From Neediness to Needing Less

Have you ever felt like no matter what you do you don’t quite get the results you want? Or perhaps you’re achieving the results you want but you don’t feel as good about your success as you thought you would. It seems that you keep doing things right but there’s still something missing.

For some reason you are compelled to act in a certain way, striving for some ultimate outcome. But when you achieve the outcome you thought you wanted, a void remains. Even if you experience some level of satisfaction, it is not sustained. You feel compelled to repeat the behaviors so that you can bring about similar outcomes.

These patterns of behavior will bring you a certain level of success, but you’ll always fall short of personal fulfillment and completeness. Whenever you look outside yourself to feel complete, you will not find what you are looking for – for what you seek can only be found within you. So perhaps it’s not the outcomes that you really want; it’s a way of being that you are seeking.

When you are motivated to achieve something, living under a predictable pattern of behavior and not experiencing the fulfillment you want, you are most likely operating from unmet personal needs. Personal needs are a driving force, the fuel that propels you to act in certain ways. Needs are forceful because they have to be met, even if that means getting them met in unhealthy ways. You’ll do whatever is necessary to get your need satisfied without realizing that’s why you are behaving or acting in that way.

Where Needs Come From
Personal needs are not really personal. Everyone experiences needs. Basically, they are things that are left from childhood that went unmet. So now as an adult, those needs become apparent. For example, if you grew up in a big family, maybe you were never able to speak up; so as an adult, you talk a lot – whenever you have an audience that will listen. You have a need to be listened to, to be heard or perhaps you just need to talk.

But don’t blame your parents or your upbringing; there is no possible way for parents to anticipate all of your needs. They do the best they can with what they know. Often needs are not apparent when we are young and spring up at different times of our life. In the example above, the fact that you grew up in a large family is just how it was for you. It wasn’t personal. So, there’s no one to blame for personal needs; they just are. Part of being an adult is to be responsible for where our parents left off. We don’t stop developing ourselves just because we turn a certain age.

There are many different needs such as the need to be recognized, appreciated or acknowledged. There’s the need for control or to be right, to have power, to accomplish, to be comfortable, to be loved or to be free. The need to be right fuels more arguments, fights and wars than any other driving force. And the need to be loved or to be cared for fuels many short-lived marriages; once the need has been satisfied and the hunger satiated the need often disappears. And that’s the beauty of learning about personal needs; you can learn to satisfy all of your needs so that you no longer live under their driving force!

Transcending Needs
Personal needs can be identified and eliminated…for good! That’s the good news. This means you must take responsibility for transcending your needs. When you accept that you are complete and whole, that you are not lacking in anyway, you are able to shift your paradigm to one where you need less, where you actually accept yourself as pure love and you become a vehicle for expressing your true Self. Rather than looking outside yourself for something or someone to complete you, you know you are already complete. If you are not clear about this, if you have difficulty trusting yourself, then hire a coach for assistance. There is no reason to hide your Self under a cloud of unmet needs.

Some needs are encouraged in childhood, like the need to be right, the need to be needed or the need to please others. This can make it more challenging to transcend when you are an adult because you grew up believing this is the way you are ‘supposed to’ be. As an adult, you have the power to choose who you want to be. You can choose to live under a different paradigm than what you were taught as a child. There is another way to live. You need to decide whether it’s more important for you to pursue your own personal happiness or continue to live up to the expectations of others.

What’s Beyond Needs?
Even if you satisfy all of your needs, you are at zero. It’s a neutral place. There’s no more motivation fueling you to pursue the achievements you’ve made in your life. After all, needs are helpful in the sense that your needs drive you to succeed in ways you might not have done had you not had that need motivating you. Someone with a need to achieve, for example, will have created great successes in life because of that need. And yet, at some point, the success will not be enough. Success, after all, is something outside you that is gained. The achievement, in and of itself, will not bring you the fulfillment you desire because fulfillment does not come from external sources; it comes from within. So, eliminate the need to achieve, and what’s left? Nothing.

But ‘nothing’ is a good place to be because from here you can fill up your cup! Take your values, take your gifts, your talents and your passions and live them. Your passions will ignite your life force and create the personal fulfillment you seek. When personal needs are in charge, you may achieve some external successes because you are satisfying the need. But when you have no needs, you are free to express your True Self.