How to Assess Your Own Needs

Many people do not have a direct response when asked what their most important needs are. Such people do not have a clue as to why they think the way they do, their emotional process, and the motivation behind their behavioral patterns that are often unhealthy.

Being in touch with your needs is beneficial for self-improvement as it leads to one being contented in life and finding their true purpose and joy. It all starts from a point of assessing what your needs are and the manner in which they develop to what they currently are.

Defining your personal needs makes it easy to come up with ways of achieving them on a regular basis. Being in the dark about your needs, however, creates mystery and fear around the topic hence simple obligations seems unattainable for such people.

Systematical Assessment of Personal Needs

From the most basic, the nature of human needs can be categorized into five:

Biological Needs

These are basic needs. The human body naturally craves sleep, food, water, oxygen, and sex. These aid in our survival as well as wellbeing and stand out to be the strongest in all the categories of needs.

Need for Safety and Security

Every human being needs to feel some sense of security in order to thrive in their life. Security is a very broad term that encompasses health, finances as well as personal safety. A safety net in life is strategic for eventualities such as lack of income, diseases, or accidents.

The Need To Belong and Be Loved

This cuts across your social circle, family ties, professional engagements, and relationships that make you feel human contact or part of something. This is a sensitive category that depends on how well adjusted you are in understanding your needs to sustain healthy relationships.

Relationships of any nature can be a great support system to empower you in attaining self-actualization in your personal endeavors.

Need for Respect and Self-esteem

Every human being seeks acceptance and needs to be valued in their social circles. According to Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist, this category of needs encompasses attention, respect for others’ status, and recognition while on the other hand dealing with the needs for independence, confidence, self-respect, and competence.

The need to Actualize Yourself

This ranks last as the others have to fall in line in order to achieve self-actualization. This entails finding your purpose in life and living a life in accordance with this. It also includes the individual desire for people to exploit their full potential in life. 

How to Identify Your Intricate Needs

For this to happen you have to peel away at your own life to understand why you are adapted to certain behaviors and the root cause of your emotional responses. This enlightens you on points of unhappiness in your life and major causes of dissatisfaction before proceeding to act on them individually.

Common emotions such as anger if carefully interpreted can lead you to understand your most intricate needs. According to psychologists, feelings of anger are usually defensive emotions in response to underlying feelings of hurt, insecurities, sadness, or loneliness.

After using your common emotional responses to pinpoint your innermost needs, you have to analyze your thought process that led to an emotional outburst. Be careful not to externalize as if you find that your thought process focuses on an external factor, may it be a person or something in your environment, it means you are yet to find underlying thoughts that directly influence your needs from within.

The aim here is to dig deeper to find out why you respond the way you do and not to outsource blame in a bid to protect yourself from pain. Internalize how you really perceive yourself. The secret is identifying the motivation behind your thought process in order to understand your immediate needs.

With love, light, and gratitude,

Melody Bass

Energy Alchemist

Transformational Coach

www.AboveAllHealing.com