While needs like shelter, food, and water are the most important pieces to survival, what comes once you have those things? What about when you want to not just survive but thrive, reaching your greatest potential? Achieving self-actualization is about doing just that. 

You may have heard the term self-actualization before in reference to the completion of psychologist Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but the term was first introduced in the early 20th century by Kurt Goldstein, a physician specializing in neuroanatomy and psychiatry. He saw it as the end goal for each living being, believing that each action taken was connected to that goal. However, the concept didn't become popular until Maslow began to explore the concept.

Self-actualization was further studied by psychologist Carl Rogers. Unlike Maslow, who saw self-actualization as one of many human motivators, Rogers saw self-actualization as our only motivator. "The organism has one basic tendency and striving—to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism," he wrote in his work, "A Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal Relationships, as Developed in the Client-centered Framework." He also disagreed with Maslow about the path to get to self-actualization, as well as the characteristics of a person who has achieved it. 

These were the 10: 

As Maslow said in "Motivation and Personality," "Self-actualizing people have the wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may have become to others."

This piece of self-actualization comes down to accepting your quirks and desires without feeling the need to apologize or feel shame for them. It's about accepting yourself completely for who you are. 

In this case, instead of trying to "fit in" with the crowd and act how you believe others want you to, a person with authenticity maintains their sense of self and integrity. 

Instead of being thrown every time something doesn't go your way, a person with equanimity accepts these as inevitables and navigates them with grace. 

No surprise here, this simply means that you have a purpose in your life and feel responsibility to accomplish it. Often this purpose is something that will help others. 

This applies to people who dig deep to ensure they are receiving the realities of the world. Instead of relying on assumptions, this comes down to cold, hard facts. 

This characteristic is for anyone who feels a genuine connection to other members of the human race, experiences sympathy and affection for them, and wants to help them. 

This ties back to truly living your most fulfilled life as it is for anyone who often feels new horizons opening up to them, who goes beyond selfishness in situations, and who feels one with the other organisms on Earth.

If you can tell right away when you've done something wrong, can trust yourself to make the right decision without too much deliberation, and can easily distinguish between right and wrong, you have good moral intuition.

This applies to people who feel in touch with their childlike self and bring creativity to everything that they do. "I learned to apply the word 'creative'...not only to products but also to people in a characterological way, and to activities, processes, and attitudes," Maslow writes in "Toward A Psychology of Being." "And furthermore, I had come to apply the word 'creative' to many products other than the standard and conventionally accepted poems, theories, novels, experiments or paintings." Hence the term creative spirit being about so much more than creating physical things. 

Below are the characteristics he associated with self-actualized people:

Instead of coming at life with your defenses up, openness to experience means that you're willing to accept what occurs and are not threatened by it. 

This occurs when you are living with a lack of denial, clearly recognizing and understanding your experiences. (Here's how to increase your emotional intelligence if this is an area you're lacking in.)

Similar to awareness, a fully functioning person should be capable of interpreting events they have gone through without changing them. 

A self-actualized person connects to their experience while also having the flexibility to adapt with it. 

This is the ability to trust in what is happening to you, process it, and explore your values based on it, without perceiving them as a threat to the self. 

To have this characteristic is to live without doubting yourself and your worth based on individual experiences. (Here are a few ways to practice self-love.)

Tying back to being open to experiences, this characteristic goes beyond that to say a person can creatively adapt to those new moments.  

If something doesn't go your way or you aren't fully satisfied, you will look at the outcome and work on correcting it for the future instead of defaulting to defensiveness.

This is the understanding that you are not alone in this and your actions affect others. In knowing that, you choose to live as harmoniously with others as you can. 

Maslow believed that Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Albert Einstein were examples of self-actualized people. While all incredible figures in history, anyone can self-actualize when they are motivated to. If you're looking to become self-actualized, here are some steps to take:

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