Self-Actualization Blah, Blah, Blah   
Joe Ferguson, PhD | December 11, 2009

     It has been an uphill battle for me to get this phrase into print. When I originally proposed to include it in my professional tagline as “Relief, Recovery, Resolution, and Self-Actualization” my hardened executive marketing team and their attorney skewered it like a cockroach on their collective spike heels. They pointed out that the phrase now smacks of the new-age kookiness that bedevils the field of personal counseling and they wanted me to distinguish myself as a serious professional. They are right and therefore self-actualization does not appear on my business card, but there is really no other phrase that properly represents this important idea. Once relief, recovery and resolution have been accomplished and the crisis du jour has been overcome, then self-actualization is what remains to be done.

     The term was coined long ago by a friend and colleague of my father’s, Abraham Maslow, and it is one that I grew up with. Self-actualization is not the fuzzy mystical fulfillment of our destiny or anything cosmic and mysterious like that. It is simply the actualization of the projects that we can choose to shape our lives if we elect to influence that process rather than leave it to chance, circumstance, and inertia. Self-actualization is the expression of goals that reflect our own distinctive personality rather than goals that we pursue because we have to or because they are dictated by our culture, our company, or our community. That is why Maslow put self-actualization at the top of his hierarchy of needs. Self-actualization can and should be reflective, intentional, and systematic. Call me.