UNLEASHED! A GUIDE TO YOUR ULTIMATE SELF-ACTUALIZATION L. 
Autor: Julio Cesar Tafforelli | Publicado: 2014-09-17T06:31:00-07:00


Michael Hall, Ph.D.
What is Self-Actualization?
C Actualizing your highest and best skills,
capabilities, possibilities, and potentials.
C Being the best you so that you can be
fully alive/fully human and contribute
your unique gifts.
C Fully functioning as a psychologically
healthy human being in all of your
relationships, activities, career, habits,
etc.
C Refusing to die with your music and gifts still within you, but actively
seeking to develop your talents, turn them into competent skills and express
your best as your contribution.


C The human adventure of continuing to grow and develop as an adult with
child-like love, passion, curiosity, wonder, and learning.
Abraham Maslow intended to write a book about Self-Actualization Psychology, but he
died at the young age of 62 before he could pull together his life’s research. Now, Dr. L.
Michael Hall a cognitive psychologist has stepped up to continue Maslow

Everybody talks about self-actualization, but who does anything about it? 


Who can tell us how it
actually works and what can we practically do to actualize our potentials? What are you doing
to unleash your potentials? What potentials have you already begun to unleash? What potentials
will you be unleashing this year?


If we all have a self-actualization drive within us, a drive that
urges us to make our highest and best real and to become all that we can be, how do we achieve
this and experience the joy of being “in the zone” of self-actualization in our everyday lives?
So many questions and now the book Unleashed offers some answers. Discover in this
revolutionary work how to unleash your highest potentials. As a practical guide for taking your
skills to new levels of peak performances and experiencing new levels of personal
transformation, Unleashed is about the human journey that embraces the possibility of greatness. 
But this is not an adventure for the faint of heart. It is for those ready to change themselves and
their world. How ready are you to be unleashed?
Experience life as a self-actualizing adventure—explorative, meaningful, enriching, productive, and
fun. Live more fully with love and humor, connection, and contribution and join the new movement
for achieving self-actualization. 
What’s in Unleashed? 
Unleashed presents self-actualization as a drama in three acts. So the book opens up with
a section on Waking Up to the Possibilities wherein the vision of self-actualization is
described as is the metaphor of “unleashing” and attitude required to actualized your highest
and best.


 And with that, the three-stage drama begins:


Act I: The Construct of Self-Actualization



Act II: The Crucible of Self-Actualization


Act III: The Zone of Self-Actualization



Act I is because self-actualization is a function of meaning and meaningfulness. We are free
of any and all genetic “programs” that force us to think and function in a deterministic way.
For human life we have to create the meanings that we live by and that’s where “the
construct” comes in, the place in our mind where we construct meaning. This is the place
where we assume the power and responsibility for creating the kind and quality of meanings
that make life worth living. It’s the place where we find the highest meanings that make
everything full of rich meanings.
Act II is because self-actualization is also about change, transformation, and ongoing
development. It is about actually performing what we understand, believe, and intend. So
we then enter into the Crucible of change where we take all of our hot needs, emotions, and-3-
experience. Then in that crucible we develop the forms and structures for using our inner
power of choice to actualize our best. Here we develop a strong enough sense of self to
transcend self (ego), create the inner security to take smart risks, and learn to synthesize
opposites as we create new forms and levels of synergy.
Act III is because self-actualization is experienced as moments of flow, as peak and plateau
experiences, and where we are able to create peak performances with our highest gifts and
competencies. Here we enter into the Zone of self-actualization itself and experience a
synergy between our highest meanings and performances. Now we can stretch forward to
ever higher levels of development, capitalize on problems, and experience the peak
experiences of love, joy, valuing, etc. As we do this with others, we are then able to creae
self-actualizing cultures and that’s the beginning step for changing the world.-4-
UNLEASHED
A Guide to Your Ultimate Self-Actualization
Preface 3
Waking Up to the Possibilities 6
 1. The Vision 8
 2. The Metaphor 21
 3. The Attitude 26
 4. The Drama 38
Act I: The Construct of Self-Actualization 47
 5. The Construct 50
 6. Mastering the Construct 66
 7. The Quadrants 80
 8. The Impulse Engines 98
 9. Jumping to Warp Speed 113
Act II: The Crucible of Self-Actualization 124
 10. The Crucible 125
 11. Transforming Emotions 136
 12. Power Zone 150
 13. Choice Point 167
 14. Ego Matters 177
 15. Safety Nets 191
 16. Synergizing 199
Act III: The Zone of Self-Actualization 209
 17. Flow 213
 18. The Stretch 225
 19. The Mirror 237
 20. Capitalizing Problems 252
 21. Love 264
 22. Joyfully Playful 271
 23. Valuing the Highest and Best 281
 24. Toward a Self-Actualizing Culture 289
 23. What they didn’t tell you about Self-Actualization 298
Here’s to Your Full Unleashing! 310
Appendix A: What’s Next in Self-Actualization 313
Appendix B: Meta-Questions 314
Bibliography 318
Index 324
Author: L. Michael Hall 327-5-
PREFACE
“What lies behind us and what lies before us
are tiny matters
compared to what lies within us.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
T
his book is about one thing and one thing only—
Unleashing the potentials within you so you can discover and
experience all that you have to offer as you experience more peak
experiences of “flow” and take your performances to ever higher
levels.
This is “self-actualization.” In self-actualizing, you actualize yourself as you
mobilize all of your inner psychological resources as well as all of your outer
relational, social, and environmental resources to make your life all that it can be.
In the drama of making this happen, you will discover how to release everything
that holds you back, everything that interferes with your possibilities, and
everything that undermines your courage to break out of the limitations that may
now be holding you back. Are you ready for this?
If this seems like a big order, it absolutely is! It is an enormous vision about life,
meaning, and ourselves. And if you entertain this vision to become all you can
become, you will be embarking on a lifelong adventure in discovering your
authenticity as you develop the best version of you.
I believe this is critically important? The reason is because only then will you feel
completely at home in your own skin, real, authentic, congruent, and able to be
completely present. Consider the opposite. What do you feel, and how do you
act, when you aren’t experiencing life in this way? Typically we feel disconnected
from any exciting passion, we feel an anxiety about trying to figure out what we’re
supposed to be doing, what we really want, perhaps even frustrated or even
depressed with our current life. If you are not in the process of self-actualizing,
the very quality of your life will suffer.Unleashed Preface Why This Book?
-6-
Every day I talk to people about these things. For more than a decade I’ve been
running a workshop on self-actualization called Accessing Personal Genius
(APG), which is designed to enable people to wake up to the possibilities and to
discover their innate powers for finding their passions and being able to step into
a “flow” state of total engagement. Over ten thousand people in two dozen
countries have experienced APG which has given me an extensive appreciation of
the challenges and processes.
Before that I had a private psychotherapy practice in which I focused on such
things as “empowerment,” personal effectiveness, and business success. I didn’t
start out in psychology with that emphasis. My training in psychology did not
introduce me to the bright side of human nature, but to the dark side. I was
introduced to how people get hurt and traumatized. How people become
“disordered” in their personality so that they feel messed-up in their mind and
emotions.
I started there, but I didn’t stay there. Eventually I started reading the works of
Maslow and others in the Human Potential Movement and that awakened in me a
whole new focus and perspective. It awakened in me a desire to discover my own
potentials and to see what “greatness” could or does lie within myself and others.
So this book is a strength basis approach of psychology that assumes there’s more
to life than just fixing broken things. There’s the whole question about what it
means to be a fully functioning human being. There’s the question of living with
meaning and passion, of enjoying life, of discovering your potentials, of being in
love, of contributing, and of making a difference.
While I’ve written other books on self-actualization, this is the first one that I have
written as a practical guide to enable you to actualize your potentials and point
you in the direction of your ultimate self-actualization. I have written this book
for anyone looking for living a more real and more full-of-meaning life. I want to
offer something that empowers you to experience a robust sense of vitality. If
you’re not ready for that and for all it entails, it would be best to wait.
“Wait? Why?” Because this book will otherwise awaken and disturb, it will
challenge and provoke, and it will ruin any delusion of smug satisfaction with
conventional life. With this book I want to jar you from your comfort zone. So
my objective is not to comfort, but to induce an exciting restlessness. I want to
disturb. I want to disturb your conventional thinking and to invite you to expand
your consciousness, to see new vistas and possibilities. All of this will challenge
the traditional ways we sleep through life.
Has it done that for me? You bet it has. As I have researched and written this
book, my own peace and tranquility has been disturbed. How? Mostly, I have-7-
discovered how small I have been thinking, and how safe I have been playing life.
So in the process I have been awakened in places where I had been slumbering and
my potentials undisturbed. As this reinitiated new searches in my psyche, it has
unleashed some new areas of growth that I’ll share in the coming chapters.
In unleashing your potentials to actualize your best, I will be inviting you into
being before doing and having. This turns everything upsidedown from the way
most of us direct our lives. Typically we think about what we want to have, then
figure out what we have to do to achieve what we want and then adjust ourselves
in how we have to be. Or, we may find that we are able to do certain things and
so go for a ride doing what we can. This leads then to having certain things. We
then end up being according to the roles and games required by those activities.

The Self-Actualization Psychology I offer here reverses that order. Instead of
doing or having setting the pace, this journey starts with doing. It starts with your
exploration of your inner gifts and strengths. You search for the potentials and
passions within yourself first —what and who you want to be. What seeds of
potentials are within? What passions have, or could, emerge from our deepest core
expressing your deepest and highest essence. What way of being in the world
would be most true to what truly excites you? What inner gifts, talents, and
strengths would enable you to fall in love with life so that you feel the passion of
giving your best?

As a guide to your ultimate self-actualization, I will quote again and again in the
pages of this book from the original pioneer, Abraham Maslow. To give voice to
his vision of the bright side of human nature has been a wonderful privilege for
me. Reading and re-reading his books convinced me that very little of his vision
has become part of today’s current of thought, that his genius has not even begun
to be appreciated, and that what he wrote and developed could very well change
the quality of life on this planet.

If you’re open to waking up to the possibilities slumbering inside you and if
you’re game for the ultimate adventure of life—buy this book. In it I set before
you the Red Pill. So be careful. Take it and I will show you the Matrix, which
will invite you into the whirlwind of the Construct where you will discover and
develop your incredible powers as a maker of meaning in the Crucible of
challenge. Are you ready to see how deep the rabbit hole goes? Are you ready to
become unleashed? Are you ready to step into the Zone of focus and “flow” at
will so you can get lost in an engagement? Then turn the page and you’ll begin
to take the Red Pill of self-actualization.