How to Identify and Honor your Needs
A needs assessment. Are you familiar with the concept? It’s quite simple really. A needs assessment involves checking in with yourself and assessing what your needs are. You can conduct a needs assessment by asking yourself 4 needs based questions.
1) What is my current need?
2) Is my need getting met or is it unmet?
3) Can I meet this need myself, or do I need support from someone else to meet this need?
4) What are some immediate action steps I can take to meet this need?
Once you have taken the time to thoughtfully navigate through each question you should have a more clear sense of direction of what your current need is. You should be able to identify whether or not this current need is being met or unmet. And also determining whether or not you can meet this need independently for yourself or if it requires the attention of others.
Now the first and fourth step can be tricky and we can sometimes become overwhelmed by the thought of understanding what exactly our needs are for starts, and then organizing in our mind immediate action steps to take.
No worries! This is where the engagement of mindfulness can be very helpful. Mindfulness allows you to re-center yourself and just be. It is intentionally connecting to where you are experiencing things in your body physically. It takes into consideration your current environment and how it is interacting with your cognitive processing aka your thoughts. We focus in on the present moment and we let any anticipatory worry fall to the waste side.
Anticipatory worry is when you experience heightened levels of anxiety (which is worry) for things that are out of your control and have not happened yet, or may never happen. It’s really wasted mental energy and can be very emotionally taxing. Mindfulness is a grounding technique that will help you to weed out all the noise in your head and better organize your thoughts.
If you still feel yourself distracted, you can then center your focus on your senses; touch, sight, hear, smell and taste. To do this, you can pay attention to the smells in the room, the surface your body is currently planted on, or how your clothes feel on your skin. You may consider the temperature in the space you occupy, what things are in your line of sight and any taste you might be experiencing in your mouth. These are all thought distractions that redirect your attention from all the other thoughts swirling around in your brain.
After re-centering yourself, try to go back to the needs assessment questions again. If you still feel challenged, no worries! Perhaps this is an indication that one of your current needs might involve an internal retreat. Well what does an internal retreat look like exactly? It actually looks very practical. You might need to engage in a physical activity such as a walk or simply stepping outdoors for fresh air. It might signal that you need rest and should consider a nap or taking both a mental and physical time out.
By honoring yourself, you are addressing your needs and you can then circle back around to the needs assessment when you are ready. Remember needs assessments are personal check-ins on determining whether or not our current needs are being met in regards to a specific situation. So this could include, personal, mental, professional, spiritual, interpersonal, and financial and so on and so forth.
Now, together, lets actively work to re-center ourselves to gain a sense is internal peace and clarity by checking in with ourselves through a needs assessment to identify our needs.
With Love & Light, JP
