It takes years to build up this certain quality, a person working towards or put effort in realising one’s own personality is known as a self actualizer.
Self actualization in simple words can be understood as self realisation. In order to live a life with an aim, knowing about own self is very important. It takes years to build up this certain quality, a person working towards or put effort in realising one’s own personality is known as a self actualizer.
It is not just a moral concept but a scientific and psychological aspect. Self actualization comes up with certain qualities.
Qualities of self Actualization
- A self-actualized person is focused on problems and solutions rather than her or him. Maslow discovered that self-actualizers focused most of their energies on problems and tasks outside of themselves.
- Self-actualized persons are very spontaneous in both actions and emotions. They preferred being themselves rather than being pretentious or artificial.
- A self-actualized person resists pressures to conform. Maslow discovered that self-actualizers tended to have values that were often in opposition to the “mainstream” culture. Thus, they tended to resist “enculturation” or the transcendence of any particular culture. They resisted enculturation, that is, they were not susceptible to social pressures and cultural influences to be “well-adjusted” or “fit in” they were in fact, non-conformists in the best sense.
- A self-actualized person is creative, inventive, and original. Not surprisingly, every self-actualizer was deemed very creative.
- Self-actualized persons have a concern about personal growth. They were strongly motivated to change negative qualities in themselves that could be changed.
- These people had a certain freshness of appreciation, an ability to see things, even ordinary things, with wonder. According to Maslow (1970), “Self-actualizing people have the wonderful capacity to 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.”
What does a self actualized person looks like?
Self-actualized people have an ability to have more peak experiences than the average person. Peak experiences are those profound and enlightening feelings that are so intense or illuminating that it is readily obvious that they are special events. A peak experience is one that takes you out of yourself, that makes you feel very tiny, or very large, to some extent one with life or nature or God.
It gives you a feeling of being a part of the infinite and the eternal. It is also an active experience which is felt as self-validating, self-justifying, and inherently good. The emotional reaction has a special flavour of wonder, awe, reverence, humility, and surrender.
Finally, the person at the peak feels godlike and loses all fear, anxiety, inhibition, defence, control, delay, and restraint. These experiences tend to leave their mark on a person, change them for the better, and many people actively seek them out. They are also called mystical experiences, and are an important part of many religious and philosophical traditions.
Maslow discovered that self-actualizers have usually had feelings of being simultaneously more powerful
