Ready, Set, Go!: 17 Primary Needs to Create a New Life

By Pamela Greenbaum and Dr. Robert Wolf

Ready, Set, Go! is the first book to expand on Abraham Maslow’s Primary Needs. This book presents the seventeen Primary Needs—each person has six to nine of them from the earliest stages of life—and tackles how to get them filled. These needs include being valued, being visible, being secure, being independent, plus thirteen more. This book also describes how most people spend their lives being filled with Pseudo-Fillers such as vacations, dining, social media, shopping, and so on. Only by discovering our Primary Needs can we live peaceful, rewarding, and satisfying lives and create New Beginnings resulting in a happy, healthy, and fulfilled life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662441929

Book preview

Chapter 1

Primary Needs

Each person holds so much power within themselves that needs to be let out. Sometimes they just need a little nudge, a little direction, a little support, a little coaching, and the greatest things can happen.

—Pete Carroll

One of life’s biggest mysteries and challenges is to figure out the key to happiness. There are many different theories and whole sections of bookstores dedicated to cracking the code. We have all heard the terms self-improvement, self-actualization, inner peace, personal fulfillment, following your bliss, personal growth—the list goes on and on. We spend so much of our time reading these books and practicing the theories that promise to deliver inner peace and happiness that we overlook the real keys to happiness: our Primary Needs.

Well, that is what this book is about!

This book is a guide toward achieving a sustained feeling of happiness and fulfillment. To achieve this sustained (the word sustained is key here) level of happiness and fulfillment, one first needs to understand the concept of Primary Needs. Let’s begin by listing the seventeen Primary Needs, and then understanding the concept of Primary Needs.

There are seventeen Primary Needs, and they are listed in no particular order, though there are some that are more common or more popular than others:

To feel safe

To feel secure

To feel important

To feel valued and valuable

To feel visible

To feel cared for

To feel our physicality

To feel understood

To feel powerful

To explore

To feel desirable

To feel independent

To feel sexual

To challenge and be challenged

To be appreciated

To experience mastery

To feel spiritual

As a human being, we come into the world with an inherent sense of self. This self is a unique repository, or mixture, of our Primary Needs, which are our most important and essential nutrients with regard to our psyche or emotional state. We are not talking about vitamins or minerals, nor are we talking about material needs. We are talking about our emotional and psychological building blocks—our beliefs and our desires that make us who we are.

Primary Needs are innate. We do not go through a conscious process of selecting them for ourselves, and others do not choose them for us. From the full deck of seventeen, we are dealt with our individual hand of six to nine Primary Needs. And it is with those cards in hand, so to speak, that we go through life seeking to both express and satiate them so that we may feel whole and filled.

Imagine one of those bath toys that resembles a Ferris wheel with little cups. In order to get the Ferris wheel to spin, you must fill the cups. The more the cups are filled, the better the toy works. None of the cups is ever filled to the exact same level, and the wheel goes faster and slower depending on how well and how evenly those cups are filled. This is how Primary Needs work. Our personal Ferris wheel is made up of our Primary Needs, or PIN code. Essentially, each cup represents one of our Primary Needs, and as we go through life, our happiness and fulfillment is determined by whether or not those cups are being filled in a consistent and meaningful way.

Each person has his or her own unique PIN code, which is made up of six to nine Primary Needs from that universal list. We do not consciously choose our PIN code like, say, one would choose from a Chinese restaurant menu (one from column A, one from column B, etc.). We are born with this PIN code built within us.

And because as infants we have no way of telling our parents or other important people in our world what our Primary Needs are, they often go unmet or get distorted, causing a lifetime of searching and confusion.

The good news, though, is that our Primary Needs cannot be taken away. They may go unacknowledged and unnurtured by us and by others, whether intentionally or unintentionally, or lie dormant and unexpressed to the world, but make no mistake. They are always with us, like buried seeds that hold the potential to sprout and emerge from the earth. What’s more, the degree to which we seek to know and fill these Primary Needs will determine whether what emerges from the ground will be beautiful flourishing flowers or poisonous depleting weeds. The power is within us.

Although our Primary Needs coexist in synergy with one another, the needs that are the most unfulfilled at any given moment tend to draw the most attention. The challenge we face is becoming our own personal detectives because, unfortunately, our unfulfilled Primary Needs don’t simply tap us on the shoulder and shout, Hello… I am a need, and I am not getting met! Instead, these unmet needs can reveal themselves in much more confusing and indirect ways:

Anger or aggression (the outward manifestation): You might find yourself sabotaging relationships, losing your temper, having little patience for others, getting into fights, or blaming others for your unhappiness.

Depression (the inward manifestation): You might become withdrawn, seek to isolate yourself, experience anxiety, or seek to numb yourself with food, drugs, or alcohol.

Keep in mind that these are all warning signs, not road maps. In other words, there is detective work involved in not only identifying your PIN code but also in detecting which of your needs is not getting met sufficiently.

Our Primary Needs represent the truth of who we are. Simply by living in alignment with them, we gain strength and freedom to fully and powerfully be ourselves, undeterred by the negative influences we encounter in our daily lives. Imagine the inner peace and tranquility that one could attain by being able to know with clarity just what makes them feel fulfilled and what they need to do to ensure that status. This is why we refer to this process as a straight line to happiness.

In the next few chapters, we will explain each Primary Need in greater detail. While reading about each Primary Need, pay close attention to your reactions and how well you relate to each one. This is one of several ways to be successful on your journey toward unearthing your personal PIN code, as well as the PIN codes of people near and dear to you.

Chapter 2

The Safety-Security Loop

The fact is that people are good; Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior."

—Abraham Maslow

We previously mentioned that some Primary Needs are more popular or common than others. The needs to feel safe and to feel secure, for example, are at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid for the hierarchy of needs. They are the largest section of the pyramid because he considered them to be the most basic, essential, and universal of needs. We agree with that theory, and that is why most of us have those two needs in our PIN code. Those two specific needs, safety and security, also present the only true hierarchy among our Primary Needs. Thus, if we have one or both of these Primary Needs—as most of us do—they must get filled before the rest. Most people, who do not feel safe and/or secure, will be so crippled with the residual fear, anxiety, and uncertainty that is a by-product of that deficiency that they will be unable to focus on or seek to fill their other Primary Needs.

To Feel Safe

To not feel physically or emotionally in danger, to be protected and unthreatened, to feel shielded and not vulnerable. The focus is on the danger at the moment and not at some future time.

What It Means

Knowing we, and those we care for, can live without fear of physical or emotional harm, feeling that we are not in imminent danger. This PIN is about the present—the here and now, how we feel at the present time as opposed to the future.

Mantra

Danger, look out!

Examples

To protect his home from intruders, Jack made his home into a virtual fortress. He installed heavy locks, a visible alarm system, and bars on all windows. For protection from fires, his home is equipped with fire alarms, a sprinkler system, and smoke detectors. When he is at home, Jack feels safe.

Alan and Susan were happily married until his drinking and erratic behavior became a regular occurrence. When he is drinking, Alan tends to belittle Susan and is prone to fits of anger and rage. If they are out, he will get flirtatious with other women and ignore Susan. Though she loves her husband very much, Susan divorces him because when he is drinking, she does not feel emotionally safe.

Alyssa grew up with two brothers and numerous male cousins. She was short and skinny as a child and did not fill out even in adolescence. Alyssa was picked on by her brothers and often did not feel safe in their presence. Her parents made fun of her and rarely supported her complaints. In school, she was frequently jostled and knocked around by peers, particularly in hallways, and teachers and administrators always seemed to look the other way. When Alyssa married Ted, she was grateful that Ted enjoyed working out in the gym and was a bodybuilder. No one seemed to scare Ted, and he backed down from no one. Alyssa felt safe in his presence and felt that this Primary Need was filled by Ted.

Jenn grew up in a dangerous neighborhood in Chicago. There were many shootings, stabbings, and attacks in her community, and two of her friends’ brothers were killed. Walking the streets was a scary adventure, and she rarely did it without a friend. After graduating from college, her family wanted her to return to their home neighborhood and work in the area. Jenn agonized over her decision but realized that it was essential for her emotional health to live in an area where she felt safe. Jenn acted on this realization, following her Primary Need for safety, despite repeated and persistent efforts by family members to change her mind. Jenn lives in an apartment in a safe neighborhood where she knows she can walk out at any time without being harassed or attacked. Although Jenn’s need to feel safe leads her to spend more on her living conditions, she is willing to bear the extra expense for the peace of mind.

Importance

Safety, along with security, which we will discuss soon, is the most primary human need because it affects our physical and/or emotional well-being. When we feel unsafe, we become afraid. It monopolizes our thoughts, and we can’t focus on anything else. Under threat, our first and most dominant impulse is simply to survive; all we want to do is regain our safety. Having lived on the South Shore of Long Island when Hurricane Sandy hit in the fall of 2012, it was amazing to see how people’s states of mind changed as the devastation and power outages stretched on from days to weeks. As time went on, gas became scarce. Looting was common, and tempers were short. People went from joining together to being at one another’s throats. And as they tried to survive,