In much of the communication literature they say that we communicate to meet our needs, and that effective communication is communication that successfully meets needs. What they tend to mean by needs are things we universally tend to value like comfort, love, autonomy, connection, stimulation, acknowledgement, independence, passion, and a sense of contribution. It’s confusing to some people thought because we don’t die without these things, so how are they needs?
We don’t really have a good word in the English language for something we value, I mean “preferences” doesn’t really cut it, so for now I’m sticking with needs.
The way I square this circle is by saying that while these are not necessarily things we die without having, we certainly do need them to thrive and be our best. And hey, if you have reached some Zen greatness by meditating in an Ashram somewhere in Tiber for 10 years and don’t need any of these things to thrive - more power to you! The rest of us will have to just keep plugging away, improving our communication skills to better meet our emotional, spiritual and psychological needs.
When we look at nature, we find that the success of an organism is predicated on how well its environment meets its needs.
If you want your little apple tree to grow, you plant it in the right place, then give it good soil, fertilizer, water, sunlight, and shelter it from the wind. You also limit its exposure to harmful toxins that may kill it or impair its ability to thrive. Sure, the tree might grow without good access to all of these things, but it will never reach the fullest expression of its possibility.
That’s how I see our emotional and psychological preferences, or “needs.” We can often get by without a great deal of them, but our life will be impoverished as a result. The great therapist Carl Rogers told a very meaningful story about a sack of potatoes that lay in the basement underneath his house when he was a child. The potatoes would send out thin, white sprouts towards a shaft of light that came in through the tiny little window several feet above them. Even though the shoots would never amount to anything, life would not give up, and would do the best job it would even under adverse circumstances. He came to see these as analogous to his clients who had been mistreated and had still done all they could to thrive under adverse and challenging conditions. Many of us have also not always lived under favorable or nurturing conditions, and yet we have strived, in the only ways we have known how, to grow and become better versions of ourselves. Fortunately for us, unlike the potatoes in the story, we have the ability to improve our environment or transport ourselves to a different one that better meet our needs.
“My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.”
– Henry Ford
As human beings, the largest environmental influence we have is other people! Many of our emotional and psychological needs are relational, by which I mean that they are best met in communion with others. Improving our communication skills offers us the tremendous opportunity to improve our environment, because our environment is largely made up of other people that we have to communicate with. By improving our communication skills, we improve our relationships with those people who make up our environment. By improving our relationships, we create an environment that is more supportive of our growth, and that of the people whom we spend time with. In other words, by improving our communication skills we craft our relationships (and by extension, our environment) to better meet our needs.
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