Empowerment and Inspiration by Jaz Rasool NEEDS AND WANTS
What we choose to let go of and what we choose to keep in our lives depends on two things, our needs and our wants. 1. Needs Stretch us and others.
Address growth challenges and pain. Encourages necessary growth. Go through and beyond comfort zones.
Attending to our needs involves focussing on our priorities and the things that are imperatives for us to manage in order that we become more empowered and facilitate others being empowered. Priorities keep us moving in life and often, as they stretch our capacity, take us out of our comfort zone. They can even take others out of their comfort zone as they are stretched by your growth. As such priorities address the pains that can come with growth challenges whether the challenges are our own or belong to others.
2. Wants Avoids stretching us and others.
Postpones/Removes growth challenges and pain. Encourages unnecessary rest. Keeps us and others in comfort zones.
Attending to our wants focuses us on our preferences and is a result of being attracted to following our impulses and desires. Preferences tend to keep us where we are, in our comfort zone and tend to lead to us to focus on pleasure, avoiding growing pains. They also make us avoid confronting others and tend to let others stay in their comfort zones and not face up to their growth challenges.
ADDICTION
It is possible for us to want something that we need and it is also possible for us to need something that we want. Wanting something we genuinely need is healthy. However if you arrived at a point where you feel you need something that is simply a desire, an impulse or a hypnotic want, then you are at the first stage of becoming addicted to what you want.
A third possibility includes needing something that is a genuine need. This is where we have made it a priority, an imperative, to address a need that empowers us. This of course is healthy.
A final possibility is us wanting something we want – a vicious circle of unmet desire followed by satisfaction of that desire followed by an even greater, ever more addictive desire.
People fall into addictive patterns most often when they lack the ability to distinguish what they really need over something that they impulsively want. In contrast, people flow into empowering patterns of growth when they actively and clearly distinguish between their preferences and priorities and they focus all their energy into desires that attend to their priorities.
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FLOW, NEEDS AND WANTS
Harmony between wants and needs is what flow is about. The more unconscious you are, the more your preferences will take over your priorities. The more you act through conscious, priority based intentions rather than unconscious want-driven impulses the more empowering flow you will generate for your life to take you to fulfilling its purpose.
Whenever preferences and priorities are aligned, it indicates you’re in a state of flow.
Flow doesn’t necessarily mean you are flowing towards your purpose. You could be in a river swimming against the current. You’re moving but going against your natural flow. This happens when you make your preferences, desires and impulsive wants into your priorities and start mistaking them as genuine needs that serve your empowerment.
Which of the following questions do you answer yes to the most often?
Do you want what you need? Driven mostly by wanting to address Priorities
Do you need what you want? Driven mostly by needing to address Preferences
Your answer indicates what you are predominantly driven by.
It is possible to fuel both Preferences and Priorities. What we fuel determines whether we end up in a state of addiction or empowerment.
Using wants to fuel wants = addiction Using needs to fuel needs = empowered life
www.choicepointmagazine.com
CHOICE POINT MAGAZINE 39
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