored by Neuro-Semantics Ltd. Colorado

            Write for a Flyer, Registration form and pricing

            Register before March 1 for a 30% savings 



The Ultimate Self-Actualization Workshop

At this moment, I only have one workshop scheduled for 2008. Many other Neuro-Semantic Trainers will soon be offering this workshop and when I get their schedules, I will put them here. Our launch date for the New Human Potential Movement is May when I am anticipating that one to three dozen Neuro-Semantic Trainers to be presenting.

May 17-19, 2008 

ID Com. International, Montreal Canada. Isabell David. Phone: 450-224-5398 / 514-815-5457. idcom at cgocable.ca / idcom at idcominter.com Web: www.idcominter.com. 

I will be delivering this training in English (!) and it will simultaneously be translated into French. There will be other English only speakers there. Come and enjoy a taste and feel of Europe in Montreal.



L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Neuro-Semantics Ltd., Executive Director
ISNS - International Society of Neuro-Semantics
P.O. Box 8
Clifton, Colorado, 81520 USA
www.neurosemantics.com 
www.meta-coaching.org
www.self-actualizing.org 

Email: meta @onlinecol.com @acsol.net @mindfocus.co.za
(970) 523-7877
(970) 523-5790 FAX
(877) 686-2867 toll free in the USA only
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