The Five Basic Needs: Understanding Choices to Improve Relationships

Big life changes have a way of exposing what we value most. As we prepare to sell our home and head into the city, I found myself leaning on a simple, sturdy framework to keep conversations clear and compassionate: five core needs that shape almost every choice we make—safety and security, belonging, achievement, joy, and freedom.

I walk through each need in plain language and show how it plays out in real decisions. Safety looks like planning and risk control; belonging sounds like peacemaking and connection; achievement wants progress and visible results; joy seeks grounded delight in everyday moments; freedom prioritizes choice, autonomy, and space. Each need offers a strength and carries a shadow. When we understand the driver beneath a behavior, we stop arguing about the surface issue and start solving for what really matters.

I share practical ways to spot needs at work, translate puzzling behavior into clear motivation, and make offers that meet people where they are: build the plan for safety, create regular touchpoints for belonging, hand off ownership for achievement, design small rituals for joy, and keep options open for freedom. By naming your top two needs and recognizing those of the people around you, you create a shared language that lowers defensiveness, reduces conflict, and invites real collaboration.

If this lens helps you navigate your next hard conversation or big decision, share the episode with a friend who could use it. Subscribe for more thoughtful minis, leave a quick review to help others find the show, and tell me: which two needs drive you most right now?

Chapters

• 0:00 Season Update And Schedule Shift
• 0:30 Introducing Choice Theory Basics
• 1:44 Why Needs Matter In Relationships
• 1:57 Personal Example: Navigating A Move
• 2:25 Safety And Security Explained
• 3:54 Belonging And The Peacemaker Pattern
• 5:17 Achievement, Power, And Self Worth
• 6:37 Joy As Everyday Delight
• 8:07 Freedom And Creating Your Life
• 9:23 Using Needs To Reduce Conflict
• 11:28 Nature, Nurture, And Negotiation

Transcript

Mary: 0:00

Hi, and welcome to a mini episode of No Shrinking Violets. First, I want to let you know that starting with this new second season, I will be going back temporarily to having guest episodes only on Thursdays with periodic Tuesday bonus episodes. Of course, you can still find me here for minis on Monday. But we just have quite a few life situations we're navigating at the beginning of this year. So until those settle out, I need to downshift my episode strategy. All right, so I'm going to talk to you today about some concepts from choice theory. And I've talked about choice theory in different ways before, but something brought this to top of mind recently. Because in choice theory, there are concepts of basic needs. So five basic needs, which inform how we kind of interact with our world. And these are kind of similar to Maslow's hierarchy, if you remember that from Psych 101, which starts with like survival needs and goes up through self-actualization. So these are very similar. I don't know, it feels like William Glasser maybe ripped that off a little bit. But I find these to be especially helpful as a framework when I'm interacting in a relationship or when I need to understand someone else's motivation. Of course, they help to understand your own motivation. It's very helpful to have a framework for that. But I think, especially in a close relationship or maybe in a work relationship where somebody's doing something and it's very contrary to what you might do, it can help to think about it as a way that they are trying to get a main need that they have. So it came up for me because my husband and I were talking about moving, because we're going to be selling our home and we're moving into a city and we're really excited about it. But as we each navigate that, we're coming at it from very different ways. And so I started to think about how we're doing this. And it helps me to sort of navigate that with him, and I think vice versa, when we understand what's motivating that other person. So William Glasser talks about these needs as survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun. I'm going to use a little bit different wording because I was trained in the mental freedom methodology or framework. And I kind of think those terms make a little bit more sense. So let's talk first about safety and security. So if you or someone you know is motivated by that as their prime um way of interacting, and again, let me say we all have some of these five. We're just typically motivated by one or two more than the others. So if you are motivated by safety and security, then things like financial planning or being very cautious, those things are going to be more important to you. So if you have a partner who is looking at a situation very analytically or very much as a way of sort of mitigating risk, that person is probably motivated a lot by safety and security. They don't like a lot of risk. They don't like things that are unpredictable. They really want to feel like there's a lot of safety or security in that situation. So the next one is belonging or love and belonging, as Glasser says. And of course, as a species, we all have a need to belong. It's actually very integral to our survival. But there are some people who are just connectors, who are very uncomfortable with conflict. They are very much motivated by making sure that there's peace, that everyone is, again, feeling connected, feeling good, and they may prioritize sometimes the needs of other people above their own. So they could be the person that wants to facilitate the holiday. Or they might acquiesce in relationships because they'll think, well, having peace here or getting along or moving in the same direction is more important than my having a boundary. Now that's putting it in a little bit of a sort of framework, not negative, but in a way, that's where the pitfall can be. But really, these people are beautiful at maintaining connection with other people. That's very much a motivator for them. Or they might volunteer, they care much, they care of a lot about humanity. The next one is power and self-worth. And I like to think about this more as achievement. So if you or someone you know is the kind of person that loves to um have success, they like to see the response to their efforts, they might be much more uh disappointed or upset by failure. And if you've heard me talk at all, you've heard you know that I think of failure as really the next chance. It's a learning experience. But these people may be high achievers in their work relationships. They might want to have a certain amount in retirement. Now that sort of goes back to security also, but they want to be known for something. So maybe again, they're the person in the family that's the matriarch, or they might be the person at work that really cares about getting the project done, about getting promotion. There are really good motivating things, again, about all of these. There are just sometimes pitfalls. So the next one, Glasser calls fun and enjoyment. I think about that as joy. This is one of my big motivators. So, of course, we all seek, I think, well, happiness is I'm just that's kind of a quote. I'm gonna put quotes on that. That's a catch-all term. But true joy is finding those moments in your life where you feel just that it's kind of a combination of your heart lifts, but you feel very grounded in the moment. And I think that's one of the reasons that I love joy. I love that sometimes it's very unexpected. For me, sometimes I'll get up and I'll look out the back window and the sun is coming up, and it's we have woods behind our house, at least for now. And so just seeing those beautiful colors come through the trees, it's just that's one of my moments of joy. Or if I get a very perfect dirty chai, that is a moment of joy. So it can be really kind of normal everyday things, or it could just be seeing your kid laugh. Now, the opposite side of that, of course, is sort of hedonistic. If you are just striving to have the next high or that next moment of joy, sometimes that can be contrived, but understanding that you need to have a life where there are things that make you feel that heart lifting. And then finally, the last one is freedom. And this is probably my highest motivator. And I think we can look at it two ways. I mean, we can look at it as being free from negative things, like freedom from pain, but the way that I think is more positive, it's looking at it like making your own choice in life. So having the freedom to live the life that you want to create. And that might mean that you don't want a lot of stuff weighing you down, or you are a person that likes a lot of solitude. That is me. I like a lot of solitude. I'm also a connector, though I I like that sense of belonging. I love bringing people together. But that sense of freedom, you know, again, the flip side of that is that you can be a little too independent, or you may want to have freedom, or you know, somebody who might want to have so much freedom that they feel like they shouldn't have to hold down a job. But freedom in its distilled essence really is just loving that ability to think about your life and decide what do you want to create. So when we think about those five things, and again, it's safety and security, belonging, achievement, joy, and freedom, it can help us first to consider how they play a role in the choices that we make, which is why they're part of choice theory. But I think they're really, really a great tool to use when we feel really disconnected from a situation. So if there's somebody at work that they make decisions or they do or say things and it's puzzling, if we can think about it in terms of this, what are they trying to achieve? If there's someone who is constantly wanting to talk, or they come into your office, or they're they're overbearing, or it may just be that they really prioritize that belonging or that connection, and that's where it can go a little too far, but understanding that they just want to be connected. Or again, in your personal relationships, if there's someone that makes choices you feel are very safe, maybe you're a freedom person, you are motivated by freedom and somebody else is motivated by safety, they can sometimes be at odds. But I think having the language to talk about that, it takes a lot of the pressure out of it, I think, when you're able to say, hey, this is a big motivator for me. And really a lot of these are in our nature versus nurture equation. A lot of these are nature. Now, some of them, of course, if you grew up without a lot or your parents were always talking about worries for money or that kind of thing, you could have a high security need. But that doesn't always translate. A lot of these are very much how we're wired, but it can take that pressure out of or the conflict out of talking about it because if you're looking at it purely as what motivates you, then I think you start with a different understanding. And then from that point, you can use what you know to talk about it in terms of like how can we have both things? How can there be decisions that will give you what you need, whether it's a sense of achievement, maybe that person wants to be the one to, you know, do the research on who's going to fix the things in the house, or you know, or they're the person that has a lot more motivation to get promotions at work. And you may be more motivated to create safety and security in the home. Those are things that can be really powerful tools to start to discuss that and break it down. So that was just my little thought for today because that came up in my own life, and I just find it really helpful. So I hope you're all having a peaceful and positive start to the new year. And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.