Success Blog: Psychology, Human Behaviour, Self-Development, Relationships, and Affirmations

Tony Robbins talks about the six human needs and how they oppose each other. Today I just want to talk about, what he calls, the first two needs – the need for certainty and the need for variety. Tony advocates that these are not wants or desires – they are actually needs; if they are not met, we feel very uncomfortable and try to do something to meet them.

So the need for certainty is reflected in our desire to know, more or less, what is going to happen tomorrow. We like to know where our income is coming from, that we’ll have a roof over our heads at night, that we’ll get some food in our stomachs when we get hungry, etc, etc. Even people who are back-packing across another continent, who may not know where they are going to sleep that night, still have some certainty in their life, like that they will experience adventure, see new things, and create life-long-lasting memories. But what happens when we fully meet this need for certainty, to the point where we know exactly what is going to happen and when it is going to happen? Simply, we get bored.

This is where the need for variety comes in. We need to have unpredictable things happen in our lives for us to really enjoy life. It is actually quite fascinating that sometimes you’ll have a person who has not left their immediate area for 10 years, suddenly leave on a long trip to South America – what happens is that they have met too much of the certainty need and swing more into meeting their need for variety. And people who stick to the government job, prefer more certainty than variety in their financial affairs.

The two are opposing needs, since the more certainty you have, the less variety you have and vice versa. People find a point along that sliding scale that they feel happy with and they usually stick to it. When you think back on your life, did you have experiences where you went too far towards one end, only to swing back in the opposite direction to compensate later?

Until next time,

V

Tags: Human Behavior, Human Needs, Personal Power, Tony Robbins

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 10:35 and is filed under Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.