Episode 819 · Jul 26, 2023

Filling Your Six Core Human Needs: Why You Do What You Do

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George Wright III opens this episode of The Daily Mastermind with a question that cuts to the heart of human behavior: have you ever stopped to ask yourself why you do the things you do? It is a question most people never take the time to answer. Yet the answer shapes every decision, every habit, and every pattern that defines your life.

Drawing on Tony Robbins' framework of the six core human needs and the foundational work of Abraham Maslow, George walks you through the invisible forces steering your thoughts, emotions, and choices day after day.

The Foundation: Maslow's Hierarchy Meets Tony Robbins' Six Needs

Maslow's hierarchy of needs established that human behavior is driven first by basic survival requirements (food, shelter, safety) and then by higher-level desires like love, self-esteem, and personal growth. Tony Robbins built on that foundation with a more actionable framework: six core human needs that every person on the planet shares. When these needs are met in positive ways, you experience fulfillment. When they go unmet or are filled through destructive behavior, you end up stuck in cycles that hold you back.

The First Need: Certainty

Everyone craves a sense of safety, stability, and predictability. Certainty helps you avoid pain and manage life's challenges. But the way you pursue certainty is often shaped by limiting beliefs and unconscious programming that may not actually serve you. George points out that understanding which beliefs are driving your need for certainty is the first step to gaining real control over your behavior.

The Second Need: Variety

Here is where the paradox lives. Just as much as you crave certainty, you also crave variety, surprise, excitement, and challenge.

"Your true success as an entrepreneur and happiness in life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty that you can handle in your life."

Growth happens outside your comfort zone. That is the territory of uncertainty. Learning to balance certainty with variety is one of the ongoing challenges of a fulfilling life.

The Third Need: Significance

The need to feel special, important, needed, and worthy of love is one of the most powerful drivers of human behavior. George shares a quote that puts this need in sharp perspective:

"You can feel more significant by achieving something, by building something, by learning something, or even by tearing other people down."

This is the dual edge of significance. It can push you to achieve great things, or it can be channeled destructively through bullying, manipulation, or the pursuit of status at someone else's expense. The question is not whether you have a need for significance; you do. The question is how you are filling it.

The Fourth Need: Love and Connection

The need for communication, approval, intimacy, and genuine connection is something every person carries. Love is one of the most powerful emotional forces in human experience. But low self-worth, past relationship failures, and unresolved experiences can distort the way you meet this need. Becoming aware of the beliefs driving your pursuit of love and connection helps you build healthier, more fulfilling relationships.

The Fifth and Sixth Needs: Growth and Contribution

These final two needs are where the deepest fulfillment lives. They are the needs of your spirit, not just your personality.

Growth means constant emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development. If you are not growing, you stagnate. One trap George highlights is perfectionism: measuring your progress against an ideal future rather than against your past self. The real game is to track the gains you have made, not the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

Contribution is the need to give beyond yourself, to care for, protect, and serve others.

"The secret to living is giving."

When you identify your unique talents (the things you are both excellent at and passionate about) and put them in service of others, you meet the need for contribution in a way that creates lasting fulfillment.

Action Steps

Ask yourself: what are my two or three primary core human needs, and how am I currently meeting them?
For each need, evaluate whether you are filling it in a positive or destructive way.
Identify the core beliefs driving your behavior in each area. Are those beliefs actually true and serving your goals?
Measure your personal growth as a gain from your past self, not as a gap from a perfect ideal.
Find one concrete way this week to use a skill or talent you have in service of someone else, meeting your need for contribution.

Living without a clear direction means drifting. And drifting, sooner or later, leads to dissatisfaction and emptiness. Understanding your core human needs and filling them with intention is how you build the clarity and purpose that drives a meaningful life. As George reminds his listeners, it is never too late to start living the life you were meant to live.

READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

All right, welcome back to The Daily Mastermind, George Wright III with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. I hope you're having a great week so far. If not, there's never too late. It's never too late. Let's get this week going. I want to talk to you today about why we do the things we do. This is a topic that I've hit a couple of times, and it really references the six core human needs that Tony Robbins talks about. But have you ever wondered or thought about why you do the things you do? You know our thoughts and emotions obviously shape our behaviors but what truly influences our conscious and unconscious thoughts on a day-to-day basis? Well let's talk about that today and I want you to remember and I want to remind you every single day that it's never too late to start living the life that you're meant to live but to do this you've got to be consistently creating growth in your mind, body, money, business, lifestyle relationships and that's why I do the daily mastermind on a on a weekday basis I want you to be able to spend time and constantly be aware of what it's going to take to take you to the next level so I want to talk you a little talk with you a little bit about these six core human needs now put a lot of thought into this and we've discussed a lot of different things about influencing your behaviors but I think this topic kind of all goes back to this concept that Abraham Maslow created which is that theory or basic human behavior called Maslow's hierarchy of needs it talks about how the most basic of needs which are you know your food shelter safety and things like that they'll affect and influence your behavior but there's also a higher level of needs like love and self-esteem and personal growth in order for you to truly feel self-actualization and happiness right in your life these are these are the main influencing factors in our behavior and so it's important for you to break them down and really analyze them. What is it that you need? You know Tony Robbins talks a lot about what he calls the six core human needs and he's become very well known for this because it's impacted so many millions of people worldwide but he believes that all humans have the same six core needs and that if you're fulfilling these six needs then you're gonna have great experience and happy. You'll be happy, right? And so if you don't feel, if you're dissatisfied in one of these areas, that's what's going to lead to unfulfillment at times. And you've got to be able to prioritize a couple of these needs, especially if they're ones that influence your day-to-day behavior. So, you know, and it'll be important to note also that many people choose to meet their six core human needs in a positive way, but it is possible and very common that people meet these needs in a negative way or destructive way that leads them to problems and struggles maybe you noticed cycles in your life so let talk about what these six needs are and and I going to do this just so that you become aware of which ones that you are prioritizing and which ones you need to focus on a little bit more. Be consciously aware of what you're doing in your life. So it's just to kind of set you up for this of the six core human needs the first four are ones that will help you to fulfill the needs of your personality and the last two will help you to fulfill the needs of your spirit and, you know, that inner soul, what you call. So true fulfillment is going to come from these last two needs, but, you know, I'm going to go through all six of these for you. So the needs of the personality, the first one is certainty. Look, we all crave or need certainty, safety, stability, comfort, predictability, control, consistency. Some of us more than others. I happen to really like having control, but, you know, obviously we do our best to avoid pain in our lives by creating certainty, right? You know, a problem can arise for us, but when we're able to create a little bit more certainty, then that helps us to deal with it a little bit more. And this is when you have to start to discover what your limiting beliefs are and your programming that carry on inside you that are going to be affecting what your expectations are. Because your limiting beliefs where you crave certainty might be based in false ideas, ideas that aren't necessarily going to serve you. The second core human need is variety. So I find it pretty ironic, but as much as we crave certainty, we also crave variety and surprise and challenge and excitement and difference. That's the idea that we need some adventure. One of my partner and mentor, Robert Stuburg, would say that your true success as an entrepreneur and happiness in life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty that you can handle in your life. So if you are an entrepreneur, you know this is true because everything growth-wise happens outside your comfort zone and that is just the land of uncertainty. And it's interesting to note that these first two core human needs are sort of like that paradox. It's continually trying to balance your need of certainty with uncertainty. And that kind of leads us to this third core human need of significance. The need for significance is the need to have meaning or be special, needed, wanted, a sense of importance or worthy of love. We want to feel special, right? Now, I read a quote. It was a pretty impactful quote by someone by the name of Adam Sakinski that I think really explains the need for significance well. So I'm just going to read you this quote. it says you can feel more significant by achieving something by building something by learning something or even by tearing other people down they all legitimate ways to fulfill the need for significance The need for significance can help you achieve more do more and become the person that you desire to be All professional athletes would probably admit that the need for significance is a big part of their careers. In fact, it's probably one of the most important influential factors that go into every decision they make. On the other hand, the need for significance can also be used for bad purposes. For example, it can be used to hurt people or gain an unfair advantage. Take the example of a bully. A bully pullies people to feel important and significant. So we've got to really balance this need of significance and make sure that it's a positive thing in our life. Now, Tony Robbins talks about how violence can also fulfill the need for significance in a very destructive way. So understanding the need of significance is important so that you can understand how to apply it in your life. Are you filling that need in a positive or a negative way? The fourth core human need is love and connection. Now, this is pretty obvious, right? The need for communication and approval, attachment, intimacy, whatever it is. But that love and connection ultimately is something that we're all searching for. Love is one of those most powerful emotions that in your life can really bring you true happiness as well as it can be deepest fears of rejection, loneliness, and regret. But the key is to understand that love can be influenced by our belief in a huge way. If you have low self-worth, past relationships, failures, or good or bad experiences, this can all affect the way you are fulfilled when it comes to this particular need. So you've got to really understand how you're filling these needs. That's the point I really want to get to you because we all have those needs to be filled. Now I want to hit real quick these last two core human needs because they're the ones that really bring the most fulfillment in your life. So I want you to take special attention to these. The first one is growth. In growth, and I've talked about this, the need for personal growth is constant emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development. You know, you've heard the saying, if you're not growing, you're dying. This comes from the fact that we all have a need to grow. And the best way to do this is through personal development, in my opinion. Without personal growth, you're going to feel stuck. Now, the negative side of growth is that many of us apply the filters of perfectionism. So we don't really recognize we're growing. I've talked about this idea of, are you measuring the gap between where you want to go or the gain that you've made? It's very important that when it comes to growth, you're measuring, recognizing, and identifying the successes, the wins. right the key is always play the game of life against the past version of yourself not other people and always remember that you need to look forward and not backwards when you growing Now let talk about this final need the one for contribution The need to give beyond ourselves, to give, care, protect, and serve others. And whether or not you feel this is a priority, this is something that's going to help you feel fulfilled. So you may or may not be meeting this need. You know, another great saying is the secret to living is giving. And that's so true. I really like what my partner Robert Stubrick says when he talks about his life mission of using his unique talents. And the key to unique talent, remember, is something you're excellent and passionate about. And he talks about how he uses a unique talent to apply it in the service of others. When you learn to use your unique talent and apply it in the service of others, you're going to hit that need of contribution. So this is what I want you to do. I want you to ask yourself, how are you meeting your six core human needs? You know, we have to strive daily to meet these needs, but remember that our needs can ultimately be met in both positive and negative ways. So are you filling these needs in positive ways that will encourage you and take you further in your life? So I want you to just ask yourself these couple of questions. What are my core needs? How am I filling them? What are the beliefs that are really driving my behaviors when I fill these? And are they leading me? And this is key. Listen to this for a minute. Are they leading me and serving me, pushing me towards my life's mission, the thing that I want to accomplish in my life? Because what I want to emphasize for you today is this as we go. I want to emphasize that if you are not living your life with specific intent, going towards some vision of what you want your life to be like, then you're just drifting. And drifting will most certainly at some point in your life lead to dissatisfaction, a feeling of emptiness, and that may be what you're feeling right now. And so having that clarity and vision of your future, but then filling those needs along the way in the present moment is such a key element. So that's my message I want to leave you with today. I want you to do me a favor. Share this episode. Share it because we have so many people out there right now that are struggling. I want to, and individuals that are really pushing, trying to get past their benchmark of success that they have in whatever area of their life is, money, business, relationships, mind and body. And this is kind of a strategy in an area they might not have thought of. So share this episode. Let me know what you're doing. Let me know how I can help you. You can hit me up on The Daily Mastermind. Go to our website. Leave me a message. Or tag me in your Instagram or Facebook post. I look forward to talking with you more tomorrow. Have an amazing day. Once again, this is George Wright III. And this has been The Daily Mastermind. Okay.