Our 6 dominant needs are the basis behind our deepest-rooted motivational factors and influence how we (more or less consciously) choose to prioritize our actions, decisions and way of behaving in life in general. With varying degrees of success, you struggle on a daily basis to meet these needs. In addition to this, most of us have two dominant needs . In this blog post we aim to dig deeper in to how these needs can express themselves in different constructive but also potentially destructive ways.
In fact, all dysfunctional behaviors can relate to a continuous inability to meet and constructively mirror the specific need. Once you have managed to understand what human needs are driving you and why, you can also understand, identify and break the limited belief systems, values, and patterns of action that restrict your higher well-being and development. Instead, it is possible to constructively take your personal development and life forward from a holistic perspective, to another level of self-realization. In addition to varying individual preferences in general, it should also be emphasized that the needs, naturally, may vary in different phases of our lives and personal development. Although we all have individual preferences and “need combinations”, a healthy and credible balance between these 6 needs constitutes the fundament behind living a nurturing and happy life.
Read and reflect about the questions below to achieve a better understanding concerning how these needs are currently met (or not) in your life:
How do the six human needs emerge at present in your life?
• Which needs are at the top of your focus, what is at the top of your list?
• Which of the human needs are you positively addressed in and which feel unintentional, exaggerated and lacking in your life?
• Which of these human needs could you focus on fulfilling in a new way? A way that would make you more to who you really are and how you want to live the rest of your life?
• Is there a seventh eighth human need that you would add to the list? How could you be able meet it?
Next we will, need by need, describe and discuss different potential ways of expressing them in your way of behaving and living your life. Often for good, but sometimes also, for bad 😉 !
Security:
All of us are independently of personal dominant needs, dependent on a certain form of security in different areas and aspects of life. At the same time, an excessively secure behavior can limit both development and well-being. Expressions of wellbeing which the majority of us (regardless of individual preferences), after all, to some extent appreciate. If security is one of your dominant needs, it continuously affects you to strive for control over your existence and the "whole world" surrounding your existence and living. In order to be able to maintain this control, you are therefore prone to operate within a very small and limited world, which obviously counteracts potentially attractive growth and variation in different areas.
Striving to meet the need for security can cause you to eat or drink alcohol too much. For the same basic reason, you can predict or try to control other people.
All of these behaviors give you a sense of security and comfort in the present, but they can also lead to destructive consequences and "pain" on long sows, even for yourself.
With the same starting point, there is the risk that you continue to hang on to a bad relationship or a limiting and non-stimulating career. You keep sustain them, because they will provide you a sense of security and security for the moment, though counteracting wellbeing and goals, which could be of true value and significance in the long term.
Variety:
A healthy level of variation gives us all new influences and an inspiration like ex. can promote one's creative ability. An ability linked to an approach that is becoming increasingly necessary in order to be able to work successfully nowadays. In times when an increasing number of people, regardless of social class, culture etc., need to be able to adapt to and coop with some form of change to succeed within vital aspects of life. A change that presupposes that you have to be able to relate precisely to new conditions (Example, digitalization trends).
The potential backside of the variation, on the other hand, becomes easily visible, if it is also characterized by superficiality without being anchored in a deeper personal “why”. To some sound extent for many of us , there is a certain youthful charm, and a possible attractive experience richness in itself, living periods of life characterized by testing and swopping between many things within several crucial planes of life. If, however, these experiences are not combined with a deeper reflection that results in a personal "why" or inner compass about why you make different choices and allocate your valuable time to specific things, then the potential of the variation risks resulting in reverse results, only boosting short time kicks.
Thus, you therefore lose the opportunity to reach long-term, personally valuable goals. In addition, an oversupply of uncertainty can often lead to higher levels of stress, anxiety, overwhelming, frustration and fear, which can quickly go out of control. Sofortly you position yourself in a “high risk zone” for the “contrast effect”, immediately switching to seek extreme security for comfort, predictability and security. Whereupon it is easy for you to get stuck in an unconstructive squirrel wheel, where you flee from one need to the next in turn. And then the cycle continues, as you jump from one need to the next in succession. How fast or how far you jump will, of course, depend on how you prioritize all your needs and why.
significance:
Fulfilling our need for significance, for all of us, in some way constitutes a fundamental source of creating our identity in the world. For those who have significance as a dominant need, it can and is supposed to burst like the nutrition that enables us to follow our own path and personal integrity in life. Constructively mirrored, the significance need can promote valuable significant development which others also can benefit from. For example by developing a cutting-edge expertise and becoming prominent in your field of work. At the same time, if this nourishment for our self-approval (eg, because of a poor self-esteem) must primarily be obtained from the approval of the outside world, it can take very destructive outlets in the form of the individual reducing other people, spreading rumors, promoting martyrdom or rebelliousness, not to mention that it nurtures the “victims cardigan”.
Society's foundation and survival takes in different ways its “springboard” based on relationships, mutual respect and love. However, people who have experienced the feeling of having great importance can easily feel separation anxiety and loneliness when that feeling disappears. This is evident from the celebrity world (especially when celebrity, may also apply to one's profession, constitutes an unreasonably large part of the core of the individual's identity and hence self-worth) many famous celebrities suffer from depression when popularity sooner or later falls and or when their career for other reasons approaches its end. They consequently struggle with depression because they fail to meet their importance needs at a sufficiently high level through other elements and focus areas of their lives. Sofortly a continuous, parallel and proactive reflection and evaluation of other possible outlets for the need for meaning invaluable is of most vital importance to avoid what could best be described as "the emptiness of the lost souls".
Togetherness & Love
With understandable individual differences, the need to feel love and affinity is important to all people. By being able to experience shared joy and perhaps even passion for something, it is much easier to also commit yourself to really investing in what is required to achieve different forms of attractive goals. We feel most alive when we love fully, while we in contradict, at a loss of love, risk being afraid of accepting the vulnerability required to find new and hopefully more well-grounded and long-term love. Close to hand, in this situation, it is easy to rely on and partly compensate for this with good friendship relations. Good friendships are undeniably invaluable in many respects. However, instead of partly using it as a substitute for love, dare to view it as a platform and basic “safety jump board” nurturing your self-insight and value in a way which enable you to dare to commit yourself to the vulnerability required to maximize your oppurtunity to experience new and hopefully very profound and solid love. In case of “failing” again you still have the basic security of why your friends appreciate you to fall back on, also enriched from new lessons and maintaining healthy open mind, you can still keep the door open for the right one.
Hence again, the need for significance and connection are sharing the same piece of the pie. If our need for connection is NOT being met, we feel alone and disjointed from people. But if it’s met entirely, we no longer feel different or unique from other, hence losing our own identity and violating our need for significance.
An imminent risk of putting love and connection in front of all other human needs is that it is entirely done at the expense of various forms of adventure and variation, which we had in good measure been good at experiencing. When you find your soul mate, you value natural love, affinity and security higher than other needs. On the other hand, despite new priorities, you still need to acknowledge certain private interests and injections. Constructive stimuli that are crucial for both the individual's well-being and for the relationship, constituting a kind of injecting nurture. Striving for mutual consciousness and respect it is for sure possible to accomplish a relevant personal balance in this case.
Growth:
At the same time as it is crucial for everyone, regardless of individual preferences, to satisfactorily meet the first four needs, it is also easy to get stuck in mirroring them in a way which limit you to mirror the more “spiritual needs”. A destructive canalizing for the need for significance can lead us to engage in energy-wasting power struggles or an unhealthy control need can lead us to avoid exposing ourselves to experiences with the potential to enable valuable development. When the need for growth is highest, you continually strive to grow emotionally, spiritually, physically, economically, and intellectually, where the time you dedicate to self-reflection enables them to deepen and grow the development and growth, with the greatest potential to continue to flourish. It therefore involves having a noteworthy and reflective attitude to continuesly evaluate the background and the consequences of your daily decisions, choices and actions. Thus, the “growth need”, just like ex. the need for variation needs to be well rooted in a clearly anchored "why" and self-insight. Otherwise, the risk is that you are chasing goals and development which in fact are more relevant to others than for yourself, based on your specific individual needs.
Contribution:
Assuming that your development goals are firmly anchored, you face a good potential of developing towards a holistic perspective, becoming your personal best version. A person who progressively develops towards his/her true best, naturally also have good prospects of developing a solid inner inner harmony widening their scope of attention beyond themselves. With a wider vision and often also mission at hand you aim to contribute to something larger, far beyond your own ego. A state of mind with greater focus on adding a value also to other people and the world as a whole. An unhealthy respect for the supply need, however, is well exemplified by a behavior in which you do a lot to others in relation to what you do to secure your own profound well-being.
The reason is often that we are completely obsessed with the first four needs, perhaps it is about no. 3 Be important - that involves us in energy-consuming power struggles or it's about no. 1 Safety - due to insecurity due to financial problems - yes there are countless variants of how we can get stuck in the first four needs. But we must remember no. 5 and 6 otherwise we know as humans and the world is deprived of the flowers and fruits we were meant to contribute. An over focus on development without an anchoring of a reasonable "security" via the first four needs can, however, lead to "burnout"
If one understands the need that is most important for another person, one can sofortly more easily understand why she is acting in a certain way.
While understanding each others needs, constructive solutions to conflicts are more easily accomplished. It is also easier to influence and build relationships in general, with people when you have formed an idea of which needs that are closest to their hearts.
But above all, one can access the problem with why we do things that we should and instead turn those actions in to a truly progressive and “need meeting” oriented behavior. We look forward to in the next blog post, dig deeper in to the way in which fear of having to experience pain and the desire to feel satisfaction govern our behavior. By clicking the link below you can more easily determine which ones are your two dominant needs!
https://core.tonyrobbins.com/driving-force-6/
Sources of information
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/240441
https://www.inspireyoursuccess.com/6-human-needs/
http://www.romanticmissions.com/the-6-human-needs-in-a-relationship/
https://mastermindmatrix.com/knowledge-base/human-needs/
