Photo by Joshua Clay on Unsplash

Maybe you recall studying Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from a Psych class. Summed up, Abraham Maslow put forth that people are wired to satisfy certain levels of needs before they can move up to eventually achieve their full potential. It’s set forth in a pyramid.

The base level is physiological needs—our basic survival needs such as air to breathe, food to eat, water to drink, and shelter. The next level is safety as in protection and security.  The third level is belonging. That would include love, friendship, affection, and being part of a group.

Level four is called esteem and is signified by reaching a zone of status, prestige, self-respect, and achievement.

What Maslow originally noted as the top level is called self-actualization. To borrow the US Army’s slogan from 1980-2001, it means “Be all you can be.” When you hit this level, you’ve realized your personal potential. That’s it…you’re at the top of the world.  Or at least the top of the pyramid.

But in the early 70s, Maslow expanded the pyramid, and among other additions, he broke the top level into two. It turns out that being your personal best isn’t the end after all.  The Transcendence need means helping others to be all that they can be.

Some experts feel that most audiences come to hear a speaker at level 3 – belonging. If we’re really good at presenting, we may be able to move an audience en masse to level four—providing information in such a way that our audience can take action to reach a new level of achievement and self-respect. That’s a nice goal for a speaker, right?

A few of us have been blessed to hear a speaker who has gone beyond that and actually changed our lives. That happened to me once.  The guest speaker at a meeting managed the shelter for abused women and children in a metropolitan area. I was young and full of myself and had no idea of the trauma of an abusive relationship. I’m now ashamed to admit it, but back then my private thinking was, “Why don’t they just leave him? Why stick around?”

The diminutive speaker softly wove the stories of real women and children who had come through the shelter. As she shared their nameless experiences, I had a complete paradigm shift of everything I thought I knew about the subject. Some of the stories had happy endings and others did not.  The tragic stories went pretty much the same way:  A woman went back to her husband after he professed his love and regret and was dead by his hands a week later.  I learned what steps someone in an abusive relationship should take. It was a transforming presentation.

Less than a month after I heard that speaker, a friend who was expecting her first baby called me on Mother’s Day. The words tumbled quickly out of her mouth. Her husband had just hit her and choked her and left her lying on the bathroom floor as he stormed out of the house. We were four hours apart, so I couldn’t swoop in to help her.

But because of that speaker, I knew exactly what questions to ask and what to tell my friend. “Do you have someplace safe to go?” Yes. “Do you have the keys to your car?” Yes. “Go, right now. Grab your purse and nothing else. Don’t pack, don’t stop to do anything else. Get out of that house, get to someplace safe, and call me.”  She did. She and the baby were both safe.

The power of sharing experiences stays with me. We never know how our words might help someone else….whether a month from now,  next year, or even tomorrow.

To my readers:  Who are you planning to help as you hit the transcendence level?