[Neurons] The Skills of Self-Actualization

[meta]

From: L. Michael Hall



THE SKILLS OF

SELF-ACTUALIZATION





So you want to actualize your best potentials and highest possibilities as a human being. Great! Okay, so how are you going to do that? What are the steps and processes for unleashing the latent potentials within and making them real in your everyday life?

In 2007 I completed a 2 ½ year research on that specific question which culminated in the book, Unleashed: A Guide to Your Ultimate Self-Actualization. The question burning within my mind and heart was the unleashing question, 

"How do we identify, find, unleash, liberate, actualize, and mobilize our gifts? How do we find what makes each of us uniquely ourselves with our gifts and talents to contribute to life and become our authentic self?"

As some of the most essential answers to those questions, I identified 24 specific mechanisms in human psychology that facilitate and mobilize self-actualization. So far, so good. Then after the book was published I received a letter that challenged me. In the challenge the author brought to my awareness a whole additional dimension that I did not specifically address in the book.

Here is the challenge as the writer expressed it:

"As I read Unleashed I was thrilled and excited; it really did awaken the self-actualization vision in me and I appreciated the personal stories that made the process seem doable. But as I read I kept feeling inadequate to the task; you seem to have assumed that your readers would already have the skills. What I want to know is how are people without these skills suppose to actualize their 'highest and best' as you say?"

What a great question! Here is a distinction that I had not considered in the book, the distinction between mechanism for self-actualizing and the skills for putting the mechanisms to good use. And while some skills are in the book, I don't believe I made them sufficiently explicit. I definitely did not highlight this distinction and use it to help facilitate the process. So, with that in mind, in this article I will here highlight the key skills for actualizing your most awesome potentials.

Skills, Skills - What are the Unleashing Skills?

If self-actualization is primarily a function of your meanings and performance, what are the competencies that you need for working with the meanings you give to things and for translating what you know in your mind to embody them in your neurology? What are the skills you need to become competent at so that you can be the Creator of meaning that you're designed to be? What skills enable you to sacrilize, suspend meanings, and enrich your full matrix of meanings?

If self-actualization means unlearning, learning, and re-learning and the Crucible offers you a transformative place for this, what skills are required for you to enter the Crucible effectively? What skills enable you to build a robust Crucible for yourself?

And if self-actualization is a function of the engagement, focus state of being "in the zone," what skills do you need in order to synergize, to create synthesis from different polarities, and cleanly step into your own genius state of engagement?

Lots of questions! And as I began contemplating the self-actualization mechanisms and then correlating them to the necessary skills, I had one of those "Aha!" moments. Suddenly I realized that what we teach in the first three modules of the Meta-Coaching system are essentially the self-actualization skills. Actually, I was stunned. I had not put that together before.

As it turns out, the very structure of Meta-Coaching facilitates us in practically using the mechanisms of self-actualization. At first I didn't know what to make of that. "How could that be?" The superficial answer is that in coaching we coach a person's full development of potentials. Yet there's a much deeper and more profound answer.

Michelle Duval and I set up the Meta-Coach system based on our analysis of what coaching as a discipline, process, and field is. Our thinking as that by first answer the question, "What is coaching?" we could then address the seven distinctions that uniquely define coaching.

Coaching is- 

1) Communication

A special conversation like none other that gets to the heart of things, it is a dialogue (dia- through and logos-meaning) in which the client's meanings flow through the conversation making it explicit and enabling us to discover the governing frames of an experience.

2) Reflexive unconscious communication

Because we're working with self-reflexive consciousness, we communicate not only at the first level, but at all of the multiple levels as we step back to notice our unconscious frames of meaning in the back of the mind that we call beliefs, values, decisions, identities, etc.

3) Generative Change

Coaching works with change at multiple levels: behavioral, developmental, and transformative and works not so much with remedial change that fixes broken things, but generative change that enables a person to move to the next level of development.

4) Implementing embodiment and measuring difference

Coaching is especially action-focused as it leads to an action plan and pragmatic actions in the real world, actions that we can then measure to record progress, the difference its making, and validating that we are closing the knowing-doing gap.

5) Working Systemically

Coaching holistically works non-linear with our mind-body-emotion system inside of family, relational, cultural, and work systems.

6) Self-Actualizing

For people who are basically psychologically healthy and ready to mobilize their hidden resources coaching focuses on enabling a person to unleash new potentials.

7) Facilitating processes

Rather than teaching, training, telling, diagnosing, lecturing, coaching operates as a facilitation so that a client is enabled and empowered in developing the required skills for taking full ownership of these processes.

Models 

With these seven distinctions identifying coaching, we then selected the models that would best enable us to succeed with these facets of coaching.

1) Communication

            The NLP Communication Model

2) Reflexive unconscious communication 

            The Meta-States Model of Reflexivity

3) Generative Change for multiple levels of transformation:

            The Axes of Change Model and the Crucible Model

4) Implementation and Measurement:

            The Benchmarking Model

            Mind-to-Muscle Patterns

5) Working Systemically: 

            The Matrix Model

6) Self-Actualization of Potentials: 

            The Self-Actualization Matrix

            Self-Actualization Quadrants

            Self-Actualization Psychology

7) Facilitation of multiple processes:

            The Facilitation Model 


>From Model to SkillsNow with these models for each of the facets of coaching we have a way of detailing out lots of specific self-actualization skills. What does this mean? 


Starting with the NLP model, it means that the skills that NLP cultivates which helps us actualize our potentials:

                    The skill of sensory awareness, being able to be present in the here-and-now.

                    The skill of attentive listening that can enter empathetically into another person's world.

                    The skill of self-awareness of representations playing on the theater of one's mind.

                    The skill of state management for accessing resourceful states at will.

                    The skill of recognizing the map / territory difference.

                    The skill of asking precision questions for gaining specific information.

                    The skill of accessing and anchoring states for greater resourcefulness.

With the Meta-States model there are additional self-actualization skills:

The skill of using self-reflexive awareness for setting meaning frames for self and others.

The skill of finding leverage for change by getting to the governing frames.

The skill of distinguishing person from frames and knowing the problem is always the frame and never the person.

The skill of setting frames to support and protect the engagement state so one can step in and out of the genius state of being "in the zone" at will.

The skill of accessing resources for self-valuing, self-empowerment, ownership, etc.

The self-actualization skills within the Axes of Change model:

The skill of facilitating a readiness for generative change by awakening vision and challenging current reality (motivation axis). 

The skill of facilitating a readiness for generative change by probing and provoking a robust decision for self-actualization (decision axis).

The skill of facilitating the creation of a new game plan for the next step in one's development and actualizing that in life (the creation axis).

The skill of facilitating the integration of the new inner game making it solid through reinforcement and testing (the integration axis).

The self-actualization skills within the Benchmarking model:

The skill of operationalizing terms, goals, and values and able to create a set of benchmarks.

The skill of finding specific behavioral key performance indicators.

The self-actualization skills within the Matrix model:

The skill of thinking systemically about human nature of mind and emotion.

The skill of following a person's energy through the system.

The skill of distinguishing the content matrices from the process matrices.

The self-actualization skills within the Self-Actualization Quadrants:

                    The skill of gauging both the meaning and the performance axes.

                    The skill of synergizing meaning and performance.

The skill of identifying and extending 12 meta-programs for more flexibility of consciousness.

                    The self-actualization skills within the Facilitation model:

                    The skill of working at a meta-level to content to bring out the best in someone.

The skill of working as an expert in process leaving the client to be the expert in content of goals and objectives.

So if you are ready to skill-up with the very skills that will unleash your highest and best - consider the self-actualization skills within the Meta-Coach Training System.

www.meta-coaching.org 



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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