As NLPers, we know that each of us has a clear communication style based on our representational systems (VAK). Did you know however, that we also have a love language? I like to think of these in terms of strategies - the recipe of love, whcih is unique for each of us.

 

Dr. Gary Chapman identifies these as the Five Languages of Love

Which one is your primary love language? How do YOU show love toward those you love? What we tend to do for others, is often a clue to what we enjoy receiving most.

If you express love in a way your partner doesn't understand, he or she won't realize you've expressed love. Perhaps your husband needs to hear encouraging words, but you feel like cooking a nice dinner will cheer him up. When he still feels down, you're puzzled. Or, maybe your wife craves time with you -- time away from the kids & TV. The flowers you gave her just don't communicate that you care.

 

In this month of love - if you haven't read this wonderful book, please do! It will help open your world to brand new possibilities!

 

The Five Love Languages is avaliable at Adyar Bookstore for $19.95 - remember your members discount of 10%!  www.adyar.com.au

 

What is self-actualization?  It is being fully human.  It is being an ordinary person with nothing taken away from you!  How about that?  It is get over, and releasing, anything and everything that interferes with us growing to full maturity.  It is releasing everything that dampens and inhibits our powers.  It is as Carl Rogers put it, being a "fully functioning human being" or "becoming a person."
 
This vision of self-actualization by Maslow and Rogers was not about becoming extraordinary.  The vision is to become everything that you already have the latent potential to become.  That's different.  That's why it is not about adding things to you, it is about reclaiming all that you already have.
 
In the 1940s Maslow began his "Good Human Beings" research, looking for people who were psychologically healthy and who developed the full range of their potentialities.  This eventually grew into his modeling of self-actualizers.  By 1950 he had developed a paradigm shifting model about human Motivation and Personality (the name of his 1954 classic).
 
At that time, this was absolutely revolutionary.  No one had studied psychologically healthy, productive, and actualizing people before.  No one had explored the bright side of human nature.  This was cutting-edge.  Eventually it led Maslow to write his third book, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.  What was so revolutionary about this? 
 
Namely that Maslow was asserting that there is a certain sense in which these extraordinary, whole, healthy person is the only genuine representatives of human nature and psychology.  If the self-actualizing person is not an ordinary person with something added, but an ordinary person "with noting taken away," then the self-actualizing person is a full human being.  This is then a description of the regular or ordinary person who has been unleashed from all of the man-made restraints of society, the human being without "dampened and inhibited powers and capacities."  This makes the self-actualized person synonymous with human nature in general.
 
For Maslow and the other pioneers of the human potential movement, being creative, authentic, unique, and self-directing was part and parcel of the farther reaches of human nature-it's what within us already.  It only needs to be unleashed.  No wonder that he constantly asserted that "human nature for centuries has been sold short!"  There is within all of us a tendency, an "instinct," and a predisposition to actualize our highest potentials.