15 Positive Qualities

15 POSITIVE QUALITIES OF SELF ACTUALIZATION

"Self-actualization... nay be loosely described as the full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities, etc. Such people soon to be fulfilling themselves and to be doing the best that they are capable of doing, reminding us of Nietzsche's exhortation, 'Become what thou art!' They are people who have developed or are developing to the full stature of which they are capable." Abrahwn Maslow, "Motivation and Personality" page 150

Maslow listed 15 positive qualities of Self-Actualizing people in chapter 11 of the above mentioned book. They are listed below with a short explanation.

1. MORE EFFICIENT PERCEPTION OF REALITY AND MORE COMFORTABLE RELATIONS WITH
IT.

This is defined as an unusual ability to detect the spurious, the fake, and the dishonest in personality, and in general to judge people correctly and efficiently.

In art and music, in things of the intellect, in scientific matters, in politics and public affairs, they soared as a group to be able to see concealed or confused realities more swiftly and more correctly than others. Their predictions of the future from what-~ever facts were in hand at the time seemed to be more often correct, because less based upon wish, desire, anxiety, fear, or upon generalized, character-determined optimism or pessimism.

Self-actualizing people distinguished far more easily than most, the fresh, concrete, and idiographic from he generic, abstract, and rubricized. The consequence is that they live more in the real world of nature than in the man- made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.

Since for healthy people, the unknown is not frightening, they do not have to spend any time laying the ghost, whistling past the cemetery or otherwise protecting themselves against imagined dangers. They do not neglect the unknown or deny it or run away from it or try to make believe that it is really known, nor do they organize, dichotomize or rubricize it prematurely.

2. ACCEPTANCE OF SELF, OTHERS, NATURE

Self-actualizing people show a relative lack of overriding guilt, of crippling shame, and of extreme or severe anxiety. They find it possible to accept themselves and their own nature without chagrin or complaint, or for that matter, even without thinking about the matter very ouch.

They can accept their own human nature in the stoic style, with all its shortcomings, with all its discrepancies from the ideal image without feeling real concern.

Self -actualizing people tend to be good animals, hearty in their appetites and enjoying themselves without regret or shame or apology. They seem to have a uniformly good appetite for food; they seen to slow well; they seen to enjoy their sexual lives without unnecessary inhibition and so on for all the relatively physiological impulses.

Closely related to self-acceptance and to acceptance of other is (1) their lack of defensiveness, protective coloration or pose and (2) their distaste for such artificialities in others. Cant, guile, hypocrisy, front, face, playing a gum, trying to impress in conventional ways: these are all absent in themselves to an unusual degree.

What healthy people do feel guilty about (or ashamed, anxious, sad or regretful)
are (1) improvable shortcomings, e.g. laziness, thoughtlessness, loss of temper, hurting others; (2) stubborn remnants of psychological ill health, e.g.,
prejudice, jealousy, envy; (3) habits, which, though relatively independent of character structure, may yet be very strong, or (4) shortcomings of the species or of the culture or of the group with which they have been identified.

3. SPONTANEITY; SIMPLICITY; NATURALNESS

Self-actualizing people can all be described as relatively spontaneous in behavior and far more spontaneous than that in their inner life, thoughts, impulses, etc. Their behavior is marked by simplicity and naturalness and by lack of artificiality or straining for affect.

This inner attitude can also be seen in those moments when the person becomes keenly absorbed in something that is close to one of his main interests. He can then be seen quite casually to drop off all sorts of rules of behavior to which at other tines he conforms.

One consequence or correlate of this characteristic is that these people have codes of ethics that are relatively autonomous and individual rather than conventional.

Their ease of penetration to reality, their closer approach to an animal-like or childlike acceptance and spontaneity imply a superior awareness of their own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general.

4. PROBLEM CENTERING

Our subjects are in general strongly focused on problem outside themselves. In current terminology they are problem centered rather than ego centered. They generally are not problem for themselves and are not generally much concerned about themselves; e.g., as contrasted with the ordinary introspectiveness that one find in insecure people. These individuals customarily have sane mission in life, sane task to fulfill, some problem outside themselves which enlists much of their energies.

With a few exceptions we can say that our objects are ordinarily concerned with basic issue and eternal questions of the type that we have learned to call philosophical or ethical.

5. THE QUALITY OF DETACHMENT; THE NEED FOR PRIVACY

Self-actualizing people can be solitary without ham to themselves and without discomfort. Furthermore, it is true for almost all that they positively like solitude and privacy to a definitely greater degree than the average person.

it is often Possible for them to remain above the battle, to remain unruffled, undisturbed by that which produces turmoil in others. They find it easy to be aloof reserved and also calm and serene; thus it becomes possible for them to take personal misfortunes without reacting violently as the ordinary person does.

Another meaning of autonomy is self-decision, self -government, being an active, responsible, self-disciplined, deciding agent rather than a pawn, or helplessly
"determined" by others, being strong rather than weak.

Finally, I(Maslow) must make a statement even though it will certainly be disturbing to many theologians, philosophers, and scientists: self-actualizing individuals have more "free will" and are less "determined" than average people are.

6. AUTONOMY; INDEPENDENCE OF CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT; WILL; ACTIVE AGENTS

one of the characteristics of self-actualizing people, which to a certain extent crosscuts much of what we have already described, is their relative independence of the physical and social environment. They are dependent for their own development and continued growth on their own potentialities and latent resources. Just as the tree needs sunshine and water and food, so do most people need love, safety and the other basic need gratifications that can come only from without. But once these external satisfiers are obtained, once these inner deficiencies are satiated by outside satisfiers, the true problem of individual human development begins, e.g. self-actualization.

7. CONTINUED FRESHNESS OF APPRECIATION

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. Thus for such a person, any sunset nay be as beautiful as the first one, any flower may be of breath-taking loveliness, even after he has seen a million flowers.
The thousandth baby he sees is just as miraculous a product as the first one he saw. He remains as convinced of his luck in marriage thirty yews after his marriage and is as surprised by the wife's beauty when she is sixty as she was forty yews before. For such people, even the casual workaday, moment-to-moment business of living can be thrilling, exciting and ecstatic.

I(Maslow) have become convinced that getting used to our blessings 13 one of the most important nonevil generators of human evil, tragedy, and suffering. What we take for granted we undervalue and we are therefore to apt to sell a valuable birthright for a moss of pottage.

8. THE MYSTIC EXPERIENCE; THE PEAK EXPERIENCE

Those subjective expressions that have been called the mystic experience and described so well by William James are a fairly common experience for self- actualizing individuals. The strong emotions described in the previous section sometime get strong enough, chaotic and widespread enough to be called mystic experiences. There were feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one every was before, the feeling of great ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placing in time and space, with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that the subject is to some extent transformed and strengthen even in his daily life by such experiences.

Apparently the acute mystic or peak experience is a tremendous intensification of any of the experiences in which there is loss of self or transcendence of it.

9. GEMEINSCHAFTSGEFOHL

This word, invented by Alfred Adler is the only one available that describes well the flavor of the feelings for mankind expressed by self-actualizing subjects. They have for human beings in general a deep feeling of
identification, sympathy, and affection in spite of the occasional anger, impatience or disgust described below. Because of this they have a gamine desire to help the human race. it is as if they were all numbers of a single family.
One's feelings toward his brothers would be on the whole affectionate, even if these brothers were foolish, weak or even if they were sometimes nasty. They would still be more easily forgiven than strangers.

10. INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

Self-actualizing people have deeper and more profound interpersonal relations than any other adults. They are capable of more fusion, greater love, more perfect identification, more obliteration of the ego boundaries than other people would consider possible. There are, however, certain special characteristics of these relationships. The other members of these relationships are likely to be healthier and closer to self-actualization than the average, often much closer. There is high selectiveness here, considering the swell proportion of such people in the general population.

One consequence of this phenomenon and of certain others as well is that self- actualizing people have these especially deep ties with rather few individuals.
Their circle of friends is rather small The ones that they love profoundly are few in number.

11. THE DEMOCRATIC CHARACTER STRUCTURE

All Self-actualizing people may be said to be democratic people in the deepest possible sense. These people have all the obvious or superficial democratic characteristics. They can be and are friendly with anyone of suitable character regardless of class, education, political belief, race or color. As a matter of fact it often seem as if they are not even aware of these differences, which are for the average person so obvious and so important.

They have not only this most obvious quality but their democratic feeling goes deeper as well. For instance, they find it possible to learn from anybody who has something to teach them--no matter what other characteristics he may have.
They are all quite well aware of how little they know in comparison with what could be known and what is known by others.

12. DISCRIMINATION BETWEEN MEANS AND ENDS, BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL

Self-actualizing people are not chronically unsure about the difference between right and wrong in his actual living. Whether or not they could verbalize the matter, they rarely showed in their day-to-day living the chaos, the confusion, the inconsistency or the conflict that are so common in the average person's ethical dealings. This may be phrased also in the following terms: these individuals are strongly ethical, they have definite moral standards, they do right and do not do wrong. Needless to say their notions of right and wrong and of good and evil are often not the conventional ones. A few centuries ago these would all have been described as men who walk in the path of God or as godly men. A few say that they believe in a God, but describe this God more as a metaphysical concept than as a personal figure. If religion is defined only in social-behavioral terms, then these are all religious people, the atheists included.

Self-actualizing people most of the time behave as though, for them means and ends are clearly distinguishable. In general, they are fixed on ends rather than on news, and mans we quite definitely subordinated to these ends.

Self-actualizing people are somewhat more likely to appreciate for its own sake, and in an absolute way, the doing itself; they can often enjoy for its own sake the getting to some place as well as the arriving. it is occasionally possible for them to make out of the most trivial and routine activity an intrinsically enjoyable game or dance or play.

13. PHILOSOPHICAL, UNHOSTILE SENSE OF HUMOR

A finding that was common to all, was their sense of humor is not of the ordinary type. They do not consider funny what the average man considers to be funny. Thus they do not laugh at hostile humor (making people laugh by hurting someone) or superiority humor (laughing at someone else's inferiority) or authority-rebellion humor (the unfunny, Oedipal, or nutty joke).
Characteristically what they consider humor is more closely allied to philosophy than to anything else. It may also be called the humor of the real because it consists in large portion poking fun at human beings in general when they are foolish or forget their place in the universe, or try to be big when they are actually small.

Such humor can be very pervasive; the human situation, human pride, seriousness, busy-ness, bustle, ambition, striving and planning can all be seen as amusing, humorous, even funny.

14. CREATIVENESS

It is a universal characteristic of all the people studied or observed. There is no exception. Each one shows in one way or another a special kind of creativeness or originality or inventiveness that has certain peculiar characteristics. They seem to be specially endowed with a drive and a capacity that may have rather little relationship to the rest of the personality and with which, from all evidence, the individuals seem to be born. The creativeness of the self-actualized mat seem rather to be akin to the naive and universal creativeness of unspoiled children.

This creativeness appears in some of our subjects not in the unusual forms of writing books, composing music or producing artistic objects, rather may be much more humble. It is as if this special type of creativeness, being an expression of healthy personality is projected out upon the world or touches whatever activity the person is engaged in.

15. RESISTANCE TO ENCULTURATION; THE TRANSCENDENCE OF ANY PARTICULAR CULTURE

Self-actualizing people are rat well adjusted (in the naive sense of approval of aid identification with the culture). They get along with the culture in various ways. but of all of them it may said that in a certain profound and meaningful sense they resist enculturation and maintain a certain inner detachment from the culture in which they are immersed.

These comments are taken directly from "Motivation and Personality" by Abraham Maslow, in most cases, word for word, or with minor changes and editing.