The Most Important Emotional Need We Have

What's your main emotional need? What are your emotional needs in general? That can be a difficult thing to parse out. So what I want to give you today is a way to think about what you need emotionally that will help you feel balanced emotionally. And also, of all these emotional needs, which one emotional need is the most fundamentally important? So stay with me. So we're talking about emotional needs here. And meeting our own emotional needs is essential. It's self-parenting really. What do I do to keep myself balanced emotionally? So quick question here from Catherine to kind of inspire this video. Catherine writes, I've read your book on emotional needs. My book is free. You can check it out on my website. It's called Forget Happiness. It basically gives you a model for understanding what your emotional needs are. There's five in the model I use. That's not to say everybody has only five emotional needs, but I found so far that it's a pretty good template to work off. If you can meet those emotional needs consistently, it has a huge impact on our emotional and psychological health. So Catherine's read the book and she says, it helps me to understand what I need to maintain balance emotionally. However, knowing what these emotional needs are is one thing. Actually meeting them is another. So time restraints, interruptions, low moods, all these things make it incredibly difficult. How does one actually go about meeting your emotional needs and doing this effectively? So that's a great question. Now, the book will tell you what the emotional needs are. I'm a bit reluctant to tell you what they are. The book is free. Go and read it. The reason I'm reluctant is that once you hear, if I was to tell you what the first one was without telling you the rest of them, you might start to get a little bit defensive. The first one is about responsibility. So it can sound like I'm the self-help guy telling you to take more responsibility. The last emotional need is about laziness and how important it is to be lazy in your life, proactively, deliberately, consciously lazy. So if I was just telling you about responsibility for the next five minutes, you might start to think, oh my God, this guy's asking me to do this and it's not like I don't have responsibility. Problem is, it's a part of life, but it's not all life. So we're looking for balance here in this. There's three other emotional needs. There's meaning, purpose, creativity. There's take care of yourself physically, and also the last need here, and this is going to help Catherine, I hope, is how do I go about meeting these needs? How do I balance them? Because life is full of interruptions and disruption and complications and restraints, time restraints, everything else. The fourth emotional need in my model is the need for reflection. Now the need for reflection in my model, and as far as I'm concerned, is the most fundamentally important emotional need there is. To take space for ourselves to sit and occasionally ask in reflection, what is it I need emotionally? What's missing? What's out of balance? And most people think that the most fundamental emotional need is the inner child or the need for human connection. What I'm talking about here in self-parenting is not even about relationships. I'm just talking about within your own personal self, those emotional needs. The relationships are a completely separate issue entirely. Equally is valid and is important, but I'm not talking about that in this model here. How do you meet your own personal emotional needs? So it's not that. The importance of the inner child and the need for connection in relationships is taken for granted here. I'm talking about something else, self-parenting. Now when we're going to try and do something for ourselves emotionally, to actually meet our emotional needs so that we're feeling less conflicted within ourselves, what we're going to run into is exactly what Catherine has run into, which is, this is tricky. This is not as easy as I thought it was. So there's a few things we can talk about there, but really the number one thing is, if you can reflect regularly, just take some time to sit down and think about what it is you need, as well as other things. I'll talk about those in a moment. It's almost as if you're just going, what worked, what didn't. That's called reflection. The thing about it is the need to reflect on the whole process of self-parenting is essential, because the way I think about it is this. When you're on an airplane and you're flying across the country, really what happens is, we don't fly in a straight line. We fly in different directions and there's this constant course correction going on. Now in self-parenting it's almost as if we're flying. Invariably we go off course. Okay. So reflection is the okay, I need to, a little adjustment here. I need to course correct. So we come in and we change and now we're back on track again. But if we stay on that track, now inevitably we're going to go off track again. So it's this constant thing of coming back on track. And how we do that is through sitting down silently in a space for ourselves, just to think, process, reflect, about what it is we need. So reflection is essentially important, because as Catherine says, this is tricky and it does need kind of constant vigilance. Now it's not just about time management and things like this, reflection. Reflection is also essentially important, because when we're meeting our own emotional needs and just living life in general, we're going to come into contact with triggers, we're going to come into contact with disappointments, emotional upset, pain. And reflection is also a space where we bring that pain and those little disappointments, where we process them. Because processing those disappointments, for instance, is essentially important, because if we don't process them, they're going to build up and it's going to knock us off course entirely. So I don't want you to think that reflection is all about looking at your schedule and scheduling and time management. Self-parenting is about that, but it's also a space where you can do other things. There's any amount of tools you can use in reflection, meditation, inquiry. Really looking at time management is a perfectly valid thing to do in reflection. So there's all sorts of things we can do in it. But really what we're trying to do in reflection is come to terms with the fact that my default setting as I go about living my life is to be quite reactive to things. I can get triggered by things all the time. And to know that that's completely natural and predictable and normal. I'm going to get triggered, I'm going to feel upsets and disappointments. If we don't go into reflection, we'll find ourselves in this constant reactive mode to life. So reflection is recognizing the need. Okay, I'm probably going to be reactive unless I... because that's the default setting for us is to be reactive. Reacting to life, external events and situations all the time and people. Reflection helps us to come out of reactivity and into more of a proactive thing about this is what I'm doing. This is my path. This is my direction. So it's essentially important for that also. And the other thing about reflection is that reflection also helps us overcome the default to beat ourselves up all the time. Because usually if we're struggling emotionally with something, really what we're all doing is we're just beating ourselves up about it and blaming ourselves, putting labels on ourselves for why we're not able to meet our own emotional needs. So reflection again, if you slow down and recognize that tendency to be harsh on yourself, what you can start to proactively do in reflection is rather than beat yourself up is to use what I call fortification where it's a deliberate practice where you're actually trying to maybe focus a little less on the to-dos and what you need to do and what you should have done and on who am I as a person. Maybe I'm just a person I need to give myself some credit here. I need to support myself unconditionally and remind myself of that. Something like journaling, for instance, can be good to practice that. To sum it up here, Catherine, and for anyone else who's watching, all your emotional needs, responsibility, meaning, purpose, creativity, physical health, reflection, spontaneity, laziness, they all do require balance. It's going to be something that we need to constantly course correct on and keep an eye on in terms of self-parenting. So many of us are attentive to other people's needs all the time, but we neglect to look at what it is we need emotionally. There's other tips in the book too. It's not like we have to perfectly balance these emotional needs. Sometimes the need for responsibility can become quite overbearing and quite needs a lot of our time and attention, but we find ways, even in those situations, to meet these other emotional needs. The other thing I tell people too is when you're going about meeting your own emotional needs, what is the most I can give to each of these needs is the wrong question. We should be asking ourselves, what's the least I can give to these emotional needs consistently and regularly so that it actually will happen? These needs do not need an awful lot of time and energy. What they really need is recognition and validation, most of all, and sometimes just a little time and energy is more than enough than they need. The difference between everything and nothing is the difference between something to an emotional need and nothing to an emotional need is everything. Let me repeat that again. The difference between something going into an emotional need and nothing going to an emotional need is everything. So we just look to meet them regularly, give them something and it helps us feel validated and emotionally balanced. I'm speaking way too much in this video and I'm trying to cover too much. The book goes into it in much more detail, but as I said, it's free on the website and feel free to go and check that out. But Catherine, focus on reflection and realize that it's inevitable that you're going to feel like you're going off track from time to time with this. But we course correct it through repeated and frequent reflection. Guys, thanks for being with me as always and I hope that's useful and I'll see you again soon in the next video. Take care. Bye bye.