Relationship Chemistry - Are You Getting Your Needs Met?

If you're ever going to be happy in your relationship, it's important to ensure that your emotional needs are being fully met. Your partner doesn't need to meet 100% of your needs but they will almost certainly need to support all of the important ones for you to be truly happy in your relationship. This approach to working out what your personal needs are was developed by Thomas Leonard who single-handedly created the profession we refer to as Life Coaching.

Whether we like it or not we're all a touch needier than we care to admit. We may have different ways of demonstrating our needs but it doesn't make us any less needy. Given the work I do with singles, it's become clear to me that figuring out a way of getting your needs met is essential if you ever intend to find your love for life.

Briefly put, we all have emotional needs that must be met for us to feel loved and safe in life. Things like: security, being held fondly, praise and recognition or being desired are all needs. They might not be your needs, of course, as we are all different.

What are your needs?

I like to work with archetypes (models) and, when it comes to needs, I use the image of the universal mother. In order for you to get your needs met you need to receive from the outside world. It's a bit like a baby at the mother's breast; they need milk and they can only get it externally. It's not something they can give themselves.

So what specifically do you need to receive to make you feel loved? Be clear that if it's working well you don't have to do anything in order to win this love, it's freely given to you.

Think about your absolute best friendship or your lover and just ask yourself, what does this person do that makes all the difference? Do they praise you in a particular way? Is it the way they stroke your face every once in a while? Is it the way they listen to you when you're down? Do they get you a little gift for no reason? What is it that makes you feel really loved?

It's not a small claim to make I know, but I guarantee that if you take the time to work out your top four emotional needs your life will change for the better, forever. I do this with every client I work with because it's so profound.

How getting your needs met can affect you

Pretty much everything you ever do is based on the desire to get your needs met and once you've figured out your needs you can begin to identify better, maybe even healthier, ways to get them met. So let me share a specific example with you.

I had a client whose core need was to be celebrated on a very regular basis. Any relationship he set up rapidly came apart, which is hardly surprising as the women he chose invariably couldn't meet that need.

As needs aren't specific to just relationships, it also turned up in his work. He is a successful novelist which would appear perfect for him until you realise that it takes at least a year to write a book, at which point his editor and friends would look at it, and then another year for it to be published. So the celebration he received was very distant and by the time it arrived hardly even seemed relevant. So we had to set up some new ways of getting his need met more immediately.

He came up with an elegant solution and began to write some articles that had a quicker turnaround so his need to be celebrated was met more often. He also had to be a bit more honest with his friends about his need to be praised on a regular basis. That can be the hardest bit, being honest with those closest to you.

An easy first step to getting your needs met

If you are going to ask your friends to help you with a specific need then be smart. You can't just bully them into praising you; it tends to weird people out really quickly.

Your friends' lives actually become easier when they know how to meet your needs. They are generally grateful that making you happy is now easy to do.

People are wired to make each other happy so let's make it easier for them to help you. Give it a go. You'll be surprised at how much easier your life becomes. So what do you think your four major emotional needs are? On the next page you're going to take a few moments to complete the questions. This will identify your most important needs. Once you know them and how to use them, you'll be amazed at how much easier your life becomes.

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Relationship Chemistry - Identify your needs