Uncover the 6 Needs Secretly Driving Everything You Do: How To Be Healthy With NLP

Do you know why you do what you do? Why there are some areas of your life where you keep sabotaging your happiness? Or why certain habits and behaviours seem impossible to change? 

Discover how the 6 Core Human Needs drive your behaviours with values and beliefs you may not even be aware of. Increase the awareness of the hidden needs controlling your life and how to fulfil them in healthy ways, rather than the default habits you were programmed into by a sick and unhealthy society.

You Value Your Needs

Have you ever noticed how you always have time and money for some things—and others, not so much?

Have you ever wondered why there are some habits or behaviours that, no matter how hard you try to change, you can’t seem to shake—permanently?

Or why no matter how much you try to control the world outside, you’re never quite happy inside?

That’s because much of your behaviour is driven by the programs installed in your subconscious mind before the age of 7, where you modelled, from the humans and world around you, how to fulfil your core human needs. 

Today—you value those needs, and you always have time (and money) for what you value. 

What Are The 6 Core Human Needs?

The 6-Core Human Needs is a model in psychology originally birthed by Sigmund Freud and contributed to by many over the years, most famously Abraham Maslow and more recently refined by Tony Robbins. 

The fulfilment of these needs is the foundation of a fulfilled and happy life and is a helpful tool to understand what drives your behaviour.

There are 6 core human needs:

Four needs of the personal self or body:

1. Love & Connection
2. Certainty
3. Significance
4. Variety/Surprise

Two are the spiritual needs of the soul:

1. Growth 
2. Contribution

Your Needs Will Be Met

Your needs will be met—whether you’re aware of them or not. 

This is because they’re your needs—not simply nice to have’s. They are fundamental to your well-being as a human and drive your behaviour in either healthy or unhealthy ways. 

You value your needs. 

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)

Neuro-Linguistic Programming or NLP is a proven model of learning that helps you understand what drives your behaviour through the power of your subconscious mind and universal laws that govern—everything.

It shows you how you model your behaviour through thoughts (neuro), words (linguistics) and behaviours (programming) that shape the world you perceive and how to change them to live in alignment with these universal laws.

NLP demonstrates how everything is energy, which is connected and changed all the time. Nothing is static. 

The Open Acceptance Method (OAM)

The OAM Method is my personal (and professional) practice that has helped me (and my clients) apply NLP in our daily lives. 

More practically, it is my signature method to help you see where you are blocked or stuck and how to accept responsibility for your very powerful mind and what it creates. 

It gives you a method to help you become more aware of the wholeness (unconditional love) that is already within you, together with tools to see and undo the automatic programming that is the opposite of this wholeness.

Your Personal Needs

Your behaviour is driven by 4 core personal needs that are always fulfilled—in healthy or unhealthy ways. 

Let’s take a look… 

1. Certainty

This is the need to feel safe, secure and certain with yourself.

On a healthy level, this need is fulfilled by a deep inner connection that brings a sense of safety and security from within. 

An inner knowing that no matter what happens in the world outside, you have the resources and resilience to be ok—inside yourself. 

But because of the way most of us were programmed in this world—by our parents, schools, society, financial system and more—this is a tough need in which to be healthy. 

We are indoctrinated into this idea that certainty is created outside ourselves—in our career, job, relationship, bank account or home. 

But the truth is change is the only certainty in this world—no matter how hard you try to make it otherwise. 

In our collective belief that certainty is something created outside ourselves, we have developed a very unhealthy, upside-down way of being in the world, to have this need fulfilled.

2. Love and Connection

This is your need to feel unconditional love. A connection with yourself and a sense of oneness with those around you. 

On the healthy side of this need, you are aware and connected to the unconditional love within you. 

You have cohesive coherence (alignment) within yourself, where your mind and heart are one—in communication with each other and at peace. 

When this internal connection or coherence is weak, you will seek to have love and connection fulfilled outside yourself on two levels:

1. Group Coherence

Group coherence is when you feel you must keep up with the Joneses to fit in and feel loved and connected. You ask yourself how you must be (outside) so you can have this connection to love—outside yourself.

2. Egoic Coherence

Egoic coherence is when you experience yourself as separate from others and therefore place yourself in competition with another—where you need to be better, the best, perfect or even different in order to validate your need to feel love and connection. 

In both these less coherent states of awareness, your connection to your own heart is overshadowed by something (or someone) outside yourself.  

3. Significance

This is your need to feel needed, wanted, loved, seen and valued. 

On the healthy side of this need, is your connection to your Self as Unconditional Love. Here you are in acceptance of yourself as you are—without needing to fix, change, be, do or have anything outside yourself. 

Your significance is fulfilled by your awareness and acceptance of your flaws and imperfections—and to love them anyway. 

But this is not what most of us were taught. 

Mostly we were shown by someone in our lives how amazing or special we are. When we enter the “real world” this turns out to be more like a slap in the face as “life” finds our flaws less endearing than our parents or loved ones led us to believe. 

This reality check can cause disappointment and a level of inner frustration, entitlement and even anger that pushes you to again seek significance where it is given to you—a habit which quickly becomes unhealthy as you fail to learn to fulfil this need, within yourself. 

4. Variety/Surprise

Variety, or surprise is the opposite of the first need—certainty. This is your need for uncertainty..

The only constant in life is change and the only change you have control over is your inner world. 

To be on the healthy side of this need, is to be in acceptance of life, as it is, with an open heart. This fulfils your need for variety, by allowing you to be present with life, without the need to control or attach to the past or endulge in a fantasy about the future. 

Here you are free to be alive, awake and aware in each moment, allowing life to surprise you in a variety of ways as your connection to your Self increases, allowing you to better serve, enhance or experience each moment.

But stuck in a false sense of certainty or control, we can often fail to fulfil this need in healthy ways. Rather we seek to control variety outside ourselves through risk, adrenaline, addiction, relationships and more. 

How Are Your Needs Fulfilled?

As you can see, in this world of duality there are always 2 ways to have your needs fulfilled—

1. Inside you (healthy), or 
2. Outside you (unhealthy). 

We all learn at a young age, how we need to be, what we need to do and what role we need to play to have our needs met—outside ourselves. 

But in a world that changes all the time, it means nothing you do is ever quite good enough because what you do to have your needs met today, will not necessarily give you the same results tomorrow. 

How your needs are met shows you the amount of authentic self-love you have—for your Self. 

Your needs become your beliefs;

Become your values; 

Become your life. 

By looking more deeply at your life—what, why, when and how you do what you do—your behaviours serve as an important map to pinpoint and undo the patterns that keep you stuck, habitually sabotaging your own happiness.

Your Needs Are Your Responsibility 

Remember: your needs are fundamental to your wellbeing as a human and will always be met, whether you’re aware of them or not.

Everything changes all the time which in this case is good news. The subconscious mind makes and breaks habits with clear commands and repetition over 30 days. 

Changing the way your needs are fulfilled, and therefore your values, is your responsibility—nobody can do this for you. 

Awareness is the first step to turning the tables on your ego and living a more fulfilled, connected, loving and happy life. 

By applying NLP through my own Open Acceptance Method, you can learn to identify this behaviour and turn it around to fulfil your own needs—from within.

Unconditional Love is Within

By accepting responsibility to bring awareness to your automatic subconscious programming—consistently deciding to change from the outside in—you will begin to experience yourself as the unconditional love that is already you. 

Over time, you will experience yourself in a whole new way—

• Healthy 
• Abundant
• Connected
• Alive and
• Aligned

-with the truth of who you are, rather than a default product of the unhealthy and unaware world we all grew up in.

As Gandhi said, “be the change you want to see in the world”. It is, after all, the only way to actually change the world. 

Looking go to deeper—with support? Book a no obligation, free Game Plan Call.

Much love, 

Renier Jooste

Open Acceptance Method (OAM) Founder, Certified Master NLP & Hypnotherapy Practitioner, Firewalking & Breathwork Instructor, Strategic Intervention Specialist, Body Language & Micro-Expression Expert, Human Behaviour Specialist, Core Human Needs Therapy Practitioner and Reiki Level 2 Practitioner

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