Learn What Drives Your Decision-Making Process
Why do you make the decisions you make? What are you genuinely seeking to gain? How can you determine which course of action will get you there? What universal forces influence and shape your emotions, choices, behaviors, levels of fulfillment, and ability to succeed?
Understanding the 6 human needs can provide the answers to all of these questions.
Are you ready to experience more pleasure and less pain? Suffering comes from your inability to consistently meet your core needs. But your needs aren’t solely bound to your suffering; they also support your greatest pleasures and peak experiences.
Fulfilling your needs will provide you with feelings of success, fulfillment, and many positive emotions. Truly understanding your hierarchy of needs will help you avoid suffering, achieve pleasure, and support you in setting new mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual goals.
How Did You Develop a Hierarchy of Needs?
Your unique life journey shapes the core of who you are and how you see the world. The events that took place in your youngest and most formative years significantly impacted who you’ve become. Your positive and negative emotions and all of your experiences supported you in developing a unique hierarchy of values and beliefs. These values and beliefs define your character both consciously and unconsciously. They created a base from which you operate, a base from which the hierarchy of your six human needs will be found.
How much of your past is dictating who you choose to be today? The impact of your past experiences on the formation of your psyche is profound. Scientific research now illustrates the fact that your past experiences due in fact affect your brain chemistry and development, but no matter how different your life is from another person’s or how similar or different your brain has formed, the six human needs are the common threads that weave all human experiences together. They will help you understand how unique you are and how much you have in common with people worldwide.
What Are the Six Human Needs?
Certainty: feeling safe and secure. Avoiding pain and achieving stability.
Uncertainty/Variety: experiencing change, stimulation, and/or the unknown.
Significance: feeling unique, important, special, and/or desired.
Connection/Love: feeling closeness, belonging, interest, and/or affection.
Growth: increasing knowledge, skill, capabilities, and/or comprehension.
Contribution: providing value and/or support to others. Focused on helping.
We all experience a unique hierarchy of these needs. The first four needs are recognized as the needs of your personality, and the last two needs (growth and contribution) are your spiritual needs. Your needs can be met in a variety of ways. We can find them through our relationships, work, hobbies, activities, entertainment, and more. The following descriptions will help you understand how the six human needs might be influencing your life.
Certainty
If certainty is your top need, achieving a sense of security and safety in your relationships, career, and future will feel essential for your balance, strength, and success. You will most likely gravitate towards dependable, reliable, and consistent income-earning opportunities when seeking work. You prefer always knowing where your money will come from next, and that it will arrive in regularly scheduled intervals. You might feel drawn to having a small group of very close friends, because having people you can call on, no matter what happens, is important to you. It’s so vital that you may often play this role of reliability in many other people’s lives.
The challenge with having certainty as a top need is the harsh reality that your life is constantly experiencing change. As much as you may want to control your circumstances, at one point or another, you will not be able to. When this happens, it can cause unneeded suffering. Simultaneously, your relationships can suffer if you place too much priority on creating certainty. Too much certainty in a relationship can subtract from the passion and excitement that is also needed to make it thrive.
Code words for certainty include comfort, structure, stability, familiarity, and security.
Variety
If variety is your top need, new experiences, and awesome adventures are a must. Too much of the same, in any area of your life can become boring and create an urge to move on or make changes. Where a certainty-driven person might come back to the same restaurant to order the same thing every week, a variety-driven person wants to explore new restaurants and try all the different items on the menu.
In your career, you appreciate opportunities to experience new things. Whether it’s constantly changing clients, creating new products, or making impactful changes; these kinds of tasks and roles provide you with great fulfillment. You’re more likely to consider freelancing than someone driven by certainty. You’ll naturally stay away from roles that feel repetitive and monotonous.
The challenge with having variety as a top need is that your relationships may be passionate but short-lived. This is because you get bored too easily and are fast to move on. You may naturally be inclined to meet many people and form many acquaintances but have a more difficult time forming closer bonds. You may find it difficult to reap the rewards of long-term projects that require exponential hours of dedicated time and focus.
Code words for variety include change, excitement, innovation, and creativity.
Significance
If significance is your top need, you care deeply about how others perceive you. You find yourself drawn to opportunities that increase your power and status quo. You are aware of your strengths, and you invest time and energy into maximizing them. You feel successful and loved when your efforts are recognized and rewarded.
In a relationship, you want to be number one in another person’s life. In successful relationships, you will go to great lengths to ensure others also feel like number one. Your need for significance can drive you to achieve incredible accomplishments and receive notoriety for your impact.
The challenge with having significance as your top need is that you will most likely end up putting your own needs before others, damaging your relationships. You can become so overconfident with your perspective that you miss out on the value that others provide. People may describe you as needy and be put off by your quest for attention. A less evolved, significance-driven person will put others down in search of greater significance.
Code words for significance include importance, power, praise, pride, and feeling special.
Connection/Love
If connection/love is your top need, then relationships are your number one priority. You’re naturally drawn towards opportunities involving human interaction and typically do well on projects requiring teamwork. You make efforts to ensure the people you care for are well. Quality time is important to you, and you go to great lengths to create opportunities for quality time with others.
In a relationship, you’re naturally supportive. With effort put into personal growth, you will also learn how to nurture and support yourself. Your drive for connection brings incredible friendships and opportunities for deep intimacy with a romantic partner. Even if others don’t express it as often as you do, know that your community loves you.
A potential challenge of having connection/love as your top need is a tendency to prioritize other people’s needs over your own. Be sure to turn your incredible capacity for love inward as well.
Another challenge that can arise is a lack of clarity and articulation around how others can fulfill your need for love. You may be great at providing for others but still need to learn how to receive.
Lastly, your incredible aptitude for connection/love can sometimes blind you. You may pour your energy into the wrong person because you miss the warning signals or you don’t adequately prepare yourself to choose who to spend your time with.
Code words for connection/love include friendly, social, affection, compassion, and empathy.
Growth
If growth is your top need, you have clear goals for learning or achieving what you desire. You have a vision of how accomplishing these tasks will improve your life or the lives of others around you. If you spend too much time away from the tasks and activities that bring you closer to achieving your goals, you feel like your time is wasted.
Your goals and desires drive your life, providing you with a sense of purpose and fulfillment. You seek opportunities that provide room for continuous improvement and advancement. You enjoy roles that require you to learn and challenge yourself. Your focus on growth will help you align with other individuals on a similar path. The connections you make with other growth-oriented individuals can lead to profound accomplishments.
A potential challenge for individuals who prioritize growth is the potential to fall out of balance by overindulging in work. Although a well-directed focus and determination are honorable skills, you must be careful not to damage any relationships, including your relationship with yourself.
When you focus on growth, you may overthink the future instead of enjoying the present. You will spend most of your time on the journey to your destination instead of the destination itself. Acknowledge this, and plan to enjoy all the steps along the way.
Contribution
If contribution is your top need, your greatest desire is to serve others. You focus your time and resources on making a positive impact. When others think about how they could improve their own life, you ask yourself what you could do to support them in their journey. You’ve found the hidden gem of fulfillment that comes from putting others first.
You may have always been driven by contribution, or you may have found it as a result of success in other areas of your life. You are drawn to opportunities with a positive ripple effect and constantly seek ways to make the most significant impact. Those who focus their life on contribution often find all their other needs fulfilled as a natural progression of their mission.
A potential challenge in holding “contribution” as your top need is forgetting to take care of yourself. You can only perform your greatest acts of service when you practice self-care and live in your own peak state. If you seek something in exchange for your service instead of giving unconditionally, contribution is not your top need. In this case, you may find yourself harboring resentment or contempt for what you have provided. Be honest with yourself, practice self-care, and rise to the occasion.
The Benefits of Studying the 6 Human Needs
Tony Robbins developed the concept of six universal human needs, and studying them will provide you with a foundational framework for understanding the motivation behind your actions and the actions of others. Learning how they work will also provide insights into your own behaviors and those of others. Once you become aware of your own hierarchy of needs, you will be able to use your understanding of them to drive profound personal and relational change.
Everyone has a unique hierarchy of needs, and most people consciously or unconsciously spend more time focused on meeting one or two of the six universal needs. The needs you spend the most time focused on fulfilling will dramatically impact the quality and course of your life. If you can’t meet your needs, you could needlessly suffer from something that could be avoided or overcome strategically.
Discovering your core driving needs will help you connect more effectively with others and contribute to your ability to develop and sustain positive relationships in all areas of your life. By learning which of the six human needs are fueling your actions and behaviors, you will learn how to leverage them to meet your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual goals.
By learning which of the six human needs is responsible for your behaviors and actions, you can also set better goals and learn how to elicit new behaviors to achieve them. Learning how to shift your needs at any moment will help you achieve an incredible transformation, both individually and in relationships with others.
Do you want to learn your core driving needs to begin making a positive change? Cloe Madanes created a free test to help you do just that, so click the link below to get started and let the transformation begin!
