The Resilient Mind - How to Achieve Self-Actualization - Earl Nightingale

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

Earl Nightingale was an American radio speaker and author, dealing mostly with the subjects of human character development, motivation, and meaningful existence. He was the voice during the early 1950s of Sky King, the hero of a radio adventure series, and was a WGN radio program host from 1950 to 1956.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind Podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to How to Achieve Self-Actualization with Earl Nightingale. Get access to the Mental Mastery Program and other exclusive episodes by becoming a subscriber. Enjoy. What would it be like to be a fully material, self-actualizing, fully functioning human being? This is the ideal, busy, happy person with all his faculty is smoothly functioning in perfect cooperation. No wars going on inside, no hang-ups, no neuroses, is the ideal productive person.

The late Dr. Maslow made a study of self-actualized people, and they stack up this way. First, these superior people have the ability to see life clearly, to see it as it is rather than as they wish it to be. They are less emotional and more objective about their observations. They're far above average and their ability to judge people correctly and to see through the phony or the fake. Usually their choice of marriage partners is far better than average,

although by no means perfect. These self-actualized people are more accurate in their prediction of future events. They see more fully, and their judgment extends to an understanding of art, music, politics, and philosophy. Yet they have a kind of humility, the ability to listen carefully to others, to admit they don't know everything, and that others can teach them. This concept can be described as a childlike simplicity and lack of arrogance. Children have this ability to hear without preconception or early judgment, as the child looks out upon the world with wide, uncritical, innocent eyes, simply noting or observing what is the case,

without either arguing the matter or demanding that it be otherwise, so does the self-actualizing person look upon human nature in himself and in others. Without exception, Maslow found self-actualizing people to be dedicated to some work, task, duty, or vocation which they considered important. Because they were interested in this work, they worked hard, and yet the usual distinction between work and work

in play became blurred, for them work is exciting and pleasurable. Maslow found creativity to be a universal characteristic of all the self-actualizing people he studied. Creativeness was almost synonymous with the terms healthy, self-actualizing, and fully human. Now, here again, the creativity of these people is similar to that of little children before they've learned to fear the ridicule of others. Maslow believes this to be a characteristic which is too frequently lost as we grow older. self-actualizing people either do not lose this fresh, naive approach, or if they lose it, they recover it later in life.

Spontaneity is typical of this person. Self-actualizing people are less inhibited, therefore more expressive, natural, and simple, and of course they have courage, the courage that's needed in the lonely moments of creation. This is a kind of daring, going out in front all alone, a defiance, a challenge. Thus, while these persons are humble in the, They're open to new ideas. They're willing to forego popularity to stand up for a new idea. The self-actualizing person is a hard worker.

Inspirations are a dime a dozen. The difference between the inspiration and the finished product, for example, the told story's war and peace is an awful lot of hard work. To go on, the self-actualizing person has a low degree of self-conflict. He's not at war with himself. His personality is integrated. This gives him more energy. for productive purposes.

As Maslow puts it, truth, goodness, and beauty are in the average person in our culture only fairly well correlated with each other, and in the neurotic person, even less so.

It is only in the evolved and mature human being, in the self-actualizing, fully functioning person that they're so highly correlated that for all practical purposes they may be said to fuse into a unity.

The psychologically healthy person is both selfish and unselfish, and, in fact, these two attitudes merge into one. The healthy person finds happiness in helping others. Thus, for him, unselfishness is selfish. They get selfish pleasure from the pleasures of other people, which is a way of being unselfish.

You're saying it another way. The healthy person is selfish in a healthy way, a way which is beneficial to him and a society, too. Research indicates that the healthy person is most integrated when facing a great creative challenge, some worthwhile goal, or a time of serious threat or emergency. The mature person has a healthy respect for himself, a respect based upon knowledge that he is competent and adequate,

and while not dependent upon it, frequently receives deserved respect from others. Such a person does not need or value unwanted fame and notoriety. He is in control of himself and his destiny. He's not afraid of himself, ashamed of himself, or discouraged by his mistakes. He makes mistakes? but takes them in stride.

The psychologically healthy person is highly independent, yet enjoys people. He's free. He resists the dictates of culture when it does not agree with his point of view. The average person is motivated by deficiencies. He seeks to fulfill his basic needs for safety, belongingness, love, respect, and self-esteem. The healthy person is motivated by a desire for self-actualization or growth. A man has a hierarchy of need. As one is satisfied, a new one pops up.

The needs start with the purely physiological, food, liquid, shelter, sex, sleep, and oxygen, not necessarily in that order. For the man who's extremely and dangerously hungry, Dr. Maslow said, No other interests exist but food. He dreams food, he remembers food, he thinks about food, he emotes only about food, he perceives only food, and he wants only food. But what happens to man's desires when there's plenty of bread, and when his belly is full? At once, other and higher needs emerge, and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new and still higher needs emerge, and so on. Maslow contends that throughout his life the human being is practically always desiring something.

He is a wanting animal, and rarely reaches a state of complete satisfaction except for very short periods of time. As one desire is satisfied, another pops up to take its place. Once the physiological needs are fairly well satisfied, safety needs arise. Now, since the safety needs are generally fairly well satisfied in a healthy, normal adult, they can be best understood by observing children or neurotic adults. Child psychologists and teachers have found that children need a predictable world. A child prefers consistency, fairness, and a certain amount of routine. When these elements, are absent. He becomes anxious and insecure. Freedom within limits rather than total permissiveness is preferred, in fact, is necessary to develop well-adjusted children, according to Dr. Maslow.

Insecure or neurotic adults behave much like insecure children. Such a person, says Maslow, behaves as of a great catastrophe. We're always almost impending. He's usually responding as if to an emergency. That is to say, a neurotic adult may be said to behave as if he were actually afraid of a spanking. The insecure person has a compulsive need for order and stability and goes to great lengths to avoid the strange and the unexpected.

The healthy person also seeks order and stability, but it is not the life or death necessity that it is for the neurotic. The mature person also has an interest in the new and the mysterious. When the physiological and safety needs are met, needs for love,

affection, and belongingness emerge. The person now strives for a place in his group, and he'll strive with great intensity to achieve this goal. It suddenly becomes more important than anything else in the world, and the person may even forget that once when he was hungry, he sneered at love as unreal or unnecessary or unimportant. Love in the sense of being deeply understood and deeply accepted, Carl Rogers' definition. Following this is the need for personal development and the utilization of one's potential. On and on the needs of humankind go, the need for identification, the need for identification, the

to understand the unknown, the need to transcend whatever has been accomplished in the past, they're never ending. In trying to understand what motivates people, it's important to remember that once a need has been gratified, it has little effect on motivation, at least for a while. As Dr. Maslow has said, a want that is satisfied is no longer a want. As long as we want things and are motivated toward their achievement, we are alive, interested, motivated. If we run out of once or lose all hope, an unhealthy situation develops. Dr. Masler talks of clinical experience with cases in which previously healthy adults suffered boredom, loss of interest in life, depression, and self-dislike.

Such symptoms when they appear in apparently intelligent people are often brought about when in Maslow's words people are leading stupid lives and stupid jobs. I've seen many women, Maslow goes on, intelligent, prosperous, and unoccupied, slowly develop these symptoms of intellectual inanimation. Those who followed the recommendation to immerse themselves in something worthy of them showed improvement or cure often enough to impress me with the reality of the cognitive needs. One of the major problems of the growing adult, the adult who aspires toward fulfillment and self-actualization, is the choosing of new meaningful goals as his former goals are accomplished and being accomplished no longer motivate him. It's important that we do not

stop along the line and sit down for too long. To remain healthy and alive, a person needs a new interest, a new challenge as he satisfies the old ones. If a person aspires to a certain level in the business world or a certain income and reaches it, and if it's quite adequate for his needs, it won't motivate him for very long.

Something new must be introduced. If the man doesn't find it, then management should, if the man is to continue to grow and make a major contribution to the organization and to himself. motivating people is as important for the people as it is for the vitality of the organization whether the organization is a family unit, a school class, a research organization, or a business concern. Some people are self-motivating.

We all know such people. They're always off on some interesting new endeavor, but I'm afraid a large percentage or not. They seem to lack the curiosity or the creativeness or the knowledge to seek out new motivating challenges for themselves. Our lives are full of things. our pasts full of events that were once the most exciting things things that buoyed us up to great heights of expectation and filled our lives

with fresh new interests. Today? Well, their old hat, like the three-year-old car or the ten-year-old home, they no longer suffice to motivate us. And what's the busy wife and mother to do when the last of her kids marries and moves away or when her husband retires from his job of 30 or 40 years?

we must consciously see to it that we do not run out of wants, that we can still sit down and make out a want list and find ourselves getting that old excitement again for something new to plan and work for. The human being needs desperately that carrot on the stick. Dr. Maslow said to his students, if you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your lives.

You will be evading your own capacity your own possibilities. Henry James, the very prolific American novelist, brother of William James, who is often called the father of American psychology. In fact, the James family

remained outstanding for generations. Henry James once wrote in The Ambassadors, Live all you can. It's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you've had your life.

If you haven't had that, what have you had? What one loses, one loses. Make no mistake about that. The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have. Live. Well, that wouldn't be a bad piece of advice to have framed and placed in a conspicuous place, would it? Live all you can. It's a mistake not to. But it seems that relatively few people are aware of living, as they take so many important things for granted. They wake up, go about their days, go back to sleep, without at once having thought, I am alive, and I'm sensing this day.

It is only when life begins to reach its conclusion that people become aware of the importance of living. It's like those people who have to be sick to appreciate good health or deprived of their freedom in order to realize its value. People who are aware of living, of enjoying living, are like sponges. They soak up all that goes on around them. They're aware of other people of what's being said. They're observers of their environment. Their eyes are everywhere. I played golf once with a man who often stood with his eyes squinted, staring for long moments at the time.

trees are a particularly present view. I asked him about it. He said, now look at that grove of trees over there and squint your eyes. Look at the rich black shadows underneath them. And then he said, you know, black is the mother of all color. It was a curious thing. And so I stood and squinted my eyes. Sure enough, this sight appeared as a painting, and the shadows did deepen.

Everyone else in the golf course was simply playing golf. This man was acutely aware of everything going about him as well. He was living more than we were. He was getting more out of his life than we were. As Henry James said, The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have. The right time is while we're working or driving or with our loved ones or alone. The right time is the only time we've got, which is now.

And if we haven't learned to live now, we'll always be living on the hope that perhaps the future will be somehow better. Now is the future we were thinking about last year. And if you don't make it into tomorrow, will you have enjoyed, will you have been aware of today? Well, it's worth thinking about. Anything that can make life more interesting, more vivid, is worth giving some thought to. Older people are always saying to younger people, you don't realize how lucky you are, which I suppose means that they didn't either. Robert Jones, Bradet, wrote,

There are two days in the week, about which and upon which I never worry. Two carefree days Kept sacredly free From fear and apprehension One of these days is yesterday And the other day I do not worry about Is tomorrow It isn't the experience of today

That drives men mad It's the remorse for something that happened yesterday And the dread of what tomorrow may disclose That's good, isn't it? It reminded me of the line in Matthew In the New English Bible in which Jesus is quoted as saying so do not be anxious about tomorrow tomorrow will look after itself each day has troubles enough of its own if a person could take robert baudet's advice to heart if he could keep those two important days free from fear and apprehension if he could never be remorseful about yesterday or concerned about tomorrow it would do a lot more than lift a great load from his mind it would cause him to concentrate on the only time we have which is right now if we handle today properly we need take no thought about tomorrow when tomorrow comes

comes we can handle it as best as we can, and it'll take care of the day after. This is not to say that we should not set goals for ourselves. I think we should, most definitely. But once we know what our goals are, we can quit worrying and set ourselves to today's task and the calm assurance and expectation that we'll reach the goals we've set in good time. Living is like building a house with bricks. You can set only one brick at a time.

You can live only one day at a time. We all know this. Understanding it is not difficult. but doing it is something else again. We need, I think, some kind of reminder every morning, perhaps, at many times during the day, until we conform the habit of living in which someone called daytime compartments. This is a panic-proof way to live,

because we can almost always handle the events of today. It's the imagined disasters of tomorrow or next week or next year that tend to wear people down and make negative misfits of it. Moreover, by living today and doing the best we can with today, we won't have remorse tomorrow. We'll tend to be satisfied with what we're doing, even as we strive to improve. Each of us has a thousand times approached the period of his life with fear and apprehension, only to find the problem solved one way or another on the appointed day.

Perhaps we were not always happy with a solution, but the problem was met, resolved, and we moved on by it. If we had not worried about it, we would have spared ourselves many unnecessary hours of fear and upset. We need only do the best we can to handle the problems of today, and in so doing prepare ourselves for the tomorrow we hope will make its appearance. Bredettes, quote, There are two days in the week about which and upon which I never worry. Two carefree days kept sacredly free from fear and apprehension. One of these days is yesterday, and the other is tomorrow.

I was chatting with a West Coast psychologist and management consultant the other day. He's also an author of some note, and he happened to mention that he's conducted classes in prosperity. that is he's tried to teach poor people how to become well to do and prosperous. How well he succeeded at that, I have no way of knowing, but I have little doubt that this subject can be taught. There are thousands of books on how I made a million in the stock market or in raising chickens or in real estate or in mail order. It isn't so much the kind of business chosen or the line of work. It's possible to become prosperous in any line. It isn't what you do that's so important.

It's more a matter, at least in the beginning, of our attitude. As the late Ernest Holmes once put it, prosperity just doesn't happen. It's at first a state of mind. Do you remember that famous comment of Mike Todd's? He said, being broke is a temporary situation. Being poor is a state of mind. Surveys have indicated that most people equate happiness with enough money to live well. Other surveys have proved that people who are well-to-do are generally happier than poor people.

That makes sense. They have fewer worries. But you run into a great deal of skepticism. When you tell poor people that prosperity depends more on the state of mind than on anything else. Few other objects are surrounded by as many myths, misinformation, and old wives tales, as is the subject of how to become prosperous. And my friend, the psychologist, told me that a series of questions can usually determine whether or not a person is going to make his mark financially. One is to ask the person how much money he intends to be worth by the time he's reached a certain age. This is followed by a question which asks

How much money do you wish you could be worth by the same age? If the two figures are the same, if the person being questioned intends to be worth the same amount he would wish to be worth, chances are he'll make it. He's serious about it, and he has the attitude that says, I will, not I hope I will. As Ernest Holmes put it,

are you interested in making money and running your business successfully and getting a better salary? Of course you are. You want to be prosperous, and it's only wrong. right and sensible. The plain practical everyday problem of money-making is a definite part of living. The answer to it is summed up in these words. Prosperity awaits man's recognition and acceptance of it. Or it can be stated in another way. Your financial success already exists, but it's waiting for you to see it and accept it as your own. Just decide on what is prosperity for you, and then head out,

Get busy, and it's usually a good idea to start where you are. There's possibly more opportunity lurking within your present environment than you can imagine. Once you create the proper mental attitude, the ideas you need will be attracted to you. They'll come right out of your own subconscious. Then if your attitude is still right, you'll act upon your ideas, but it all starts with the right attitude. As scientists delve deeper into the nature of what causes things to be as they are, they find themselves immersed in an unseen world of infinite intelligence, acting in a lawful and purposeful manner. What we encounter in the physical world appears to be but a manifestation of invisible cause.

The distinguished psychologist, and incidentally the inventor, the famous lie detector, William Moten, Marston wrote, For years as a psychologist, I've thought in the careers of great and everyday people the inner springs that make for successful living. There are two which seem to me of priming importance. The first is plain old hard work, governed by cool, logical thoughtfulness. The other is sudden, worn, impulsive action. Admitting that I can't name a single person of true accomplishment who hasn't forged success out of brains and hard work, I still hazard the sweeping assertion that most of the high spots and many of the lesser successes in their careers

stem from impulses promptly turned into action. Most of us actually stifle enough good impulses during the course of a day to change the current of our lives. These inner flashes of impulse light up the mind for an instant, then contented in their afterglow, we laps back into routine, feeling vaguely that sometime we might do something about it, or that at least our intentions were good. In this we sin against the inner self, for impulses set up the lines of communication

between the subconscious mind and daily action. Said William James, every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit, it's worse than a chance lost. It works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. Thus, we failed to build up the power to act in a firm and prompt and definite way

upon the principal emergencies of life. Well, Dr. B. Aster wrote, once in Hollywood, where Walter B. Pitkin and I were retained by a motion picture studio, a young promoter presented an ambitious production idea to us. Well, the plan appealed to both of us. It was, I thought, distinctly worth considering We could think it over, discuss it, and decide later what to do.

But even while I was fumbling with the idea, Pitkin abruptly reached for the phone and began dictating a telegram to a Wall Street man he knew. It presented the idea in the enthusiasm of the moment it carried conviction. To my amazement, a $10 million underwriting of the picture project came as a result of that telegram. Had we delayed to talk it over, we might have cautiously talked ourselves out of the whole idea. But Pitkin knew how to act on the spur of the moment. He had learned to trust his impulses. Behind many an imposing executive desk

sits a man who is there because he learned the same lesson. The person who follows his impulses is not necessarily flighty, far from it. The timid soul, however, is fearful less impulse lead him into all manner of mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable. We're bound to make them, no matter which course we take. Some of the worst mistakes in history have followed consciously reasoned decisions. The mistakes of inaction, flanked by heavy reasoning, are likely to be worse than the mistakes of genuine impulse. The life stories that successful people are full of episodes that are marked turning points in their careers.

True impulses are intelligent. They reveal the basic interest of the unconscious mind. In the winter of 1969, Stanford University printed an article by Dr. Willis W.S. W. W.S. W. W. Harmon, which I found to be of tremendous interest. Dr. Harmon suggests that when future historians look back on our times, it will not be the wars, riot, student protests, or even our technological and scientific advances they'll remember. He suggests that it will be something quite different from any of these, an event perhaps well symbolized by an obscure scientific conference held in Council Grove, Kansas, in April of

1969. He further suggests that the consequences may be even more far-reaching than those which emerged from the Copernican, Darwinian, and Freudian revolutions. It has to do with transpersonal psychology.

That field of inquiry which deals with man's subjective experience, especially the transcendental kind. Early writing in this field were F. W.H. Myers' human personality and its survival of bodily death, Richard Buck's cosmic consciousness, William James varieties of religious experience, and Petirum's Sorokens, the ways and power of love.

This new age we're moving into, Dr. Shapley of Harvard calls it the psychozoic age, is based on several propositions, the most important of which is that the potentialities of the individual human being are far greater in extent and diversity than we ordinarily imagine them to be, and far greater than currently in vogue models of men would lead us to think possible. Another is that a far greater portion of significant human experience than we ordinarily feel or assumed to be so is comprised of unconscious processes. Now, this includes not only the sort of repressed memories and messages familiar to us through psychotherapy, it includes also the wisdom of the body and those mysterious realms

of experience we refer to with such words as intuition and creativity. access to these unconscious processes is apparently facilitated by a wide variety of factors including attention, free association, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, special drugs, and others. Now, included in these partly or largely unconscious processes are self-expectations, internalized expectations of others, images of the self, and limitations of the self, and images of the future, which play a predominant role in limiting or enhancing actualization of one's capacities. These tend to be self-fulfilling.

Much recent research has focused on the role of self-expectations and expectations of others in affecting performance and on the improvement of performance level through enhancing self-image. The validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy and the self-realizing image appears to grow steadily in confirmation. That April 1969 Council Grove, Kansas Conference on Voluntary Control of Interstate, co-sponsored by the Manager Foundation and the American Association for Humanistic Psychology,

represented an unprecedented assemblage of scientists working with altered states of consciousness. Now, what we're seeing is the scientific stamp of approval and deepening interest in what the ancient prophets told us we can do. We're beginning to find a new image of man. We will begin the cultivation of an enhanced self-image in each individual child. perhaps now at last men will begin to truly discover who he is and what his true powers are. Sometime back, my old friend Dr. Herbert Otto wrote an article in the Saturday Review in which he pointed out how greatly we underestimate our true potentialities and explain why so many millions tend to withdraw from the world. It's because we are members of a pathology-oriented culture.

Psychological and psychiatric jargon dealing with emotional dysfunction and mental illness has become the parlance. of the man in the street. In addition, from early childhood in our educational system, we learn largely by our mistakes, by having them pointed out to us repeatedly. And all this results in early negative conditioning and influences our attitudes and perception of ourselves and other people. An attitudinal climate has become established, which is continually fed and reinforced. As a part of this negative conditioning, there is the heavy emphasis by communications media on violence and television programs and motion pictures. The current American news format of radio, television, and newspapers.

The widely prevalent idea of what constitutes news results from a narrow, brutalizing concept 30 or 40 years behind the times and is inimical to the development of human potential. The news media give much time and prominent space to violence and consistently underplay good news. This gives the consumer the impression that important things that happen

are various types of destructive activities. Consistent and repeated emphasis on bad news not only creates anxiety and tension, but instills the belief that there's little except violence and disasters and accidents and mayhem abroad in the world. As a consequence, the consumer of such news gradually experiences a shift in his outlook about the world, leading to the formation of feelings of alienation and separation. The world is increasingly perceived as a threat, as the viewer becomes anxious that violence and mayhem may be perpetrated on him from some way. out of the strange and unpredictable environment in which he lives.

There slowly grows a conviction that it's safer to withdraw from such a world, to isolate himself from its struggles, and to let others make the decisions and become involved. As a result of a steady diet of violence in the media, an even more fundamental and insidious erosion in men's self-system takes place, the erosion affects what Dr. Otto calls the trust factor. If we've been given a certain amount of affection, love, and understand, in our formative years, we're able to place a certain amount of trust in our fellow man.

Trust is one of the most important elements in today's society, although we tend to minimize its importance. Thank you for tuning into this episode. If you're enjoying the content, you can access exclusive material by becoming a subscriber. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.