Self-Actualization

Abraham Maslow places our need to be self-actualizing at the top of our hierarchy of needs, but instead of developing his theory of what this need consisted of, he took the reverse engineering approach. Maslow studied people that he had observed to be living self-fulfilling lives, and determined that they all had common characteristics. He concluded that self-actualizing people were:

• Experiencing life fully, vividly, and selflessly.
• Making life choices that led to progression not regression (growth over fear).
• Listening to their inner voice and letting the self emerge.
• Taking responsibility for themselves.
• Having peak experiences.
• Self-examining, finding their defenses and then giving them up.

Basically, a self-actualizing person is someone who is growing into the best person they can be.

Happiness and Flow

Flow - “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

Happiness - a temporary feeling of enjoyment that not only comes from doing something exciting, but usually involves learning something, accomplishing something, or overcoming some kind of challenge. Otherwise, the feeling of “happiness” you are experiencing is really just the feeling of having fun. Fun is great, even awesome, but it is not happiness.

Man's Search For Meaning

By Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl was a German psychiatrist imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps during World War 2. He writes about the suffering that he and his fellow inmates endured, the cruelty of the guards, and the even greater cruelty from the inmates appointed to a level of authority over the rest.

Frankl learned that suffering is an inevitable part of life, and without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

Everything can be taken from man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Frankl came to realize that if a prisoner could keep his faith in the future, he had a chance to survive, but if he lost his faith he lost his spiritual hold leading to mental and physical decay.

There are two types of people, the decent man and the indecent man.

Strength Training 1 - Introduction

Physical activity is one of the key lifestyle risk factors that warrants attention. Lack of regular exercise and excess sedentary behavior are clearly associated with cardiovascular risk and mortality in both men and women. Diminished levels of fitness as measured by exercise testing correlated with increased risk of mortality. Even modest incremental increases in physical activity and exercise yields a measurable reduction in mortality. The effect of exercise on health outcomes appears to be dose-dependent. Also, increased physical activity favorably impacts a range of cardiometabolic indices, including weight, blood pressure, glycemic parameters, blood lipids, inflammation, and psychosocial factors.

Our Reprogramming - Part I

So here we are. We understand that the life we have been living is one that we did not choose. We are working on forgiving ourselves for wronging others in the past as well as forgiving others for wronging us. We cannot and will not be victims, no matter how much cover it provides us. We understand that while the programming of our subconscious may be extremely difficult to alter, we have much more control of our consciousness and its interaction with our subconscious.

Our conscious needs and desires can override and even take control of those of our subconscious.

We have determined that we do not want to keep traveling down the path we are currently on. We want to travel along a path of our own design and we have the power to make that happen. The trick is how do we make that happen. While the answer to this question will be unique for each of us, there are a few questions that are more universal that we can try to answer.