They are the basic and meta-needs and it was Abraham Maslow who mapped out these levels of needs during the 1930s and 1940s.  Today you know these levels as those of survival, safety, belonging, self, and “growth” (self-actualization) for being needs.  Maslow documented this in his classic Motivation and Personality (1954) which contains his hierarchy of needs that he had first presented in 1943.  In 2006 I updated Maslow’s hierarchy with the models of Neuro-Semantics.  That’s when I introduced the Matrix-Embedded Pyramid of Needs.  My first book on self-actualization (Unleashed, 2007) briefly discussed the human Base Needs as did Self-Actualization Psychology (2008).

Then in 2009, while in South Africa presenting one of the Unleashing Self-Actualizing Leaders workshop, Tim Goodenough asked a rivoting question that stopped me in my tracks:

How do we use the Hierarchy of Needs for facilitating the self-actualization of clients?  How can we use that to determine where a person is in terms of their need gratification?

That’s when I asked Tim to work with me on answering those questions; and he did.  Tim and I immediately began mapping out a process for using the Hierarchy of Needs for precisely that purpose.  After several false starts, we eventually came up with the proto-type in January of 2010 while at the Leadership Summit.  And after another one or two refinements, we presented The Self-Actualization Assessment Scale.

With that Scale we can now assess where you live your life—that is, at what level?  Do you live your life at the base of the hierarchy, mid-way up the hierarchy, or at the peak?  Depending on how well you have learned to meet your needs, you can live a low level life in terms of need gratification or a high level life.  You can live your life in a self-actualizing society or in the jungle at the survival or safety levels. Do you know where you live your life and the specific needs that drive you?

You can also live in the Red Zone of any need— in the realm of deficiency and lack — not getting your needs met, not gratifying the drives that clamor within you. Or you can live in the Green Zone of growth and development, adequately gratifying the driving needs so that the next level of development keeps emerging.

The Self-Actualization Assessment Scale now gives you a way to evaluate the level that you are living, where you are, what’s your next level, the extent to which you might not be handling your base or meta-needs effectively, where you might be stuck, and how you can get leverage on yourself to more adequately meet your needs.  And because you can assess your level and the quality of your need gratification, you can also now zoom in on the very places in your life where your needs may be keeping you stuck.

Now when I say stuck, this stuckness may have nothing to do with any trauma or need for therapy.  You and I can get stuck by simply using an old coping style that no longer works.  We can get stuck by accidently giving a need some meaning that does not fully and adequately represent the full truth.  We can get stuck by semantically over-loading a need or a coping mechanism.  And yes, we can also get stuck by giving distorted understandings about the need and ways to gratify it.  That’s what usually involves the discipline that we call therapy.

Needs — you and I are needy in our very nature.  We are not self-sufficient, we are not invulnerable, we are not omniscient, omnipotent, and we are not infallible.  Reading that line, do you feel like throwing a party or checking in at your local psychiatric clinic?  If the latter, what expectations have you set about yourself and human life?  What non-sense have you inherited about human nature?  How long are you going to keep the insanity of thinking you are God?  If the former, then congratulations for having fully joined the human race!

Being needy is our heritage, our nature, and our life.  It is also the basis for growth, learning, development and self-actualization.  After all, if you were omniscient, omnipotent, and infallible you wouldn’t need anything, couldn’t develop, and would not have more potentials to unleash.  Being needy at your essence — needing to become fully alive, fully human, fully open, fully developing, fully curious, fully fascinated, fully enjoying life —drives your vitality and energy for the next-level!

Either way—if you are a trying-to-be-God-frustrated-and-deceived human or if you are a fully-alive-and-seeking-to-be-self-actualizing human —there’s hope, there’s solutions, and there’s a self-actualizing future for you.  For the first, there’s a Crucible awaiting ready to help you melt now the non-sense of perfectionism and your God-trip so you can be human.  For the latter, there’s the adventure of moving to the next-level.

What this means is that your vitality is related to, and dependent upon, you discovering and being your best self— your real self.  The wisdom within this actually goes far, far beyond Maslow to the ancient Greeks who made this one of the points of wisdom: “Know thyself.”

And to others who said, “To thy own self be true.”  “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

In Self-Actualization Psychology Maslow forged the way beyond the “empty slate” idea to the realization that each of us are born with unique features and possibilities— potentials of our disposition and uniqueness.  And just as we are not born human (we become human, we learn how to become human), so we are not born fully ourselves— we become. We don’t arrive on the scene with “instincts.”  We don’t come out of the womb and can run and jump.  We develop.  Hence, Developmental Psychology arose in the twentieth century to map out how we develop physically, socially, sexually, mentally, emotionally, etc.  And all of that resulted in Lifespan studies of the developmental stages.

All this relates directly to your sense of vitality in life.  If you want to dampen your energies, reduce the quality of your vitality— try to be someone else!  Try to conform to a mold that’s established at school, in the media, by your culture, by Hollywood, or by any group.  If you succeed, you will fail at being you. You will fail at being authentic and knowing yourself and with that, you won’t know your best gifts and contributions.  So you’ll feel like a fraud, you’ll evaluate yourself as up or down depending on local circumstances, you’ll suffer identity crisis, you won’t know what you like, your values, your unique potentials.  And in the long run that will undermine your joy of life and basic vitality.

Another way to dampen your energies, reduce your vitality, and diminish yourself as a person— try to be what you are not.  Try to be perfect!  Ha, that’s a great way to ruin a perfectly good fallible human being!  At first you’ll have lots of energy and effort but then you’ll over-prepare and begin to procrastinate and hyper-worry about flaws and fill your mind-body with anxiety and … yes will make life a party!

Or try to be totally positive and never negative!  Yes, at first it will seem like a great strategy— you, the positive thinker.  But then whenever you have an experience that doesn’t fit that mental box of “positive” you have to distort your experience and so begins the pretend-life.  And the more you refuse to welcome (a very un-positive thing) the so-called “negative” emotions and experiences, you begin to defend yourself against reality.  And in the long-run that distortion will undermine your ability to accept reality for what it is.

When your life energies seem down, depressed, empty, or diminished, you may be wasting your energies.  You could be wasting them fighting some phantom in your mind like the need to be perfect or positive or never fallible, vulnerable, or mortal.  The paradox is that your vitality for life comes more alive with more energy when you fully embrace your true nature as a weak, fallible, and mortal person!  Look at any young child— weak, fallible, vulnerable and fully alive to the mystery, excitement, and fascination of life!

Vitality emerges from your needs, not in spite of them.  So what do you need?  What are the requirements of life that activates your full mind-body-emotions?  People become experientially empty and out-of-touch with themselves when they don’t know their true needs and try to live in some synthetic life that Wall Street or Hollywood or some Cultural Bureau of Standards impose on their lives.  Then they live by external values, by the clock, by brand names, by what others are telling them they should think, feel, and experience.

Because we come without “instinct,” and because we have to learn how to be human— we are so open to information outside of ourselves.  This is our glory and our agony.  Maslow said that for the human species is it hard to be the species we are (1971: 179).  That’s why we have to discover ourselves, to “know ourselves.”

If your tired of being diminished, devitalized, and living like a zombie, then I’d recommend Unleashing Vitality so you can discover who you are in your lower-level needs and drives and find out how to gratify them adequately and accurately for yourself.  Achieving that you can then move on to discovering who you are given your higher-level needs— your being needs and, again, how to gratify them so that it brings out your best and fulfills your nature.

“How do you actually use the hierarchy of needs to facilitate your own self-actualization?”

The answer is actually simple enough—Find out how well you are doing on each need, how well are you gratifying each need, how free you are from each need so that you can move up to the next higher level of need, and how much you are free from the lower needs to focus on the higher needs?  That is, how much do the lower needs create a foundation for self-actualizing for you?

Your vitality goes back to your needs. And the matter of the fact is that neither you nor I ever get away from our “lower” animal needs.  In fact, every single day we wake up and start there again.  I did this morning.  How about you?  Not only that, but every day and every hour of every day we still require the most basic needs of life— air, water, food, sleep, etc.  Our physiological and basic neurological needs never go away for good.  We revisit them constantly and yet, here’s the mystery and wonder, if you are adequately gratifying them, then the revisits are short, temporary, and not turned into “the meaning of life.”

And if that’s the case, then you have a foundation for living a self-actualizing life.  If that’s the case for you, then you are free to move beyond the animal needs to the truly human needs.  Maslow called these truly human needs the being needs, the growth needs, and the self-actualization needs.  These are the highest needs—the expressive needs to be fully and uniquely you as a human being.  These are the needs to understand, to know, to contribute, to make a difference, to create beauty, order, to embrace truth, to create fairness, to give love, etc.  And in terms of vitality—these are the needs that enable you to truly unleash the vitality of your life.

Is that your life?

Does your life have that kind of energy, passion, and vitality?

Would you like it to?

You can.  You have that potential within you.  And that’s what Neuro-Semantics as a discipline for actualizing excellence is designed to facilitate and that’s especially true for the new workshop:Unleashing Vitality.

How?  First and foremost, develop your base vitality and identity.  That’s the theme of Day 1 of theUnleashing Vitality workshop.  We start at the base with our drives—with the needs that drive our energy and motivation.  The four levels of these lower needs address the needs that we share with the higher intelligent animals.  And when we “truly satisfy” the need (Maslow’s terminology), the drive of the need is gratified and with that, the next level of need emerges into awareness.   It is in this way, that we move up the level of our needs and move to live and operate at the higher levels.

So what can mess this up?  Lots of things: satisfiers that do not work, that do not actually gratify the need, cognitive distortions in our thinking patterns about our needs, distorted meanings, semantically over-loading the meanings so that we are trying to make a lower need “the meaning of life.”  Any of these things can interfere with a basic need and its requirements and cause us to become stuck at an animal level of living, which is not a good thing for a human being!

Achieving a base vitality, Day 2 moves into the Self-Actualization needs— “Seeking your Peak Vitality and Identity.”  We now explore the 7 meta-drives or needs, the seven being needs of the human expressive motivation and use the Self-Actualization Assessment Scale for that as well.  Human vitality transcends the animal needs and moves you up into those needs that no longer operate from lack, scarcity, or deficiency.  You don’t need these in the same way as the lower needs.  And when you gratify them, they do not go away.  They grow.  They expand.  They make you richer and fuller and more desirous, more ambitious.  Move here and you will begin to experience the vitality of marvelous little peak experiences throughout your days and weeks.  These are the rushes of vitality that we experience as joy, happiness, thrill, engagement, commitment, passion, and living for something bigger than yourself.

Where from there?  The theme of Day 3 is “Living the Vitality.”  Now it’s time to fully experience the organisms of the peaks of the higher live.  And Maslow has wonderfully provided some hands-on processes for doing that.  By taking his characteristics of self-actualizing people which he identified in his modeling, I have identified several peaking skills and that makes up most of Day 3.

Vitality —the purpose of a fully alive/ fully human person!  Well, at least in Self-Actualization Psychology.  This is the psychology of human possibilities, of studying and viewing man as his and her best, under conditions of psychological health.  You are not made to just get by, to endure, to survive.  You were made for much greater possibilities than that!  All this also comes back to the charge that Maslow began making from his original studies, “We have sold human nature short; there is a higher nature in man.”

Maslow also added to that several other ideas: That higher nature that’s within you and within me is ever-present and always calling out to us— if we can quiet ourselves and learn to listen to our inner voice.  That higher nature is also asking you to become your Real Self.  And that’s part of theUnleashing Vitality workshop.  I’ll describe that in the next Meta Reflection.

If you were to gauge your everyday vitality— your energy, passion, commitment, and excitement— where would you put it (0 to 10)?

Do you experience your vitality as a resource or as an objective?

The other day I got into a conversation with a guy at Starbuck’s Coffee Shop when I was back in Colorado.   He saw me with layers of papers stretched out on a table and was curious what I was working on.  So he did something outrageous, he asked me.

I told him I was working on a new Self-Actualization workshop, Unleashing Vitality. Well, if he was curious before, that really jacked up his curiosity.  Maybe he was suffering from de-vitalization, de-motivated, or just finding life empty and dull, whatever it was, his tone of voice shifted, as did the sparkle in his eyes and his engagement as he sat down at my table and inquired how does the unleashing of vitality works.

“Well, it’s begins with your energies— the energy that gets you out of bed in the morning… your mental energies by which you give such rich and robust meaning to what you are doing that you can’t wait to get to it … which you feel in your emotions — moving and motivating your behavioral and linguistic responses.”

At that he said that was his problem; he didn’t have any energy left.  Not like he used to.   So what could he do?  That’s what he wanted to know.

“Ah, so something is blocking or dampening your energies!  Do you know how you are throwing cold water on your inner energies?”

And so began a great conversation— one of those conversations that I long to have— anywhere, with anyone— if they open up, have a willingness to explore.  And he did.  I ended up sharing a lot aboutSelf-Actualization Psychology and essentially gave him a very short version of the new workshop as well as some practical how-to steps about reclaiming his natural vitality.

So if you ask me, “Why in the world another Self-Actualization Workshop?  After all, you already have three, why yet another one?”  Well, there’s several reasons.  One reason is that some people are not ready for all of the unleashing processes which is what we do in Unleashing Potentials (Workshop I).  In that “Ultimate Self-Actualization Workshop” we take people through 3-part drama.  It is the drama of self-actualizing in 3-acts: the Construct, the Crucible, and the Zone (similar to what you find in the book, Unleashed!).  The whole design is to facilitate the unleashing of one thing— just one— because if you can, in 3 days, unleash one potential, then you will know how and have the experience for unleashing many more things.

But everybody isn’t ready for that.  And some don’t have the energy to do that or the persistence, patience, or commitment.  They don’t have the inner vitality to go through the unleashing processes.  So we need to go back to basics and especially the basics of human functioning.  So in Workshop II, instead of using the Self-Actualization Quadrants, we use the Matrix-Embedded-Pyramid-turned-Volcano model of Neuro-Semantics.  This is this model that transforms the static pyramid and hierarchy of the levels of needs into a dynamic model where your meaning-making encounters your neurological needs all the way up the levels.  The Matrix-Embedded-Volcano explains and exposes your needs to your style of meeting your needs so you can evaluate if you are successful or not.  Andvitality is the telling indicator.

If you are adequately, accurately, and effectively meeting your true human needs and wants, you experience a rush of vitality. If you are not, then you will be exhausting your energy, wasting your time and effort, feeling unfulfilled and perhaps feeling frustrated and futile about trying to figure out how to get what you truly want or need.  And to create some powerful measurements, in Workshop IIUnleashing Vitality we use the Self-Actualization Assessment Scale that Tim Goodenough and I designed for getting a reading on how you are doing with gratifying your lower needs and higher needs.

The levels of needs—wants (the pushes and pulls of human energy and motivation) have requirements.  There are certain conditions to adequately satisfying them.  And you can fulfill them accurately and adequately or you can not.  Do it and you have vitality, fail to do it, and you don’t.  That’s why the rush of vitality provides both the reward for success and the indicator of where you are living your life.

Where are you living your life? Are you living at the survival level, the safety and security level, the love and affection (social, belonging, connecting) level, the ego-level of self-value and respect level?  If you are, that’s fine.  Do you know how to gratify that level and move on up?  Or are you somehow stuck at that level?  Do you need to understand and find better ways to meet your needs?  InUnleashing Vitality we first check to determine your understanding and gratifying of your needs.  Do that right, and you’ll unleash all kinds of physical and emotional energy— vitality for living.

Are you living at the being-level of the self-actualization needs and wants?  That’s the goal of the human experience and what this new Unleashing Vitality workshop is designed to enable you to achieve.  The goal is to understand your neurological drives and how they interface with your psychological drives of meaning-making and how to use both for experiencing an energetic lifestyle.  Then comes the rush of vitality and you’ll experience it as peak experiences, magical moments, pure joy, and falling in love with life itself.

Now would that be worthwhile to you?  If so, check it out.  I will run the proto-type in Pretoria South Africa in Sept. and the second later in Imola Italy.