313Appendix B: Meta-Questions 314Bibliography 318Index 324Author: L. Michael Hall 327-5-PREFACEWhat lies behind us and what lies before usare tiny matterscompared to what lies within us.Ralph Waldo EmersonThis book is about one thing and one thing onlyUnleashing the potentials within you so you can discover andexperience all that you have to offer as you experience more peakexperiences of flow and take your performances to ever higherlevels.This is self-actualization. In self-actualizing, you actualize yourself as youmobilize all of your inner psychological resources as well as all of your outerrelational, 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 everythingthat holds you back, everything that interferes with your possibilities, andeverything that undermines your courage to break out of the limitations that maynow 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 canbecome, you will be embarking on a lifelong adventure in discovering yourauthenticity as you develop the best version of you.I believe this is critically important? The reason is because only then will you feelcompletely at home in your own skin, real, authentic, congruent, and able to becompletely present. Consider the opposite. What do you feel, and how do youact, when you arent experiencing life in this way? Typically we feel disconnectedfrom any exciting passion, we feel an anxiety about trying to figure out what weresupposed to be doing, what we really want, perhaps even frustrated or evendepressed 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 Ive beenrunning a workshop on self-actualization called Accessing Personal Genius(APG), which is designed to enable people to wake up to the possibilities and todiscover their innate powers for finding their passions and being able to step intoa flow state of total engagement. Over ten thousand people in two dozencountries have experienced APG which has given me an extensive appreciation ofthe challenges and processes.Before that I had a private psychotherapy practice in which I focused on suchthings as empowerment, personal effectiveness, and business success. I didntstart out in psychology with that emphasis. My training in psychology did notintroduce me to the bright side of human nature, but to the dark side. I wasintroduced to how people get hurt and traumatized. How people becomedisordered in their personality so that they feel messed-up in their mind andemotions.I started there, but I didnt stay there. Eventually I started reading the works ofMaslow and others in the Human Potential Movement and that awakened in me awhole new focus and perspective. It awakened in me a desire to discover my ownpotentials 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 theres moreto life than just fixing broken