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Maslow's Pyramid of Needs

Dr. Abraham Maslow studied human needs and suggested an arrangement of them in a hierarchy of strength or potency.  His theory is that the appearance of one need usually rests on the prior satisfaction of another, more important or more powerful need.  That is, man strives to satisfy higher needs after the lower needs have been satisfied.

He believed that as soon as one need is satisfied, another appears in its place.  You must learn to think in terms of needs rather than what a person says he wants because people rarely talk in terms of needs, despite the stated wants being always related to those needs.

The five types of needs, in order of power, that Maslow identified are: physiological, safety, love, self-esteem and self-actualization.

Physiological needs. Man's most basic needs are termed physiological.  They include those we inherit, needs that are instinctive.  They include food, shelter, warmth and sex, for examples.  Not much can motivate a person who has not reasonably satisfied his basic needs.  Only when these basic needs are satisfied does man strive to satisfy a higher need.

Safety needs. Maslow placed safety at the second level of needs.  Our need to feel safe runs strong and deep. All of us have been touched by it.  In our present society, man is generally free from direct threats to the safety of his physical person.  Yet, more subtle, more sophisticated fears do exist.  Examples of man's need to feel safe and secure: the job he chose for security; his savings put aside for a rainy day; his insurance program.

Psychological safety is a terribly strong motivator to avoid doing certain things.  An example is a salesman's call reluctance.  He may not make the number of sales calls he needs to be successful, simply because he fears rejection.  At the root of much of our fears today is simple ignorance.  The other is learned patterns of behavior that served us once in our distant past, perhaps forgotten in our consciousness, but still there in our subconscious minds, ruling over us years later.  Another common fear is the fear of failure. This prevents many people from even trying things they are not sure that they can succeed at.  They certainly are not the believers in the saying that "the only people who have never failed at anything are those who have not tried anything."

Another reflection of man's need to feel safe is his preference for the familiar rather than the unknown.  McDonalds restaurants certain benefit from this need, as the consistency of McDonalds wherever you find them is one measure of "quality" in many people's minds, as it is familiar, and thus safe. 

We often meet people who feel safe only doing what they already know.  They are extremely reluctant to change to anything new or different.  Any change represents a possible safety threat.  In fact, nearly every innovation or technical advance's usage can be broken down into four major groups of people:  the innovators, the early adopters, the great majority, and the late adopters.  Each group in order have increasing resistance to change and increasing preference for safety, i.e., lower risk tolerance.  The late adopters only adopt the new when adopting the new is deemed less threatening (e.g., avoiding ridicule or falling behind competitors) than not adopting the new technology.  Fear of this sort is a natural outgrowth of our need for safety.

Love needs.  Once man has relatively satisfied his physiological and safety needs, there begins within him or her the urge for love, affection, acceptance, recognition, and the feeling of belonging.  It is important to recognize that the person needs to give as well as receive. A great deal of our behavior can be traced to our need for love.  It is a very strong motivator. 

Self-esteem needs. Every psychologically mature person needs to feel that he or she, as an individual, is important.  He wants to have self-respect, self-esteem, and wants others to think of him as an important person.  His attitude toward himself reflects a need to feel confident and adequate in meeting the day-to-day challenges of life. Dale Carnegie said in "How to Make Friends and Influence People", "If you can tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I can tell you what you are."

The reaction we seek from others is one that will reflect us as a person of good reputation, a person of prestige, a person deserving of recognition and attention.  Because these self'-esteem needs are so strong, people will sometimes go to great lengths to satisfy them.  Each of us acquires an image of ourselves partly from our interactions with others.  In order to see ourselves as an important worthwhile person, it helps if others tend to have this view of us  -- and tell us so. 

Almost all of us have a strong desire or need to be recognized.  In fact, in a personal development program I was involved in in 1988, at a retreat, we were asked to identify our "hunger", the thing we would "crawl through broken glass" to obtain.  The most common hunger identified by the participants (and thousands of others who have participated in similar programs) were either "recognition" or "acceptance", related to the self-esteem and love needs.  This is not bad.  Behind many a success story, either in business or of tremendous benevolence, lies a flaming ambition fed by an unrelenting need to feel important in our own eyes and in the eyes of others.

Self-actualization needs. Self-actualization is the need for self-fulfillment, the full blooming of one's capabilities, a full tapping of one's potential.  It is the need to be all that you can be (huh, even the US Army has tried to tap into this need).

The drive toward self-actualization rests upon a person being relatively satisfied in the other needs, including a basic satisfaction of our own self-image, our own self-esteem.  Liking what we are motivates us to become more of what we can be.  Dr. Maslow's contention is that even the basically satisfied person has room for growth.  His belief is that the need for self-actualization and achievement is never really satisfied.  One success stimulates another, and another. 

On the other hand, it is our failures and our fear of failures that tend to stop us cold.  Stop us from doing and being more.  That is why it is smart to remember and dwell on our past accomplishments - not on our past failures.