Do You Like Your Problems?

Whenever the standard nlp stuff I use doesn’t deliver the results I think it should, one of the things I think about is the following:

People keep their problems because their problems allow them to meet their needs while not having to face their deepest fear – Robbins

Here’s an excerpt from a previous blog post that explains what I mean by “needs”:

In Human Needs Psychology there is a concept called the 6 Human needs.  The idea is that everyone has 6 Human needs, and these needs drive EVERYTHING we do.  These needs are hierarchical.  That is, each individual will value one need over all others.   An individual’s highest need will have a tremendous impact on his/her life.

The 6 human needs are: certainty, uncertainty, importance,  love, growth and contribution (the 6 Human needs model was developed by Tony Robbins).

What’s interesting to me, based on my interpretation of this model, is that although we all have the same human needs, we all have our own own unique ways of meeting these needs.  The ways of meeting our needs vary depending on our model of the world (beliefs, values, memories, identity, etc).

What’s obnoxiously fascinating to me is that people actually develop safe problems that meet their needs in order to not have to deal with stuff that might bring up their deepest fear.  Six Human Needs Psychology tells us that our two deepest fears are that we are not good enough and that since we are not good enough we do not deserve love. This can mean that in a coaching context a client might bring up a safe problem, instead of the REAL issue to work on.

Here are a couple of questions that I find useful:

Is there a problem in your life that IS POSSIBLE TO SOLVE but you’ve had for a LONG time? If so, which needs does the problem meet? Is there something that you know you should do but that you’ve been running away from?

Sometimes it takes a bit of a provocative attitude and even an in your face demeanor to get this stuff out in the open, which can take some balls. This is one of the reasons I really love this job.

Take care,

Martin

Advertisement