Need: the second principle
The Second Principle
Getting what you NEED to thrive.
I’ve been studying why people do what they do for most of my life. As a child I learned psychology from my mother as she studied for her degree and later became a psychotherapist. In the house I grew up in, conversations tended to be about Jung or Maslow or famous psychology experiments. After school, I went to study philosophy at a prestigious college in London, and that blew the whole subject of “why” and “how” wide open. Since then, over the last 15 years, I’ve gone ever deeper and deeper into the science and mystery of the human person. It’s my calling. Today I provide life coaching services, and people come and sit with me and we talk about how to make big, meaningful improvements to their lives. We delve into deep questions and we look for answers, but it’s all kept practical and useful. I’m not here to talk theory: I’m here to help you make meaningful improvements to overcome the things that are standing in your way.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
What do you need, to be truly happy, healthy and fulfilled? To feel completely alive, settled in your own skin, prosperous and glad to be alive?
Famously, the psychotherapist Abraham Maslow wrote a Hierarchy of Needs. He was a very prolific writer who said some truly wise things, but most people know him for the Hierarchy model. It’s often depicted something like this:
It says that we have some needs that are more demanding of our attention than others. Until we’ve taken care of our more basic needs, we’re not going to be interested in meeting the more sophisticated ones. If I am starving and cold, I am not going to put as much effort into finding a new romantic relationship as I am into feeding myself and getting warm. If I fear for my safety, I won’t be terribly interested in expressing myself artistically. I put my more fundamental needs first.
The Second Principle
As you probably know, there are 12 fundamental principles that underpin my coaching work. They are a big part of the book that I’m writing this year, and they pull together teachings that I’ve encountered in all kinds of settings, from shamanic rituals to conversations with corporate executives. They are signposts on a road towards an empowered, fulfilling, nourishing life.
The second principle of Deep Coaching is:
I understand and accept my own needs, and I take responsibility for meeting them.
My clients’ needs come up quite often in my coaching work, because unless we understand what we need to thrive, we’re unlikely to factor in the right things when we’re taking meaningful steps forwards. Let’s say you’re feeling frustrated and unfulfilled at work, and you want to strike out in a completely new direction in your career…but you’re not sure which direction. Where should you begin in your search for something better? Some of the fundamental questions must be: how much money do you need in the life you want to live? How much free time do you need in order to rest and do all of the other things in your life that aren’t work? Where do you want to work, so that your commute isn’t going to be overwhelming, or are you willing to uproot entirely and move? How are your practical needs affected by this?
And then you get into the more subtle psycho-spiritual questions. What kind of work brings you satisfaction? How do you like to relate to colleagues at work (do you prefer to work alone, do you like to be an invisible part of a team, or do you like to lead others)? Do you need a high or low amount of personal expression and freedom at work, or do you get more enjoyment from doing a good job in an established system? Does your self-esteem and sense of self-worth depend on your work? How does that work? Do you carry needs that aren’t actually yours, but are needs to fulfil the expectations that your parents gave you during in your childhood, or the expectations of society for you to succeed and complete certain goals to validate your self worth?
This topic opens up all kinds of questions, and sometimes leads us to old wounds and limiting beliefs. A lot of this work you can do alone: deeply considering, over time, what things you need to feel happy, healthy and nourished. Various psychological experiments have shown, though, that we aren’t always very good at understanding what makes us happy, so getting the opinion of people who have known you for a long time can be helpful.
Other parts of this work are best done with a professional, to bounce ideas off and to expose old thinking that doesn’t fit in with your intentions and aspirations to create a better life.
That is the first half of the second principle: I understand and accept my own needs
The second half is a statement of the approach that we use to our lives. Part of my coaching work is fuelled by a certain approach to life, one that I have seen in business leaders, indigenous warriors and community leaders. This approach, or paradigm, is where we step up to direct and steer our lives, instead of being a victim of our circumstances. We learn to be more vitally alive, more present in each moment, and more empowered in our decision-making. This is the approach that is implied throughout my coaching work.
In this state of empowered adulthood, we take responsibility for the things that are appropriate to adulthood. Taking this responsibility is a statement of our personal power and our ability to control our lives. So the second half of the second principle is: I take responsibility for meeting my needs.
This can be a radical idea. Nobody else is responsible for making sure that your needs are met. If you need something from somebody, it’s your responsibility to ask for it, in the knowledge that they might say no. Equally, you are not beholden to meet the needs of other people, unless you’ve directly and explicitly agreed to do so. At first this can seem obvious, but as we begin to apply it to our lives we begin to subtly alter our relationships at work, with our friends, with our romantic and intimate partners and with ourselves. People place unspoken expectations on us all the time, and we tend to do the same. In a culture with no clear distinction between childhood and adulthood, we continue acting like children in this way: trying to please others and trying to persuade them to look after us without actually asking. When we shatter this old behaviour, we step more fully into our independent adult power.
In this place, we refuse to use passive-aggressive techniques, or to respond to them. We begin to notice when others dump their needs onto us and we hand them back, gently but firmly. We operate from compassion for ourselves and for others, and we refuse to keep playing unhealthy games of subtle needs-exchange.
The kind of people we become through this work is quite remarkable to experience. When my clients discover it, it’s often a surprise. They tell me that they never realised they were playing these games, and they feel filled with power and potential that they don’t need to play them any more.
Do you play games like these? Do you let people put their needs onto you, and end up feeling responsible for making them feel happy and safe? Do you do the same, urgently asking somebody else, without saying a word, to make you feel happy and safe?
If you do, I invite you to begin exploring the idea of taking back your power from the childhood game of needs-exchange.
When we’ve dropped the game, and had some practice at living in other ways, we can re-enter healthy forms of caring and needing. Interdependence is an important part of intimate relationships, but we can only really treat our partners well if we’ve done this work on ourselves. The approach that deep coaching promotes is one of great compassion and connection, with proper boundaries and a balanced kind of vulnerability. We end up satisfied with our lives, happy with each moment as it comes, and free to be a force for good in the world. We find that contributing to the world becomes one of those fundamental needs to be fulfilled.
Maslow, whose Hierarchy of Needs I mentioned earlier, called this state “self-actualized”. I’d like to end with this quote from him…
"Self-actualizing people are, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside themselves. They are devoted, working at something, something is very precious to them - some calling or vocation in the old sense, the priestly sense.
They are working at something which fate has called them to somehow and which they work at and which they love, so that the work-joy dichotomy in them disappears."