Maslow, a psychologist, gave a theory of hierarchy of needs. He talked of five needs. Self actualisation was the need placed highest in that hierarchy. The first four were, physiological, security, love n belonging and esteem needs in the same order. That every individual has the same needs and follow almost the same order every time, I feel I went through a slight different course.
While two of the needs lower in hierarchy are easily satisfied for most, I almost skipped the need of love and belonging and started moving towards gratifying my need for esteem i.e. status, recognition, fame, prestige, attention, strength, competence, mastery, self-confidence, independence and freedom, with a lot of focus on independence and freedom. In fact I had almost paved my way towards self-actualisation, the fifth and final one, but a great change came into my life. I returned back to studies, MBA, after having worked for two years and finding myself fitting quite well in the field i was, i.e. psychology, counselling and teaching.
Now that i am going back on the line, i am trying to find out whether this is actually taking me back to retrace my steps towards fulfilling my fourth need again or is it that I have set a higher goal and obviously a higher self-actualisation. While i need to find an answer to this question, I also realised that i had taken a peep into the third need of love n belonging, and had very soon realised that it was never very important to me to have a lover or a spouse because i had this great sense of individuality prevailing over the need for a community as such.
I wrote all this because today when in a mock interview I was asked as to "Why I was wanting to do MBA, a complete deviation from my field of earlier education?", I could not give a convincing answer, probably because I myself was not convinced with my decision, or rather someone else's. Therefore all this self-search. And it seems i have somewhat answered myself. When we are able to answer "What do i want?", we get to know what we exactly want and start working towards it with all our efforts and at times it automatically fills us with the required confidence too.
2 comments:
You said you skipped first three needs, but I feel that because first three needs sometimes don't need conscious efforts, so perhaps you didn't realize. The other two needs 'esteem and self-actualisation' require conscious efforts so you are talking about that. Right now you don't have any reason to go for MBA. Sooner or later you will find at least one good reason for that. May be you can wait until then. Could you please avoid writing very long sentences.
hmm. yes. i will.
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