Institute of Neuro-Semantics Europe
Self-Actualisation Assessment
ASSESSING SELF-ACTUALISATION
One of our purposes in Neuro-Semantics is to enable ourselves and others
to actualise, or make real, our highest and best. Highest refers to your
highest visions about life, your values for how to live, and meanings for
making life meaningful. Best refers to your top performances, your best
skills and competencies, and taking your actions so that they reflect you
when you are in the zone of performance. Yet to do that with mindfulness
requires that we be able to assess where we are now and where we are as
we progress, in other words, assessment of our self-actualisation. And that
means creating benchmarks for self-actualising development.
This Assessment Scale invites you to look at your driving needs— those
lower and higher needs that drive your neurology, physiology, and
psychological states of mind and emotion. For each of the four lower
needs and for the fifth level of self-actualisation needs, you will find seven
or more distinctions. The scale invites you to gauge yourself in terms of
how well are you adequately meeting your needs. Are you just “getting
by?” Then you would put a check in the middle. If you are not getting by
very well, then you will be to the left in the red zone. If you are more than
just getting by, you are thriving or optimising, you will be to the right of
the center line, in the green zone.
Getting by refers to being able to fulfill the need so that the drive goes
away. That’s how the lower needs work. When adequate gratified by truesatisfiers (things that truly correspond to and fit the need), then the
disequilibrium, the inner tension, the driving urge reduces and then
vanishes from awareness. That will be a first sign of using a true satisfier.
Another sign: energy! Vitality. You will feel good and be able to focus on
the next-level needs.
If you are not using true-satisfiers, but false-satisfiers, then the drive
doesn’t go away. In fact, the drive for that need, whether food, drink,
shelter, money, sex, etc. will dominate more and more. You may become
obsessive about it, and then compulsive in your actions. False-satisfiers
and false-beliefs about our needs, for us humans, will create neurotic
needs. We will semantically load the need with meanings, understandings, beliefs, etc. that the need cannot bear and the result we will become obsessive-compulsive about the need or some false-satisfier (drugs, money, gambling, etc.) and the false-gratification makes things worse.
Now you can assess where you are and how you are dealing with,
handling, coping, and hopefully mastering your innate driving needs. The
lower needs are “animal” needs because the higher intelligent social
animals have those needs as well— the need not only for survival and
safety, but for connection, bonding, belong, and for recognition of their
place in a group. The mechanism that drives these lower needs is
deficiency and so Maslow designated them, the D-needs. These are the
needs that do not go away until fulfilled. And when fulfilled, they go
away.
The higher or self-actualisation needs are those which are with us from the beginning— in nascent form– but which become fully present to us as we fulfill the lower needs. These are the uniquely human needs. These are our needs for knowledge, meaning, understanding, beauty, order, mathematics, excellence, fairness, justice, contribution, making a difference, giving love, etc. The mechanism governing these needs is abundance and being-ness.
Abundance means that when you gratify them, they grow. They do not go
away, they do the opposite— they expand and become fuller. Being-ness
means that unlike the lower needs that are instrumental needs, means to an end, these are non-instrumental, they are ends (not means). These are for living in, for being, they are valid and satisfying in and of themselves.
So where are you? Go and take the assessment. It will take 30 minutes
when you do it the first time and then you can print off the results. Each
time you do it thereafter, will go quicker and quicker as you get more
acquainted with it.
Contact us to work through the completed form at no charge!
You can now find it on the website:
http://www.neurosemantics.com/assessment-scale-form
Contact one of the Neuro-Semantics Trainers or Meta-Coaches.