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.
