Are You Getting Your Needs Met? š¤ Needs First then Hard Conversationsā¦
While itās all fine and dandy to engage in hard conversations, this is an option of privilege. And in The Third Place, our intention to acknowledge our privilege will be ongoing. We want to use this as an opportunity to be able to hold a safe space for these exchanges. In order for us to really stand by this fact, we realized pretty quickly that the concept of needs, basic or otherwise, was one that is foundational to the work we now doā¦ This led us back to the work of Maslow and his hierarchy of needs.
Even though I will in no way be able to explain it as beautifully as our guest (and NYU professor) Dr. Liz does on the podcast this week (insert shameless plug to listen here), I will give you a super quick run down. A quick Google search would show you that itās a theory of human motivation, made up of 5 tiers. The foundation of the pyramid consists of our basic or ādeficiencyā needs which make way to psychological needs, topped by self-fulfillment needs. The intention of the triangle is to show the importance of the fundamental needs at the bottom and how accessing needs further up the triangle is largely (but not always) dependent on meeting each need below it. Though one thing we discovered in our interview was that this was not Maslowās original intention, similar to the discovery we had around the stages of grief in our grief seriesā¦ It was not intended to be perceived as rigid as it often is.
So as we first identify which needs exist in which parts of the triangle, we can use this information to empower ourselves to have empathy for ourselves and others. This understanding can also help us identify where people are coming from, even if they are not able to voice that themselves. Both of which take the pressure off of the person in a dynamic that may or may not be getting their fundamental needs met and instead can allow the exchange to be rooted in meeting someone where they are atā¦ And if this is not the most obvious example of empathy, then I donāt know what is!
