The six needs

Why do you keep doing the thing you can't explain?

Tony Robbins has a tool for that, and it's the last self-help key before the mirrors begin. Robbins was a janitor's son who left home at seventeen, worked for Jim Rohn, and by his mid-twenties was running seminars where people walked across hot coals. He wrote Unlimited Power in 1986 and Awaken the Giant Within in 1991 and went on to build the biggest live-event business in the field. We point to his events; we don't run them. What I want from him is the kitchen-table version.

His first teaching is state. Change your body, your breath and your focus, and your feeling changes before your thinking catches up. It is the oldest trick in the room, and you've been using it for twenty days every time you walked out the door instead of thinking about walking out the door.

His second teaching is the one that belongs to this month: the six human needs. Certainty, the need to know it will be okay. Variety, the need for it not to be the same. Significance, the need to matter. Connection, the need to belong. Growth. Contribution.

Here's the insight. Any behavior that meets three or more of those needs becomes a habit, whether or not it's good for you. That is why people stay in jobs, relationships and routines that are visibly costing them. The thing is meeting certainty and significance and connection, and the body doesn't care that it's starving growth and contribution to do it.

Once you see that, the habit stops being a mystery and a shame. It's a need being met badly. And a need being met badly can be met well.