The Six Core Needs Model - Anthony Robbins
The six core needs remains Anthony Robbin’s finest contribution to the personal development space. Here is how the model works:
Beyond the biological needs of food, water, air and shelter, Anthony Robbins summarises the complete range of human needs in his brilliant six core needs model. There are three groups of paradox pairs pulling in opposite directions making up six needs in total.
Six Core Needs
1. Certainty – The need for safety, control, order, and comfort
2. Variety/uncertainty – The need for adventure, change, surprise, and spontaneity
3. Significance – The need for validation, approval, acceptance, value, and importance
4. Love/connection – The need for belonging, understanding, closeness, and to be seen.
5. Contribution – The need to give back, make a difference, add value, solve problems, and leave a legacy.
6. Growth – The need to expand, achieve, experience, enlarge, explore, develop, attain, and achieve.
There are also four overarching principles which govern how these needs play out in our lives and help us to observe all human behaviour in a clean way:
1. All needs must be met. Each need provides an essential part of what is required to survive life. Unmet needs create a vacuum that must be filled. Therefore, you are either meeting each need resourcefully or unresourcefully. Your conscious awareness of how these needs are being met is not a prerequisite to the meeting of the need itself. Your unconscious will find some way to fill your cup, or you will die.
2. Needs trump values. If you have not developed high quality, adult strategies to meet each need in line with your values, your needs will still be met irrespective of your values. (see principle 1) This is precisely why good people do bad things. Remember, behaviour is a strategy to meet needs.
3. Every behaviour has a positive intent. We are intrinsically motivated to do good to, and for, ourselves. We are always trying to bring peace and comfort. No one is trying to ruin their own life. Behaving in ways that hurt ourselves and others is NOT evidence of inherent evil. We do bad things not because we are bad, but because we are needy and haven’t found a better way to meet the need (see principle 1 and 2)
4. Change always comes through displacing poor ‘need meeting’ strategies with better ones. You can’t just stop a behaviour if it is meeting a need. You’ll simply open the vacuum again. (See principle 1)
Six Core Needs
The first time I heard of the six core needs it radically changed my life. I hit the jackpot at a garage sale one frosty Saturday morning when I found an unopened box set of Tony Robbins CD’s for only $10. A few weeks later in my car, I heard him describe the power of his model in a way that revolutionised my thinking about my own nature and the reasons I behave in certain ways.
Listening to Tony explain this model on his original CD’s, he taught that all needs must be met, at all times. And that we all need just as much certainty, variety, significance, love, contribution, and growth as everyone else.
Since then, however, every half-arsed, shiny life coach has butchered and diluted this model in such a way that it has made it all the way back to Robbins himself and caused him to change the way he speaks about how these needs work. Now you can take a test on Tony’s website that identifies your most important need as a function of your personality type.
This deviation from the original model now suggests that these needs exist in a hierarchy.
There is no hierarchy
Although, the clear advantage of this heresy is how well it works as a marketing funnel, the problem is that it protects, excuses, and even empowers dysfunction as just a result of having a greater need for one or more of the core needs.
For example:
If the test reveals your primary core need is certainty, you can be excused for being a control freak, risk averse, fearful, anxious, and therefore remain in your comfort zone.
If your primary need is variety, you can get away with being scattered, unplanned, late, disorganised, transient, uncommitted, and rebellious. It is not your fault!
If your primary need is significance, that explains why you are needy, selfish, narcissistic, a people pleaser, externally motivated, arrogant, egotistical, and overly driven.
If your primary need is love, that explains why you are needy, dependant, clingy and compliant.
If your primary need is contribution, then of course you will always need to be seen doing things for others and giving of your time, energy, and money sacrificially.
And if growth ranks highest, that can excuse your driven-ness, restlessness, overachieving, and dissatisfaction with your current results.
While this may appear to explain why you behave in certain ways, again it does not hold up under scrutiny.
A friend of mine tried to use this logic to explain why he was risk averse, anxious, overly cautious, and analytical, and I appeared adventurous, confident, carefree, with a large appetite for risk. It made sense to him that we simply had different primary needs. He clearly needed more certainty, and I required far more variety.
The truth is, that we both need exactly the same amounts of both certainty and variety. I can’t survive in the world with any less certainty than he can, it’s just that I have developed a high quality, internal way of being my own certainty and so my cup is always full, whereas his strategy is all external and unresourceful and so his cup leaks. Sure, he definitely has a higher felt need for certainty, but that just betrays his low-quality source and how little certainty he receives from the world.
To come back to the foundational idea that there is no hierarchy, means that each of us need all the core needs to be met at all times. And every behaviour is simply an attempt to meet these needs in the best way we have available to us at the time.
Without this understanding, it inevitably causes people to be highly confused about their nature, identity, and personality. (Which then undermines their willingness to trust themselves completely).
These are the most common misunderstandings that underpin the faulty assumptions about yourself:
Your character is most accurately demonstrated by your behaviour.
Bad behaviour proves there is a problem with your nature.
You are what you do and so your identity is entirely connected with your performance.
Your personality is the culmination of your patterns of behaviour.
When you take a clean look at yourself through the lens of the six core needs model, an entirely different truth emerges:
You always do the best you know how with the resources available to you at the time.
Your behaviour is simply a strategy for meeting your needs, not a reflection of your true nature.
You are not what you do. Your identity has nothing to do with your strategy for meeting your needs and protecting your fears.
Your personality is not the persona you’ve developed in a certain season to meet your needs and protect your fear. You are not your personas.
Behaviour is at the end of the assembly line in the factory of our lives and as such, every behaviour is clear evidence of the cleverly designed strategy to meet your needs externally.
The aim of the game is not to stop needing, but to meet your own needs internally. This means becoming your own source and supply.
Two rings
When I came to terms with the implications of Robbins’ core needs model, it completely changed my life.
No wonder I was so anxious and insecure, I had been looking for my needs to be filled in all the wrong places. The people I was relying on for my sense of certainty, significance and love were terrible at satisfying my thirst. To no fault of their own, they were too busy trying to meet their own needs to have any extra capacity to meet mine as well.
To continue outsourcing responsibility for what I needed, could only leave me feeling increasingly empty, alone, and unloved, and confusing me about my true value and worth.
I accepted that filling my cup was actually my job. I had worked out how to become self-sufficient physically and financially, so clearly, I had what it took to become self-sufficient emotionally, relationally, and psychologically as well.
Although I had no clear plan about how to do this for myself, the closest reference point for what it would be like to take on this role was the wedding ring on my left hand.
I can vividly remember standing at the alter as a 19 year old boy holding Katherine’s hand, about to pledge my life to her. I remember thinking that these words I was saying to her were some lofty and grandiose promises, especially at my age. I had gone against the pleas of my father-in-law to wait until I was much more financially stable before taking his daughter from him. However, I also realised that what qualified me to be speaking these words was not my track record of successful past marriages but my wholehearted commitment to be Katherine’s man.
I looked into her eyes and spoke from my heart. From this moment, I’ve got you, I’ve got this, I’ve got us. You can rest in my love for you. You won’t need to look for anyone else to be by your side in this way for the rest of your life.
In one moment, everything had changed. I’m not trialling for the role of husband or on probation to see if I’m up for the job, I’m in. With this ring, I am now her husband, and she is my wife.
This ring is still a powerful anchor to this wholehearted love I have for Katherine 25 years later.
In the same way, I decided that I wanted to wholeheartedly commit to the role of being there for myself.
The very same day I had the revelation about meeting my own core needs, I bought a ring and put it on my right hand and spoke from my heart to myself. From this moment, Jaemin I’ve got you, I’ve got this, I’ve got us. I knew that I couldn’t point to my past track record of knowing how to meet my own needs, but that this was not required. Again, it was my wholeheartedness that qualified me.
All these years later, that ring too is still a powerful anchor of my wholehearted commitment to be there for myself.
This threshold moment, line in the sand, all-in thinking, is a central part of ending your neediness and making the adult upgrade to meet all 6 core needs yourself. Any half-heartedness, or indecisiveness will get you into strife with the safety officer. For your operating system to be deemed safe enough to handle more speed, pressure, and growth you must be sure that you are completely committed to being the adult in your own life.
Here is a comprehensive description of the typical ways adults meet their need unresourcefully, and what the adult upgrade looks like for each of the 6 core needs.
