What are the six human needs (in Pyschology)?
The list of 6 core human needs are:
- Love/Connection: The need for intimacy, communication, and shared love
- Certainty: The need for security, comfort, safety, order, control, or consistency
- Variety/Uncertainty: The need for uncertainty, change, diversity, adventure, surprise, or challenge
- Significance: The need for validation, meaning, honored, special, wanted, or the feeling of being needed
- Contribution: The need to care, give, protect beyond self, serve others and provide good for all
- Growth: The need for intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and physical growth
1. Love & Connection
Human beings will always strive for a certain level of connection or affiliation with those people around them. In most cases, people tend to surround themselves with individuals of like- mind, whether as colleagues, friends, or an online family. While seeking to get love and connection, individuals still need to protect their uniqueness. This creates a conflict whereby one has to decide to condone affiliation guidelines or personal principles to make them unique.
Having a team spirit can help greatly in realizing love and affection. Generally, team spirit makes everyone feel accepted in the group, despite their challenges of uniqueness. You can make space for everyone to feel accepted, valued, and even learn from others, thus developing personal strengths that lead to the achievement of personal and group goals.
2. Certainty
At the most primary level, every human has the need to satisfy a basic sense of stability. Meeting the need for certainty guarantees the continuation of human DNA. One must do the basics to satisfy the need for certainty. Getting shelter, paying bills, building and maintaining healthy relationships, and remaining safe in all human endeavors contributes to satisfying the first human need.
However, there is one common challenge in satisfying this need. This is the constant change of the surrounding, making individuals create strong boundaries of control around living and stay in their comfort zones, thus rejecting any form of change, including positive change. On the plus side, satisfying the certainty needs helps individuals find a sense of stability and, over time, get to identify themselves and the need for change in life.
3. Variety/Uncertainty
While there is a need to experience certainty, it is also important to identify uncertainty in order to evolve and become more of what one was meant to be. This need interrupts the common patterns of stagnation and predictability. It allows one to expand and experience oneself’s ability to remain in motion.
Of course, there are risks to leaving a certain world to experience uncertainty, but you get to know more at the end of the process. There are greater chances that you will enter into a realm of immersive possibilities that are not bound to past or known experiences.
4. Significance
While balancing the way of satisfying uncertainty and variety needs, one gets into a new world where the efforts should be seen and validated. Through validation, one does not exist in isolation but as a part of a whole group, whereby one wants to know the role to play in making the group whole. Significance is a major part of creating a sense of identity through the process of self-experience and freedom of expression of the self.
The greatest challenge in fulfilling the need is that one becomes solely dependent on the input of others to feel complete within oneself. For instance, if you get one source that brings more validation of self, you may put all your focus on that single aspect, leaving behind all other life aspects. The best way to fulfill this need is by having an internal sense of acknowledgment without having others validate your effort in following your own integrity path.
5. Contribution
People usually desire to contribute something that adds value to life, whether at a personal level, community, family, or society. To satisfy the need for contribution, one has to live a purposeful life while sharing a similar purpose with others. You can easily add value to the lives of other people around you through contribution. The fulfillment of this need is natural as it arises from the satisfaction of the other five lower needs.
6. Growth Need
All humans have a point in life when they need to grow and expand to get to a specific position. Whether it is a financial target, professional status, or a particular lifestyle, growth is needed. However, in most instances, when one grows to the desired state, there is a dominant feeling of stagnation and unhappiness because the normal growth process has ended. To manage this, one has to get into a staged growth process, whereby there are always new goals at every stage. Additionally, there is a need for celebration at the end of every stage to congratulate the efforts made. Precisely, there is a need for human beings to always have something to strive for every day and challenges that can steer growth.
The Difference To Maslow’s 5 Human Needs
Tony Robbins has expanded on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to create his own model of human needs. While Maslow’s model consists of five levels of needs, Robbins has identified six basic human needs: certainty, variety, significance, love and connection, growth, and contribution. Maslow’s model focuses on satisfying physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization needs, with the ultimate goal being self-fulfillment. Robbins’ model, on the other hand, emphasizes the importance of not only fulfilling basic needs but also achieving growth and contributing to something greater than oneself [3]. Both models prioritize the need for connection and significance, but Robbins’ model emphasizes the importance of variety and growth, while Maslow’s model focuses more on self-actualization. Ultimately, both models aim to help individuals understand and fulfill their fundamental human needs in order to achieve a fulfilling life.
Whats The 6 Human Needs Test
The human needs test is a free online assessment that helps you identify your primary human need. This knowledge can help you gain a deeper understanding of yourself and your motivations, which can lead to personal growth and a more fulfilling life. The test consists of a series of questions that are designed to get to the root of what drives you and what is most important to you. If you want to discover your primary need and learn how to strengthen your other needs, take the human needs test now by clicking on this link: Take The Human Needs Test Here
Conclusion
To live a happy and fulfilling life, one has to satisfy the above human needs. While the satisfaction of each need has its challenges, learning helps people identify how to deal with every challenge. At several stages of life, you can carry out a personality test to affirm if you have satisfied any of the needs and to track your progress.
