Achieving the Best We Can Be

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.
Benjamin Franklin

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Last week I told you about Maslow and his search for 'becoming the best we can be'. How do we go about it though ? Unfortunately there is no pill you can take that will turn you into a self-actualiser overnight, but there are some steps that you can take starting now that may lead you in the right direction:

Assess your life. Are you living a life that you find deeply rewarding and full of meaning for you ? This is not a "once-only" step. It's a question you'll need to ask yourself often. Am I working hard enough ? Am I wasting time when I ought to be moving nearer my goals ? If you want to be a doctor aim for at least your 7 A* at GCSE.
Assess your motives. Are you holding yourself back because of fear? Base your life choices on a desire to grow, rather than as a reaction to fear. Fear of failure can be very powerful - what if I try my best and I fail ? What is certain is that if you don't try your best you are MORE likely to fail.
Be willing to change. If your life isn't rewarding you'll need to be willing to change, willing to get off your backside and take a new direction. This is never easy for any of us but we need to be brave enough to say,'OK, I must do this'. I am diabetic and need cardiovascular exercise so I am going to go to the gym at least twice a week: a major change for me but a necessary one.
Take responsibility. This is really important we are all good at blaming other people or our circumstances: DON'T do it. We are all responsible for our own behaviour and achievement. Don't expect others to make changes for you. If you feel you're not learning enough get some books and papers and teach yourself. It's your life and its up to you to make the necessary changes that will lead to YOUR fulfillment.
Cherish your uniqueness. Be prepared to break away from the herd and be different. Don't be afraid to follow your impulses. Never do something because other people are doing it and you want to be 'cool'. Do what you think is right for you.
Realise your dreams. Instead of wallowing in wishful thinking, write down your goals and take the appropriate action to achieve them.
Accept your fallibility. Be willing to say, "I was wrong." Be honest with yourself and with others. We all fail at something instead of blaming others we ought to get back right in there -if at first you don't succeed...
Learn from your good experiences. Try to repeat an experience that you found deeply meaningful or awe-inspiring or that lead to feelings of excitement, ecstasy, humility or personal fulfillment. I used to enjoy walking and hiking in the hills and mountains or visiting museums and art galleries; feed your soul.Read poetry, ride your bike, run the race -you get the idea.
Join in. Get involved in life. Become an active member of your community. Very important in school. You have the privilege of many clubs and sports. Join in our discussions at the Psych. Club you may find them enjoyable.
Look for the good in others. Every one of us has good points and bad. All too often we overlook the good and focus on the bad. Get into the habit of looking for the good in others.OK, It's easier to say than to do but if we try and move the focus from ourselves and our own feelings we can get quite a shock - me too!
Assess your progress. Take the time to reflect on all that you've accomplished as well as to honestly assess how you can do more to improve your life and the lives of those around you. You may even as the great Ben Franklin did keep a diary to see how you're getting on in your scheme for self-improvement: try it.He was probably one of the best self-actualisers who has ever lived.

Maslow the Prophet of Humanity

The blog is a little different today – it's a brief account of the life of a psychologist I much admire: Abraham Maslow. He overcame poverty and deprivation to become a psychologist who had a deep belief that all of us are capable of becoming the best we can be. Something to strive for !
Abraham Maslow was born on April 1, 1908, in New York City, the first child of Samuel, a Russian Jewish immigrant. He grew up in Brooklyn, fearing his father, a rough, hard-drinking man, and loathing his mother, whom he later described as “schizophrenic” — the type of mother “who makes crazy people, crazy children.” She did her best to terrorise him with promises of God's revenge for ordinary childhood misbehaviour; from an early age he would test the reality of her rants and when he was not paralysed or struck blind on the spot for some minor offence, his suspicion that she was spouting superstitious rubbish was confirmed. Evidently she was a real horror. When he brought home two stray kittens and she found him feeding them milk from one of her good dishes, she dashed the tiny animals’ brains out against the basement walls. Maslow wondered why he didn’t turn out psychotic. Fortunately, a loving uncle, his mother’s brother, watched over him in adolescence and showed him what normality and decency were.

Cornell was the university of his dreams — it was the only Ivy League college to take more than a token number of Jews — but his mediocre high school grades meant that the best he could hope for was the City College of New York. After a year there, he also enrolled in night classes at Brooklyn Law School; his father had wanted to be a lawyer, and expected Abe to succeed where he could not. But legal study dealt “only with evil men, and with the sins of mankind,” and a class discussion on spite fences — property fences that neighbours erect to annoy one another — prompted Abe to walk out and never come back. Maslow managed to transfer to Cornell. However, even the most pleasant of the students made him feel unwelcome, as a Jew. Waiting on tables at a fraternity house, where none of the “brothers” would speak to him, filled him with resentment that he held onto for years. He lasted a semester, then went back home to City College.
New York in the 1930's was home to some of the finest psychologists of the twentieth century. Maslow would speak of himself as the luckiest man in the world when it came to the teachers he had. To his mind, New York in the 1930s was like Plato’s Athens; some of the finest European psychologists had gathered there, many of them Jews escaping Hitler. Erich Fromm, Kurt Koffka, Karen Horney, Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Goldstein all took a generous interest in the intellectual education of the keen young student.
It was Goldstein who coined the term self-actualisation, reviving the Aristotle's theory of teleology, largely discredited by modern science. Every organism, Goldstein maintained, inherently sought to attain the end it was made for. It was the social psychologist Wertheimer who, along with the pathbreaking anthropologist Ruth Benedict, would provide Maslow with the living model of self-actualising humanity. These two intellectuals were the finest persons Maslow knew, and not in intellect alone; several cuts above the ordinary run in most every crucial respect, they simply had a genius for living. “It was as if they came from another planet,” Maslow would say years later. He felt everybody ought to become the very best they were capable of.
It would become Maslow’s life’s work to describe such people, to explain their excellence, and to spread the word to the multitudes that this richness was in fact an inborn human possession, lost to most because of a deficient social background and emotional problems, but recoverable on a wide scale by overthrowing the pessimistic and oppressive view of mankind that had passed for wisdom. Maslow became confident that he would succeed where his predecessors had failed, not only in the scientific description of what man is, but in the moral prescription for the best that man can become.
At Ruth Benedict’s urging, in 1938 Maslow undertook anthropological fieldwork in Alberta with the North Blackfoot Indians. Nearly all of the Blackfoot, he discovered, displayed a level of emotional security that only the upper percentiles of the U.S. population reached, and Maslow attributed this in large measure to the Indians’ emphasis on personal responsibility instilled from early childhood. For example, a seven-year-old boy faced with a tough decision would go off into the woods by himself for several days to think things over. A demanding but loving upbringing enhanced the essential goodness and strength with which these children were born. Perhaps most important, their inborn virtues were not leached away. That is to say, their culture did not erode their fundamental humanity; people in other more “advanced” societies were not so fortunate. The combination of tenderness and hardiness that Maslow saw in the Blackfoot helped shape his ideas of the best sort of character. It was a universal ideal, then, that his fieldwork directed him toward, rather than a culturally specific one. Cultural relativism had to go. What all people shared in the best of their nature overrode even the differences between races, classes, or civilizations. Maslow’s project involved getting at the vital core of Man, pure and simple. We ought to become the very best we are capable of, me and you both.

Thought for the New Year....

Why we're better at predicting other people's behaviour than our own

Unfortunately, it is a fact that we are better at predicting and understanding the behaviour of other people than our own. Even in a community of fair minded and open people such as our own school misunderstandings and conflict may occur.Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own behaviour is so poor. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly base it upon the influence of their circumstances. This means that we're instinctually good social psychologists but at the same time we're poor self-psychologists. This means, for example, that if your friend is going through a rough patch with her parents you will understand why she is sometimes short-tempered with you.

Across three studies, Balcetis and Dunning asked students to predict how they or their peers would behave in various situayions. This included whether or not they, or others, would help a researcher clear up a knocked-over box of jigsaw pieces; donate part of their participation fee to charity; or cheat on a self-marked quiz. The relevant situational factors were, respectively: being alone or in a group of two to three; being in a good or bad mood (induced via funny or very boring videos); having anonymity. Whilst some of the students predicted how they and others would behave in these situations, other students were actually placed in these circumstances and their behaviour was recorded. The predictions were then compared against the reality. 

When predicting the behaviour of others, the students were shrewd psychologists and took situational factors into account. For example, in reality, people were 27 per cent less likely to help clear up the jigsaw when in a group than when alone. When predicting other people's behaviour the students expected this: they said their peers would be 22 per cent less likely to help when in a group. When predicting their own behaviour, however, they didn't think it would make any difference whether they were in a group or alone.

It was similar with the charity donations and the cheating. In reality, students provoked into a bad mood gave 23 per cent less money to charity. And students given the cloak of anonymity cheated more. The students in the predicting role anticipated these situational effects (although they underestimated them) when considering the behaviour of their peers, yet they imagined that their own behaviour would be immune. They thought they'd give just as much money whether in a good or bad mood, and be just as likely to cheat, or not, regardless of whether they had the benefit of anonymity.

Another trend across all the studies was for people to overestimate their own generosity (judged against the average of how people actually behaved), but to estimate other people's generosity ( or lack of it) more reliably. This is in agreement with a mountain of past research showing that we tend to assess ourselves in an unrealistically favourable light.

"The good news," Balcetis and Dunning concluded, "is that people display some level of insight into the ability of situations to shape their potential actions compared with what they think their peers will choose. The bad news is that people may fail to realise, or choose not to realise, that this knowledge should be applied to predictions of their own behaviour as well." The lesson is that we need to reflect more upon our own behaviour by using our expectations of our friends as a guide.
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