Becoming Perceptive

Another thing to consider when trying to become perceptive is that the way you learn in school—where the material is sequenced in a curriculum so that you are first exposed to simple examples and later to more complex ones—tends to make you less perceptive.

If you are confused about your feelings, or in denial about how the world works, or unable to read others, it will be harder to self-actualize. If you are too constrained by what you think is going on to notice what is actually going on—you will miss important data that would allow you to make better choices.

Self-actualization means, at least partly, that you have designed a life that fits you—that allows you to express your human potential.

When Abraham Maslow did clinical studies of people who self-actualized, one thing that set them apart from others was, he wrote, that they lived “more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.”