Becoming Your Best Self

BECOMING YOUR BEST SELF
by
Bill Cottringer

“Knowing others is intelligence. Knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true strength.” ~Lao Tzu.

An earlier Psychologist, Abraham Maslow, proposed a hierarchy of needs that all people had a drive to satisfy. This was Maslow’s attempt to explain human motivation. Each need must be met with a certain level of satisfaction before we are inclined to move up through the hierarchy with any degree of serious intent or likelihood of satisfying that need.

Maslow’s hierarchy starts with basic physiological needs and then moves up to safety and security, to love and belonging and next to self-esteem, and finally to self-actualization. It is self-actualization that this article will address. And the journey through the hierarchy from start to finish is not a one-time deal. You may have cause to go back through the hierarchy several times during your lifetime.

The best way to describe what your best self looks like as a fully self-actualized person is to understand the required personal attributes that work together to complete self-actualization. Here is a baker’s dozen core attributes on which to judge your own self-actualization progress:

1. Developing a Toolbox of Skills.
We all have a life purpose to fulfill with our lives, which may or may not be vocational in nature. Regardless, the path towards self-actualization requires us to develop expertise and gain working knowledge of important governing principles, to be successful and happy in work, play and relationships. The key is to know your best, natural success skills to develop further.
2. Ability to Think Smartly.
Smart thinking doesn’t necessarily relate to genetic IQ, as much as learning how to think critically in discerning the truth from fiction and avoid contaminating biases and appealing half-truths. It also involves developing your own clever style of being creative in collaborating and compromising to solve difficult problems and resolve complex conflicts. One ounce of smart thinking outplays a pound of IQ points.
3. Being an Interpersonal Magnate.
A critical quality of self-actualized persons is that they are interpersonal magnates, using expert communication skills and emotional intelligence (below) to get along with others extremely well. This involves creating a supportive climate of conversation, with equality, freedom, tentativeness and acceptance; and by exercising self-control, using empathy and being likeable, honest, positive, agreeable, humorous, and probably more than anything, a good listener.
4. Having Emotional Intelligence. Self-actualized interpersonal magnates have a tank full of useful emotional intelligence. The tank contains accurate self-understanding, a healthy store of positive empathy, an abundance of likeability, excellent social skills, admirable self-control, overflowing compassion for others, and strong internal, self-directed motivation and drive.
5. Practicing Balance.
Another important quality of self-actualized persons is that they recognize the urgency of striving to be balanced in important areas of their lives. This involves arriving at a healthy balance between work and play, being with others and being alone, showing both strength and vulnerability and being optimistic and realistic. A position of balance is always the best perspective to have because it lets you see and act in all directions, especially when you need that most.
6. Practicing Time Management.
Time may very well be our most important resource to manage well. It is only logical that the self-actualization process requires people to become masters of the clock in being able to get twice as much done in half the time available. Good time management always starts with reinventing the nature of time to be less mechanical from past to present to future and more fluid in the perpetuating the now moment, which seems to expand time and make more of it. Progress here, is when you stop letting time manage you and successfully reverse that sequence.
7. Being Mindful.
Being mindful is the best time management practice there is. This involves developing a keen awareness of and being fully engaged in the present moment, not drowned out by past memories and future expectations. It is living in the eternal now moment that allows you to see and do what leads to success from being self-actualized.
8. Being Spiritually Grounded.
True spiritual grounding is when religious ideals are spiritualized. What this means is that religion offers sensible guidelines on how to live and it gives shielding comfort from bad things, but it is not the ultimate truth that sets you free. That comes with the ultimate insight from an integrated moral philosophy that can make perfect sense of work and life’s purposes and perspectives for you. Some other world religions and philosophies call this rejoining the “oneness” of it all.
9. Having Sensitivity to the Point of No Return.
There are many cross-roads that appear in life representing moments of either danger or opportunity. Self-actualization requires becoming sensitive to these moments with the right perspective and timing before they come and go. In other words, the skill of knowing when to fish or cut bait is called on to avoid going past the point of no return in not distinguishing danger from opportunity. In anything, timing is everything.
10. Practicing Time Management.
Time very well may be our most important resource to manage well. It is only logical that the self-actualization process requires people to become masters of the clock in being able to get twice as much done in half the time available. Good time management always starts with reinventing the nature of time to be less mechanical from past to present to future and more fluid in perpetuating the now moment, which seems to expand time and make more of it. Progress here, is when you stop letting time manage you and successfully reverse that sequence.
11. Showing Charisma and Credibility.
Self-actualized persons are natural leaders by role model example. They demonstrate all the core qualities of being self-actualized and this includes having enough charisma and credibility, to be perceived as a leader who is worth following, being liked enough but respected more. Charisma and credibility are a natural side effect of self-actualization.
12. Using High Road Ethics.
The real challenge for self-actualization to bloom is during adversity, when the shadow part of your character can shine and be seen as a hero instead of being a status quo bystander or worse yet, villain or victim. These situations often require you to exercise high road ethics where appealing short-term gains without pains, always give way to long term gains with short-term pains. High road ethics are especially difficult to apply when the alternatives are more popular or when you think no one is paying attention.
13. Committed to Perpetual Growth.
This last attribute of self-actualization is what drives the development of the others. Becoming your best-self is a life-long quest, but the quicker you make progress in this self-actualization process, the more success and happiness you will have to enjoy, and longer. This required attribute of self-actualization involves an unwavering commitment to continuously learn, grow, and improve, in being a student of life, work and relationships. Your reality check on self-actualization comes when you start becoming who you have pretended to be all along. And the sooner, the better, or better late than never?
“It is never too late to be who you might have been.” ~George Eliot.