Self-actualisation: what it is, why it is important and how to work towards it.

Self-actualisation is probably the most important element of a happy and fulfilling life you haven’t heard much about. 

Or maybe you have. It is not part of everyday language, but it has been discussed for decades in humanistic and positive psychology circles.

Maslow put self-actualisation at the top of his famous hierarchy of needs as the highest and most sublime need humans can have. Other psychologists have expanded on Maslow’s work in the last few decades.

But what exactly is self-actualisation? And why is it so important? Can it be developed and worked upon?

We’ll answer these and other questions below.

What is self-actualisation?

So many features and dimensions have been added to the concept of self-actualisation over the years that it no longer has a clear definition.

In A Theory of Human Motivation, Maslow defined it as “self-fulfilment, namely the tendency for the individual to become actualised in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” 

In later writings, Maslow replaced the term self-actualisation with being “fully human”. For him, self-actualisation was the highest human need and being self-actualised meant being fully human or displaying the fullest humanness possible.

Self-actualisation is about being the best version of yourself, having a growth mindset, and constantly wanting to improve and learn new things. 

It is also about self-awareness, listening to your nature and being your true self.

It is a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional concept.

10 characteristics of self-actualisation

Maslow wrote about many of the characteristics of self-actualised people in different papers. The psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman has looked at them in detail, and after testing them and comparing them to existing research, he has grouped them into ten characteristics.

He explains them in his best-selling book Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization and has created a free test to find out how self-actualised you are based on these ten characteristics. 

Let’s have a quick look at these ten characteristics.

Truth Seeking

Self-actualising people like to get to the truth of things and people. They like to find out how things really are. 

For Maslow, truth is one of the most fundamental human values, recognised across all cultures. It is a universal value. 

Self-actualised people are driven by the search of it.

Acceptance

The first person one has to accept is oneself. 

Before being able to love others and be compassionate to them, we need to start with ourselves.

Self-actualised people understand this. They understand they are not perfect, but they accept themselves as they are, with their quirks and desires, without shame or apology.

Purpose

A favourite in this blog, purpose is essential to being a happy and fulfilled human being. It is also an essential part of self-actualisation.

Purpose is about having a mission that goes beyond one’s self-interest, knowing what it is and working towards achieving it.

Authenticity

Self-actualised people are authentic to themselves. 

They accept themselves as they are, so they have no problem with being authentic to their real self, regardless of the situation they find themselves in.

As Barry Kaufman says, they “can maintain their dignity and integrity even in situations and environments that are undignified”.

Continued freshness of appreciation

Self-actualised people enjoy and appreciate the little things in life. 

They are like grown-up children who haven’t stopped marvelling at all the wondrous things life has to offer.

Watching a sunset is wonderful, it doesn’t matter how many you have already seen. So is smelling the earth after a summer rain, listening to a moving song, watching the view from a high mountain, and other million things. 

Others may have become tired of these experiences, but self-actualised people keep enjoying and savouring them as if it were the first time.

Peak experiences

Maslow dedicated much time to studying peak experiences. 

In The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, he defined peak experiences as “transient moments of self-actualisation. They are moments of ecstasy which cannot be bought, cannot be guaranteed, cannot be sought.” 

They can be attained by different means. For example, giving birth to a child can be a peak experience, but so can be working in a flow state on something requiring concentration, finishing a marathon, making love or having a hallucinogenic-induced trip.

Humanitarianism

Self-actualised people have a genuine desire to help the human race to get better. They want to contribute to building a better world and a better society.

Good moral intuition

Self-actualised people know straight away when something is right or wrong. They have a well-tuned moral compass, and they are guided by it.

They don’t need to reflect on it. They just know. 

The right moral intuitions guide them.

Creative spirit

People manifest their self-actualisation through their creativity.

Self-actualised people like and want to create new things. They realise creating things is one of the most human endeavours, and they relish their creative spirit.

They squeeze their creative juices to the maximum.

That doesn’t mean all self-actualised people are artists or that they are the next Leonardo or Michel Angelo. Creativity can be applied to all human activities, not only arts, and we will all apply it in our levels of mastery, without necessarily being the next genius.

Read more: 6 Practical Tips To Unleash Your Creativity

Equanimity

Self-actualised people tend to take life’s vicissitudes with equanimity. 

They take them with grace and acceptance. 

They know that life has ups and downs, which are a necessary part of life, and they accept them as such.

A pyramid that isn’t a pyramid

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been drawn as a pyramid so many times that it is now difficult to imagine it any other way, but Maslow himself never envisaged it as such.

He thought some needs were at a higher spectrum than others and that you needed to have some basic needs covered before you could aspire to others, but Maslow never envisaged life as a videogame with different levels, where you need to cover one need before you go up to the next one.

Life is more complex and nuanced than that, and so are human needs. 

As Barry Kaufman tells us, “most people are partially satisfied in all their basic needs and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs at the same time.”

Following up with the videogame metaphor, we are all playing at all levels all the time, depending on our state of mind at the moment. I might be working on my self-actualisation because some of my lower needs are covered, but in specific moments I might feel unsafe for some reason, and my need for safety will need covering.  

The psychologist John Rowan compared Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with Russian dolls: “each larger doll includes all the smaller dolls but also transcends them.” When working on a higher-purpose need such as self-actualisation, the lower-level needs don’t disappear but become integrated with the higher need. 

Self-actualisation is at the peak of the pyramid that isn’t a pyramid. It is the highest-purpose need, but it is integrated with all the rest. 

It includes and transcends them all.

Why is self-actualisation worth pursuing?

Self-actualisation is the higher need we humans can have, so it is essential to being happy and satisfied.

It is as simple as that.

It is what we are meant to do, but we often go astray and lose our ways. Self-actualisation is your way to go back to what you were supposed to be doing. 

All babies are born with the desire and urge to grow and learn. During the first years of their life, toddlers and little children are sponges absorbing all kinds of knowledge and new skills. They explore the world and become better at being human beings.

Then most of us lose that urge and become stuck in adulthood. We get stuck in a job we don’t like, relationships we don’t enjoy, thought and behaviour patterns that make us unhappy, and unhealthy habits. We don’t learn new things, we don’t create anything new, we don’t grow.

We get stuck.

We don’t let our self-actualising nature express itself, so we wither and wilt like an untended plant.

Self-actualisation is worth pursuing because it will make us feel alive and bring a higher purpose to our life. 

It is what will give us real and profound joy.

How to self-actualise

All this is great, but how do you self-actualise? Is it possible to become a self-actualised person?

First of all, self-actualisation is an ongoing process, like life itself. There is no final destination where you suddenly arrive, and hey, presto, you are now self-actualised. 

You constantly self-actualise, but there is always room for improvement. It is a process of continuous becoming rather than being.

You can do different things to work on your self-actualisation, to work on this continuous becoming. 

The ten characteristics mentioned above would be the best starting point. Just look at them and reflect on how you do against each. 

In some, you will do great; in others, not so much, but that’s OK. You will then know now where to start.

Once you do that, you can focus on the three areas below. 

Know thyself

Self-actualisation is about following your nature, about being your real self. It’s about doing what you are supposed to do and not what your parents or society expect from you.

To do that, first, you need to know yourself well. You need to know who you are. You need to be self-aware. 

There are different ways to know yourself better, like asking for feedback from others or using the services of a coach. I explained them well elsewhere, so I won’t discuss the details here.

Another good option is to carry out the test on self-actualisation I mentioned above. By doing so, you will gain self-awareness in general and in all the specific dimensions of self-actualisation, so you will know where to focus more.

Once you know who you are, you just need to be yourself. Find your purpose, what you are meant to do, and try to live according to your authentic nature. 

Be creative

Creativity is one of the most human features. 

Creating things gives us purpose and meaning, so it can be highly satisfying. It is also fun.

All human beings have their own creative impulse. Don’t ever believe you aren’t creative.

We all are. 

So, create new things, build them, test them. Try and experiment with new things. Play an instrument, draw, paint, mould clay, write, try a new method or process at work, or, why not, start your own blog. 

Express your creativity the way that feels best for you. We all have our own different ways of being creative. 

Find yours.

You will know what it is when you do it.

Don’t stop learning

Learning is the source of one of the biggest joys in life, but it is an unappreciated joy for many.

Don’t be one of those many. Appreciate the joys learning brings.

There is so much knowledge, so many skills, so many interesting facts, so many valuable tips… so many things to learn out there, that you can learn something new every minute for the rest of your life, and you will still have plenty of things left to learn. 

But that’s fine, it’s not a race.

The self-actualised person doesn’t compete with anybody else, only with him or herself. They want to become the best version of themselves, get as close as possible to their potential as a human being.

To do that, the self-actualising person needs to keep learning and improving. 

They keep learning not because they must so they can get better but because of the joy it brings them. 

Learning is not a means to an end; it’s the end itself.

Towards full humanness

For Maslow, self-actualisation meant being fully human. 

Working towards self-actualisation means working towards full humanness. It means being the best version of ourselves, making the most of our most human capabilities.

It means listening to our inner self, knowing who we really are, and using that knowledge to live the life we are meant to live. It also means being creative, never stopping learning new things and living by our values.

An ideal world would be one where everybody, the entire population, was encouraged and had the time and everything they needed to work towards their self-actualisation. 

A better future would be one where self-actualisation was a value and a state of mind cherished by society, where we all made an effort to be the best version of ourselves.

It is a distant future, but not impossible. We are born to self-actualise, but some of us forget about it. We can build a society where we don’t forget it, and everyone is allowed to live the life they are meant to live.

Wouldn’t it be great to live in such a world? 

Definitely!

It is in our hands to build it. What are we waiting for?

Read also: Why self-actualisation is the key to building a happier world

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If you are into Twitter and other social media, you have probably heard about the Dunning-Kruger effect. It is one of the most talked-about mental biases nowadays. It affects us all and has some profound implications on diverse areas such as leadership, learning, and even how we argue with strangers on social media.

As Wikipedia explains, “the Dunning-Kruger effect is the cognitive bias whereby people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability”. Some researchers also apply it to people with high ability, who tend to underestimate their capabilities.

This makes sense. When you don’t know much about a topic, you don’t know everything there is to know. It is easy to fall into thinking that you already know a lot or enough. You don’t know enough about the topic to assess everything you don’t know correctly. The opposite also happens: people who are experts on a topic realise how much it took them to get there and also know enough about the specific field to see that they are still far away from knowing everything. Hence, they underestimate their knowledge or expertise.

Thus, the Dunning-Kruger effect would be the opposite of the most famous phrase from Socrates: “I know only one thing, and that is that I know nothing”. Under Dunning-Kruger, we could reformulate this into “I know nothing, ergo I know everything”.

The research

As the name indicates, this effect is based on research conducted by two American social psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger. They published their now-famous paper in 1999, and since then, the results have been replicated many times. The original research focused on logical reasoning, grammar, and social skills. The study subjects would rate themselves in these topics. Then their true ability would be assessed. Dunning and Kruger realized that people who weren’t experts or skilled in the topic would rate themselves higher than their actual performance merited.

The results of this and other research usually come in the form of the graph we can see below.

I love the names of the phases, especially the first one; it is very graphic. When you are climbing Mount Stupid, you think you know a lot, but you don’t know anything.

It happens to the best of us

Like all biases, we think it happens to other people, but not us. We are too smart for this silly thing to happen to us. This is probably another type of bias, although I’m not sure of the name.

The Dunning-Kruger effect affects us all, not only the most stupid people in society (strangely enough, we always think others are the stupid ones, not us, we can’t possibly be the dumb ones). It is not a phenomenon only affecting a few. It affects us all. 

I know I am a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I know it now, but I wasn’t aware of it until recently. Still, I’m sure I will continue thinking I am better at things for which I am ill-prepared to perform. I like to think of myself as a multidisciplinary erudite. If you read some of my posts, you will have noticed that I like to learn (and have an opinion) about many different topics: leadership, technology, history, philosophy, coaching, geopolitics, or even death and the meaning of life. I am a generalist, not a specialist, which means I know a little about many things, but I don’t know a lot about a single topic. This is a fertile ground for the Dunning-Kruger effect to flourish.

I often enter into discussions believing I know it all about that specific topic, but many times I don’t know enough, far from it. This makes me frustrated and angry when other people disagree with me, and I become dismissive of their arguments. Unfortunately, this is not the right way to learn, or make friends, for that matter. 

This is something that I realized very recently, and it really annoys me about myself. I need to be humbler and be aware that I know very little about almost anything in life. It will be a long journey, but at least now I know this is something I need to improve on. I’ll get there.

Is Dunning-Kruger real?

Like all biases, the Dunning-Kruger effect is difficult to avoid altogether. We know we do it, but we aren’t aware of it in most cases. That’s the point with biases: they affect the way we look at the world without us realizing they influence us. 

Another thing with biases and psychological effects is that it is challenging to prove definitely that they exist. Social sciences are not hard sciences, and many will argue they aren’t sciences at all. As I mentioned earlier, the Dunning-Kruger effect has been replicated in other experiments many times, but it has also failed to be replicated in many others.

The author of this article, for example, dismantles the results of the original experiment using statistics. He argues that the results of the Dunning-Kruger experiment came that way because of the way the experiment was designed and random inputs gave similar results. If that is really the case, then Dunning-Kruger doesn’t really exist.

The author says there are other well-studied biases that would explain similar (but not the same) phenomena, like for example the over-confidence bias or the better-than-average bias, whereby we all believe we are better than average in many areas, like for example driving, when this is mathematically impossible: a big part of the population has to be worse than the average by definition.

So Dunning-Kruger may not really exist and the experiment wasn’t well designed. So what? It is not my place to say whether this is true or not (for once I would like to admit my lack of expertise on the matter), but still, I think it has some important learnings for all of us, regardless of its existence or not.

Why it matters

All biases matter. We think we are rational beings, like the homo economicus promulgated by economists in their studies, but as it happens, we are flawed, emotional and biased animals. The Dunning-Kruger effect is one of these limiting biases. You won’t be able always to avoid it, but being aware of it will increase the chances of you not missing something because of it.

At the end of the day, life is a journey of searching for self-awareness and learning about oneself. Being aware that when we are not experts on something, we tend to overestimate our expertise is helpful. It allows us to know our limitations better and not screw it up miserably. Being aware of the Dunning-Kruger effect and how it impacts us increases our self-awareness.

Great and wise leaders are self-aware. They know their strengths and limitations and those of their team members. Great leaders know when they don’t know something; they limit the Dunning-Kruger effect’s grasp on their view of the problems. 

They also know that some of their team members don’t have the required skills and expertise in some areas. When this is the case, leaders familiar with Dunning-Kruger will know that these team members will probably overestimate their performance level and underestimate the dimension of the problems they face, thus increasing the risk of not tackling the challenge well and creating further problems. Also, low performers will be less receptive to training and development exercises related to the skill they are poor at because they won’t see the need to improve. They will think they are strong enough and have no need to learn anything.

You cannot force someone to learn if they don’t want to. Learning is subjective, personal, and voluntary. There has to be some motivation to do it, otherwise learning simply won’t happen. This is, for me, one of the most important applications of Dunning-Kruger. It makes us overestimate our skills and knowledge in a specific area, thus hindering our development and learning. Why make an effort learning something if you already know enough? The risk of this happening is at its highest at the peak of “Mount Stupid”. 

This is something to think about next time you don’t see the need to study or learn more about something because you think you already know enough. Ask yourself, is this true? Do you know enough of the subject to know how much you still don’t know? Or are you being a victim, once again, of the Dunning-Kruger effect? 

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A few months ago, when I started this blog, I was talking with one of my former managers about a common acquaintance, how he completely lacked self-awareness and how this affected his work and his relationships with others.

“You should write about self-awareness or the lack of it in your blog,” she said half-jokingly.

“I might, one day,” I half-promised.

And here I am.

A few months have passed since then, but I never forgot about that conversation, and I always thought one day I should write about it. I have touched upon self-awareness in other posts (the Man in the Mirror, The Wise Leader, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the Modern Stoic, or How to Overcome Limiting Beliefs), but this time the entire post is dedicated to the topic.

It deserves its space. As we will see, self-awareness is critical.

A New Year resolution

I don’t tend to pick new year’s resolutions (I chose many new resolutions, but why do they have to be in January and not in October?), but this year I am proposing to improve my self-awareness. 

Why? Because it is one of the most important competencies you can have.

It is the source of everything else. If you know yourself well and are aware of your strengths, weaknesses, motivations, emotions, drives, and desires, you are already well on your way to effectively leading yourself and others to success. 

In Ancient Greece, when people visited the Oracle of Delphi, one of the maxims written on the temple forecourt was “Know thyself”. It is the first step in self-development and growth. Know yourself, and then you will understand your purpose and motivations in life, be happy and improve your relationships with others. 

If self-awareness is that important and beneficial, is it something you can learn?

Nature vs Nurture

Like most skills and competencies, there is a bit of nature and nurture when it comes to self-awareness.

Genetics plays a part, and some people are more predisposed, by nature, to be better tuned to how they feel, what their strengths and weaknesses are, etc. 

Nature always matters, but it is never alone. Nurture also tends to play its part, and self-awareness isn’t an exception. The family environment, schools, the books read, the feedback received, mentors and role models… all of this builds up or fails to build a person’s self-awareness. 

So it is a bit of both.

Someone might have the potential to be very self-aware because it is in their genes, but if this skill isn’t honed and promoted, it will not flourish.

On the other hand, someone with a low potential for high self-awareness might work on it and get closer to the potential dictated by nature and display what would be high levels of self-awareness, even if not genetically predisposed to it.

Self-awareness as part of Emotional Intelligence

Self-awareness is the first of five components of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) as per the model of its leading proponent Daniel Goleman.

He believes it is an essential skill that allows those who have it to know how their emotions affect them and others and helps them improve their performance. People with self-awareness also have a better understanding of their values and purpose, which, as I wrote in another post, are key to high performance, fulfilment, and happiness at work. 

In Goleman’s opinion, self-aware people are able to evaluate themselves realistically and honestly, and are usually perceived as self-confident, even if they often have no problems showing their vulnerability (remember, Vulnerability is a Super-Power!), and they display a self-deprecating sense of humour. 

Self-aware people seek constructive feedback to learn more about themselves and improve, whereas people with low self-awareness often mistakenly think they know themselves well enough, so they don’t like to hear feedback that goes against the image they have built about themselves in their imagination. 

It is my own impression not supported by any evidence, so I might be mistaken, but I have the feeling that there is a positive correlation between people with high self-awareness and a growth mindset, whereas people with low self-awareness tend to lean more towards a fixed mindset.

If you are self-aware, you realise you can learn, grow and get better by practising and making mistakes. 

How to be more self-aware

There are different techniques to improve self-awareness.

Here I will focus on three.

Johari Window

The Johari Window is a technique created by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955, and it helps people know themselves and their relationships with others better. The name comes from a combination of the authors’ first names.

It involves an exercise whereby different adjectives describing a subject end up in different quadrants of a box (see figure). There is a public quadrant, also known as the Arena or the Open quadrant, where known to self and known to others match. This is the area in which our view of ourselves and that of others are aligned. 

The second quadrant is the Blind Spot area. This is where there are things about us others know, but we don’t.

The third quadrant, also known as the Façade or the Hidden area, is where there are things known to ourselves but unknown to others. These are our inner views of ourselves, which often we don’t want others to know, usually due to shame and embarrassment. These are things we don’t usually like about ourselves, so we don’t want others to know them.

Finally, there is the Unknown quadrant, with things neither we nor others know about us. 

The first quadrant can be made bigger through feedback, coaching, introspection, or just by conducting this simple exercise with others, making the quadrants two (Blind Spot) and four (Unknown) smaller. This increases our self-awareness.

We can also reduce the third quadrant, the Façade, by sharing more about ourselves with others and displaying our vulnerability, again making the first quadrant, the public one, bigger. This improves our relationship with others.

The Johari window was devised as a therapeutic exercise involving the subject and the people who knew them selecting adjectives defining them, but I don’t think it is necessary to conduct the exercise exactly as prescribed to get some value out of it. It can make us reflect on what we think are our public and façade windows, make the active commitment to reducing the blind window by asking for feedback and wonder what may lay in the unknown quadrant.

Coaching

Coaching is one of the most powerful methods to increase self-awareness.

After all, the coach’s mission is just that, to accompany the coachee on a journey of knowing themselves better so they can grow and achieve their goals. 

As a coach myself, I have been coached by others several times. Every time I have learned deep, meaningful things about myself that previously I was ignorant about. It never fails to amaze me. 

You think you know yourself very well, and bang, it hits you.

There is always something new you didn’t know that makes you see yourself and others in a different light. It is usually shocking and uncomfortable but also rewarding and enlightening. The truth, especially when it is about oneself, isn’t always pleasant, but it is the truth nevertheless, and knowing it will make you stronger, better, happier… you name it. 

A coach is like a mirror that, through questioning, feedback, and different exercises, helps you look at yourself better.

It’s a mirror that reaches hitherto hidden blind spots and uncovers what has been hiding, often in plain sight for all others but you. Coaching helps you reduce the Blind and Unknown quadrants, be more honest with yourself about your Façade quadrant, and question why you aren’t more public about it.

Know thyself, as the Delphi Oracle said. A coach is like a modern oracle, but she doesn’t tell you about your future. She doesn’t tell you anything but asks you the right questions for you to find your answers yourself.

Meditation

I started meditating through an app called Headspace in 2013 or 2014 but stopped after a few months, and since then, I didn’t keep up doing it regularly. I remember I felt good when I did it, but still, I stopped it for some reason I can’t remember. I guess I find it hard to keep some habits, especially if they are the healthy type. 

Then last year, the pandemic kicked in, and I was spending a lot of time alone at home, getting anxious and stressed, so I decided to give it a go again, this time with an app called Waking Up.

It was a great decision. Covid was terrible for so many reasons, but restarting meditation and writing will be something for which I will be forever grateful to this virus.

Meditation has many benefits, and I would recommend everybody to do it, but this post is not the place to extol all its virtues. We are here to talk about self-awareness, and oh boy, does meditation help with it. 

Meditation is about being more present and in the moment, being conscious of your breath and aware of everything that is happening in your consciousness: thoughts, sounds, sensations of the body, images, what you see in your visual field with your eyes closed (it’s never completely black, is it?). 

The first time you try to focus on your breath without concentrating on anything else, you realise how hopeless a task this is. A myriad of thoughts and images comes racing out of nowhere, and you realise you don’t control your thought process as much as you thought you did. 

As you meditate more and more, you start noticing better where your thoughts are coming from, and the images, feelings, emotions, sensations like heat or cold, the energy passing through your body, and the mood you are in… You start to be more mindful about everything happening through your consciousness, as and when it happens.

You begin to get to know yourself and how your conscious mind works better. 

In sum, you start to be more self-aware.

AI in support of Self-awareness

In this blog, we always tend to keep an eye on the future and how things might evolve and change, so I would like to share something I found interesting regarding AI and self-awareness in Pedro Domingos’s The Master Algorithm. 

Domingos explains that there is an enormous amount of data about each of us online, as we all know, but luckily, it is not located in one single place (yet), nor is it accessible to one single agent.

Google has some data about you, Facebook some more, Amazon knows something else, etc. Domingos believes that in the future, we may have all the data there is about us in a USB or cloud, all in one place, and we could ask the Master Algorithm (this will be the master of all algorithms, the one unifying all the rest, that hasn’t been created yet) to interpret the data for us and tell us who we really are.

In similar lines, Yuval Noah Harari argues in his works Homo Deus and 21 lessons for the 21st Century that we will reach a moment in the near future where AI and algorithms, based on all the data they have collected about us, will know our desires and what drives us better than ourselves. When this future arrives, we may have delegated all our decisions to machines, as they will know better what is good for us.

This is a scary and dystopian thought, and there are several reasons why I think (or hope) we may never end up there, but this is a discussion for another post.

What matters here is that as AI gets better and gets to amass data about us in one place, we may reach a moment when we could get some AI to help us increase our self-awareness. AI would analyse the data, how we did in certain meetings, how we are doing in our work, how we feel about it, etc., and give us advice, some pointers, tell us about our blind spots, etc.

It would be like an artificial mentor but with much more data about us than any human could ever have.

But I think we are still far from this, if we ever get there.

Before we get to that time, we’ll have to continue working on our self-awareness through the old means: introspection and reflection, seeking and interiorising feedback, coaching and mentoring, meditation, and tools like the Johari window. 

And you, how self-aware are you? What are you doing to improve your self-awareness?

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“Be the change you want to see in the world”

Mahatma Ghandi

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. 

Today I am wise, so I am changing myself”

Rumi

I love these three quotes. Well, I love these two quotes and the song, although the latter could also be a quote of wisdom from a wise philosopher instead of a song by the King of Pop himself. These three quotes have something fundamental in common. They all highlight the virtues of personal responsibility and self-actualisation and are a desperate call for action to change the world, starting with oneself. 

The three of them are conveying the same message: the world is changed by every one of us, by our actions, so if you want the world to change, don’t wait for others (governments, the UN, NGOs, corporations, actors, singers, writers, philosophers, your friends) to change the world, but start with yourself. If all of us started with ourselves and changed for the better, becoming wiser, more compassionate, more generous, and kinder, and sharing our vulnerability, the world would become a much nicer place to live.

If you change yourself and nobody else follows you, maybe the world will not have changed so much, but at least your world will have changed, you will be able to live with yourself, and you might even become a role model for others.

This is a compelling message, so it is worth repeating: don’t wait for others to change for the better; start with yourself first.

Personal responsibility and self-actualisation

These quotes talk about changing the world, but I don’t think that’s the most important message. They also talk about personal responsibility, taking ownership of your own life, and changing yourself. 

In his famous work hierarchy of needs, Maslow listed self-actualisation as the need of the highest order, the one sitting at the top of the pyramid (although Maslow himself never showed these needs in a pyramid). Self-actualisation is about the realisation of one’s full potential, of achieving everything we can achieve, of being everything we can be. As Maslow put it, “what a man can be, he must be.” 

Self-actualisation can mean pursuing one’s creative instincts and expressing ourselves through art, but it can also mean achieving our life goals, being the best parent or partner we can be, or excelling at work.

We all need to find out who we are, accept ourselves the way we are, and then be the best possible versions of ourselves. We will be grateful for it, and the world will be thankful for it.

Excellence vs. Exigence

I associate self-actualisation with the search for excellence, not for exigence. Both sound similar but are very different and can have different consequences on our effectiveness and mental wellbeing. 

The search for excellence means trying to be the best version of yourself but accepting your shortcomings, knowing you are not perfect and being OK with that. It’s giving your best shot at it, trying your best, and being happy knowing you are reaching your maximum potential. You focus on what you have done and what you are good at, and it usually brings happiness and contentment.

When we live in exigence mode, we aim for perfectionism and are always focusing on what is lacking and what we aren’t doing well. We are always missing the target, as we haven’t reached our unachievable and unrealistic goals. Exigence brings constant dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

It is a fine line between the two, and it is not always easy to navigate.

Is purpose the secret to happiness?

When I was younger, I was a bit of a hedonist, and I would identify myself with the Epicureans. I thought happiness was the result of having pleasurable experiences and avoiding suffering as much as possible. As I grew older, I distanced myself more and more from this line of thought, and I’ve become more of a Stoic. I still like and enjoy the pleasures of life, but I understand suffering and pain are also part and parcel of it. I embrace them fully and try to learn from them.

If pleasurable experiences and lack of suffering aren’t the secret to happiness, what is it?

The secret of happiness is a very complex and subjective topic and would merit much more than a blog post, but I think one of the main elements has to be purpose. We are goal-oriented creatures, and if we don’t have a purpose, something to strive for, something to dream about, or something to redirect our efforts towards, then it will be impossible to be fully happy. 

One of the great stoic masters, Seneca, put it nicely more than two thousand years ago:

“Man’s ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he was born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy – that he lives in accordance with his own nature.”

Seneca, “Letters from a Stoic”

This sounds simple and obvious, but it is profound. How many of us have stopped to think about what our true nature is and what we want from life? Are we true to ourselves in our choices of career, partner, and life goals? How many of us know, really know, who we are and what we want to achieve in life?

I don’t know about you, but I am now a middle-aged man, and I am still grappling with these questions.

Find out who you are, define your purpose in life, and go for it. You will have walked the first step towards happiness.

Let’s change the world

What I like about the three quotes above from Michael Jackson, Ghandi and Rumi is that they combine personal growth and self-actualisation, focused on the individual, with changing the world, focused on the collective. The first step in order to change the group is to change oneself.

Our world has improved a lot, and living standards are better than ever, but it is still a highly unequal and unfair place, with many global issues menacing our existence and the quality of our lives. It needs changing, but it won’t change itself. 

We shouldn’t be waiting for others to change it for us. These three quotes remind us that we have the agency, the power, and the capacity to change the world if we start with ourselves. If you become the best version of yourself, you will live a happier life, you will make your small contribution to changing the world for the better, and you will become a role model for others. 

Next time you look at yourself in the mirror, think about what type of human being you want to be, who you really are, and who the best version of yourself is. Think about what change the world needs, and be that change.

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The post I’m starting with the man in the mirror appeared first on Humane Future of Work.