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Maslow viewed self-actualizing people as dedicated to a calling or social cause.

Attachment theory opens a new vista on those who fulfill their career passion.

The secure attachment style may be most beneficial for such growth.

Secure Attachment Priming (SAP) is proving effective in boosting a secure attachment style.

Do you have a career passion, or are you still looking? Possibly more than ever before, it's a goal emphasized by vocational counselors and, increasingly, their college and even high-school counterparts. In this light, positive psychology uses the term "callings," often signaled by our heady excitement and dedication in discovering a career that feels just right for our soul. Recalling his first, joyful exposure to psychology as a struggling college student, Abraham Maslow likened this exuberant experience to "falling in love" (his words).

As Maslow's biographer, I learned that he regarded career passion as a vital trait of self-actualizers, those thriving at the highest psychological level in his famous hierarchy of inborn needs. In Motivation and Personality, Maslow reported: "They are people who have developed or are developing to the full stature of which they are capable" and are dedicated to a cause or field outside themselves, such as education or the arts, labor organizing, law, medicine, or stay-at-home family caregiving.

Regardless of their specific vocational focus, Maslow insisted in an unpublished essay, self-actualizers have what he called strong "positive human traits" that include the "qualities of self-respect, of security and safety, of being lovable, of being able to love someone else, and of being aware of the need to be loved and to love." These are all........

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