Week three individual assignment Essay

Submitted By pepshaw
Words: 463
Pages: 2

Week 3 Assignment
PSY 211
18 March 2014 Antoinette Babers

When we are young we cannot wait to grow up, have our own things, and realize our own ideals. When we are grown up we strive to achieve goals that we have set for ourselves. These goals are often predicated on the needs we have for basic survival and comfort levels. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a good place to start looking for ideas of how to achieve the goals we have set ourselves.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs explains the human need to satisfy basic biological and psychological needs, and how we can use those needs as motivation to achieve higher levels of personal satisfaction, ending with self-actualization. The hierarchy of needs makes sense as a starting point. Maslow believed in the notion that one must satisfy the needs at one level before moving on to the next level. In general that is a flawed statement in that humans have the ability to multi-task. What’s to say that while we are satisfying our basic physiological, and safety needs we cannot begin working on the belongingness and esteem needs. We also have the ability to begin gathering the required tools that we will need to realize self-actualization.
We all have different levels of motivation and different things that motivate us. Some people are motivated by career progression, while others may be motivated by knowing that they are safe in their homes. What ever drives us to better ourselves is motivation. Motivation plays a key role in the hierarchy of needs because without the motivation to move to forward one can become stuck and never realize their full potential. In order to become better one has to have the desire to become better.

The most difficult need to satisfy would be self-actualization. Maslow defined self-actualization as “people