#195 – What do you need?

Back in coaching school, we debated a seemingly simple choice to open a session: "what do you want?" or "what do you need?"

What would be a more effective question to inquire about the session's focus? And what were the different implications?

Some said "want" implied a stronger sense of agency, whereas "need" made it sound like one's between a rock and a hard place.

I went with "want" but then, a few years into my practice, I came across Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and understood the importance of needs.

According to Wikipedia, "A need is dissatisfaction at a point of time and in a given context." And as Rosenberg argues, "our life is our needs in action." In other words, we live by seeking to fulfill our needs.

A misrepresentation of the NVC process would be that it helps us "teach" others how to treat us. Nothing farthest from the truth.

If I cause my own dissatisfaction, creating the ripples that bother me based on how I see the world, why don't I stop? What prevents me from ceasing to thrown more stones into the pond when I don't want any more ripples?

What NVC teaches is to ask others for help in stopping to create more ripples, or, in NVC lingo, meeting our needs.

The process starts by acknowledging that I am the cause of my own dissatisfaction: "this is what I see and that's how what I see impacts me." It's never about blaming someone else for my feelings.

Then, after I've recognized my needs (to myself or someone else), I ask for collaboration – would you help me stop to throw stones in the pond? Here, it's crucial that I leave open the possibility that they say no.

In which case, I'll just have to learn to handle the world. And that is, ultimately, what growth and evolution are about.

What aspect of the world or yourself will you learn to handle to take one more step in your evolution?

Love,

Carolina