Quick and Dirty
You are made up of 3 parts: Mind, Body, and Soul.
These 3 parts all have their own sets of needs.
Unmet needs are disruptive and split your resources.
These needs can either be conscious or unconscious.
Understanding each component and becoming aware of their needs will help you learn the best ways to satisfy them.
The key to concentration, motivation, and achievement is making sure that you are meeting all of your other needs outside of the thing you wish to focus on.
You can reach your ultimate potential when you are in tune with yourself and intentional with your efforts.
Long Version
If you want to have a fulfilling life, you have to You can either be your greatest asset or your greatest enemy. It depends on how much you understand about yourself and how you try to satisfy your needs.
Most people have no idea why they do certain things and often find themselves struggling with focus, motivation, and compulsions. Many actions and decisions can result in guilt, regret, shame or a multitude of other emotions.
“You” are actually made up of 3 different parts: mind, body, and soul. What you may not realize is that each of these parts has its own needs. If the needs of different components are not in alignment, you get conflicting messages, which split your resources and can be very distracting.
Components of You
Body
Your body is the vessel in which your consciousness resides and uses to experience things in life. We sense things that happen to our bodies and things that happen within them. This includes lower level emotions. I like to think of our body as our connection to the physical realm.
Our bodies are a very complex system. Scientists have been able to quantify certain things, but they are constantly discovering new information – some of which overrides previous knowledge. Who knows if we will ever understand all functions and mechanisms of the human body.
Then we potentially have coded messages in our DNA that could also have an impact on our specific needs. Again, we only have a small understanding of what pieces and how our genome impacts us. Our ancestry and genetics can potentially explain why two different people have different nutritional needs as well as behaviors.
We’ve all heard of how we aren’t adapting to the world as fast as it’s changing. Part of me believes that there’s some logic in biological behaviors taking a long time to change, but the other part of me wonders if we “aren’t changing” for a reason. Nature always adapts or dies off, so maybe we are adapting in a way that doesn’t jive with what we think.
Regardless of all of the speculation, this does not mean that we can’t benefit from what we know right now. We can gain practical insight for ourselves if we learn to notice our own behaviors, triggers, and cues. These are things like when you crave food, when you feel tired, a headache, an emotional response, or an action.
Soul
The Soul and its understanding can be a controversial topic that varies based on one’s experiences, beliefs, spirituality, and religion. In a very simplistic manner, we can consider our soul to be our life force or our energy that resides and brings life to our physical body.
You may also consider it to be your consciousness, your unconscious, or possibly argue that that is your Mind. It doesn’t really matter what you believe as long as you can agree that whatever it is has higher based emotions, agendas, and/or needs.
I like to think of our soul as the connection to the metaphysical or ethereal realm. If you can accept that humans are all part of the same physical makeup, you can reasonably extend that concept to our souls all being made of the same energetic makeup. Both of these things connect us yet allow us to be unique.
It is pretty obvious that different people have different needs on a soul-deep level. Any parent can witness this in their children. You see it in the differences between you, your friends, and your spouse. I believe this to be the source of where our values, morals, and principles stem from.
Mind
For our purposes, we are going to consider the Mind as the bridge that connects the physical body and the spiritual soul.
The Mind is different from the brain. The brain is part of the physical body, but it is the location in which thinking of the Mind occurs. Our brains are more like hardware. They process information received from our bodies and then send messages back to the body via hormones, neurons, etc.
Our mind is more like a software or the way that we are programmed to utilize the hardware of the body. It is where we collect data, synthesize, analyze, and determine how to respond to the data. It seems reasonable to believe that Soul might be what determines how the Mind is programmed.
This preference is actually the premise of the MBTI personality typing system.
Since our mind is set up to take in data, or which types of data, and process it in a specific way, it’s easy to see how specific needs would arise and stress would occur if the Mind cannot operate as it was intended to.
Unconscious Effects
This is just a simplified understanding of these different parts of us, as I’m sure you are aware that each has subcomponents. We’ll be getting deeper into the relevant aspects of each component later when we’re setting up for practical action.
Because there is so much going on, it is no wonder that a lot of things go unnoticed by us. We are programmed to move repetitive and familiar things into our unconscious to free up the bandwidth of our conscious awareness for new and more challenging things.
This is how habits are formed and why we often fail to realize that old habits are no longer serving us. It is why we don’t notice that things we automatically do to try to fill a specific need aren’t working. This is also the reason that trying to form new habits can be so difficult.
With so many things happening in our unconscious awareness, it becomes easy to see how we have unmet needs disrupting our focus and splitting up our precious resources.
That is why it is essential to understand all of the aspects involved with human needs and the best ways to satisfy them. This is the real key to concentration, motivation, and achievement.
When you learn this system, it will help you have a much better and fulfilling life. If you wish to strive even further, you’ll be able to reach your ultimate potential by becoming in tune with yourself and getting intentional with your efforts.
Do You Have Competing Needs?
Let us know what needs feel like they are pulling you in different directions and sapping your resources.
