At any given point in our lives we can find ourselves asking the question – What Do I Need Right Now? The answer to that question changes over time. What we really needed in our childhood and adolescence can be vastly different to our needs as adults, parents and then as we age. Even from day to day, what we need in any given moment can change depending on our energy level, mood and surroundings.

When we are aware of and acknowledge our own needs we come closer to activating the motivation to address them. This is not always easy in our busy and challenging lives. Often women put the needs of others before their own and attach their life purpose, self -worth and value to helping others. Whether its their children, partners, friends, family or co-workers.

Yes, it’s good to be kind and loving to others, but that kindness also needs to be turned inward toward ourselves in a balanced way. Otherwise, we end up feeling burnout and resentful. It’s important that we include ourselves in our circle of compassion and need provision.

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

Recognising our Needs

So what are some of your current needs? Is it having time to yourself (even if it’s 30 minutes to have a shower or eat a leisurely meal), appreciation from others, feeling loved and accepted for who you are, receiving support and encouragement, fresh air and time in nature or having a listening ear to share life’s challenges. You might be craving interesting work or hobbies that make your life enjoyable and fun.

Our major psychological needs fall into three categories – autonomy, competence and relatedness. With autonomy we want to make decisions in our lives that affect us. Those might be related to our interests, preferences, wants and desires. We need to be able to make those decisions at our own pace and feel supported by others and respected for the particular choices we make.

Competence needs revolve around developing our skills and abilities. Having that feeling we can rise to a challenge successfully and feel satisfaction around completion of a task. Anyone who has found themselves immersed in something they enjoy and achieved a state of ‘flow’ (where time seems to stand still) knows the joy of competence. Attempting tasks that are neither too hard or too easy for us and receiving positive feedback about how we are doing help build our competence. We also need to learn to accept failure and then be willing to try again.

The other important need is around our sense of belonging and relatedness to others. We want to have warm, close, affectionate relationships with others. Connections with people who understand, accept and value us for who we are. We want relationships with others who really care for our well-being.

If we were to conjure up what makes a good day for us it would incorporate each of these psychological needs.

Competing Needs with those of Others

There are times in our lives when the needs of others take priority over our own. This is obvious when we bring a newborn into our family or a loved one is struggling with illness. In parenting we can get lost in the endless tasks of maintaining a home and family while often also having ongoing work commitments. In later years it can be the competing interests and desires of couples who want to make the most of the precious years they have left to live.

When our own needs go unmet or have a lower priority than others it impacts our wellbeing. One of the first principles of self-compassion is to acknowledge that our own needs matter, that we need to take them seriously and value ourselves enough to ensure we meet them.

It may require some soul searching and really asking ourselves the question – What do I need?  This can be done on a regular basis to ensure we are caring for ourselves, particularly at times of change and challenge in our lives.

‘If we’re kind to ourselves, we’ll do what it takes to be happy. We’ll ask what meaningfully contributes to our well-being and then take proactive steps to make it happen.’

Kristen Neff. PhD
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Advocating for our own Needs

Being a woman in the 21^st century has numerous challenges. It seems almost impossible to combine the multiple roles we take on. The self-imposed aim for perfectionism in everything we do has to instead give way to allowing ourselves to feel ‘good enough’ in what we achieve. We also need to create healthy boundaries around what we do and don’t do in our daily lives. Asking what truly matters to us and prioritizing that. Feeling comfortable enough to disappoint those around us when we decline invitations or requests from others that require us to take on more than we can handle at the time.

It’s also important to enlist others to support us more. We can have deeper conversations with our partners around traditional gender and cultural stereotyping of roles and responsibilities.  Our children will also rise to the occasion if our expectations of them are higher.

Nate and Kaley Klemp in their book ‘The 80/80 Marriage’ examine a new model for happier and stronger relationships. Beyond both the traditional gender roles in partnerships and the more recent aim for 50/50 shared responsibility they look to a more equitable and sustaining model.

Their five essential habits of an 80/80 partnership

• Creating space for connection
• Doing a radically generous act for your partner each day and paying close attention to your partner’s acts of contribution and appreciating them for their work.
• Revealing issues, misunderstandings and resentments as they arise.
• Building structures together to handle the logistics of life more skilfully. Sharing the load of household and family responsibilities.
• Creating space away from digital distractions. Discussing expectations around device use.

‘Before looking something up or checking your phone, ask yourself, ‘Do I really need to know this, right now? You may be surprised to find the answer is generally no.’

Nate and Kaley Klemp

Identifying and advocating for what we need is an act of self-compassion and crucial for our well being. When life overwhelms us it can be an opportunity to pause from what we are doing and ask the simple question – What do I need right now?

Listen intuitively for the answer as it may take a while to surface. Then take the time to honour your needs in that moment. It may require a small tweak in your routine or reflection on more significant changes to your habits, boundaries or priorities.

Do you catch yourself nostalgically looking back over your past decisions? Wishing life was different. Thinking that among the alternate pathways you could have chosen, you made the ‘wrong’ one. I am sure you are not alone. As humans our ability to make good choices is impacted by biases in our thinking, and the previous life experience we can draw from. We can only make decisions based on what we know.

One of my readers made a profound statement that has resonated with me about this phenomenon. It’s that we need to reframe our nostalgic thinking to take in the reasons we made that particular decision at the time.

Unfortunately, early adulthood is a time when many of those important decisions are made. Where to live, the career or study path we take, whether or not to marry, if and when we have children …. The list goes on. It’s also a time when our brain is not fully matured for decision making and our life experience is lean and seems to be learnt ‘on the go’. Decisions can be made on impulse that have long term repercussions. Not only for ourselves but also for those around us such as family and friends.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Personally, I was faced with a myriad of life decisions in my early twenties. My mother had cancer and consequently died of the disease when I was twenty two. I was in my final year of university two hours away from my family. I had also met my future husband. At the time many of my friends didn’t know how to deal with having a motherless friend among them. Thankfully I was surrounded by a beautiful group of matriarchs, my university lecturers, who supported me as I completed my degree.

At the end of the year I made the difficult choice of following my fiancé to a new location away from my father and then seventeen year old sister. Each of us freshly grieving the loss. This decision has continually produced nostalgic reflection throughout my life. Causing me to make decisions to support family over my marriage at different times. It is also poignant again as our eldest granddaughter turns seventeen this year. I see in a very real, physical sense just how young my sister was at the time this life changing event occurred.

How can we frame these early decisions? To see that we gave ourselves valid reasons to make them at the time.

• To understand how important it is to take the opportunities life provides for us. The alternative is to be frozen in a state of inaction and safety afraid we might get it wrong.
• To accept the consequences. Once we choose a particular pathway in life, other doors will close. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and by looking back we may find we chose a particular path that has had repercussions throughout our life. See the consequences as life lessons that help us mature and grow wisdom. Interestingly enough, the longer we live the more likely a similar situation will arise that requires us to put into practice the life lesson we’ve learnt in a tangible way using our additional maturity and reflection.
• Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. When you identify that you’ve taken a life path that has unintended consequences, give yourself forgiveness and compassion for being human.
• Count your blessings. Okay, things didn’t turn out as you’ve expected, yet there are blessings in the pathway you have taken. Make a list of those good things that you have accumulated in life.
• Find peace, ease and acceptance. Life throws so many choices at us. Some good and some not so good for us. You can only make your decisions on the circumstances and awareness you have at the time. Continue to see where your life leads from the decisions you actually make. There are often opportunities to redirect your life course or experience a missed opportunity you now crave in a different way.
• Some choices are made for us. A health diagnosis, natural disaster or accident that brings with it an abrupt change of life direction. Even in these circumstances we can look at choices we can make moving forward.

As long as we live, we will be faced with making decisions among potential possibilities. You can only make those decisions on the limitations of the knowledge and experience you have at the time. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Life will continue to present both lessons and blessings for you along the way.

More reading on decision making: –

Making Authentic Decisions

Courage to Step Through the Opening Door

Often in life we prefer to focus on the highlights – when we land an amazing job, fall in love, give birth to our precious children, travel to far off places. When we meet people these highlights are the things we are eager to share with them. Our accomplishments and ‘Instagram’ worthy experiences feed our ego and give us a sense that we are truly living our lives.

Alongside these highlights sit our stories of loss and separation, sadness and pain. They too are the baseline experiences of life. We may see these times as deviations from what ‘should’ be happening. Hiding from expressing them with each other, feeling shame and confusion within. At times believing we are alone in our personal suffering.

‘We are all flying high in some ways and falling flat on our faces in others. Nobody has it all figured out’

Amy Weatherly

Yet the bitter and the sweet sit alongside each other. Both types of experiences and the meshing of them together allow us to reach some of the very highest states of our human existence – awe, joy, wonder, love, meaning and creativity. Our life is rich and far from dull and pleasantly vanilla.

A bittersweet realization

My husband has reached the age his father passed away. Several days ago was the exact amount of time his dad had lived his earthly life. As my husband shared this milestone with me we realized the bittersweet nature of this awareness. My husband is fit and healthy for his age and really stepping into some of the life experiences he is passionate about. For his father some of the experiences we now look forward to were not to be part of his life. We realized he had not met any of his great grandchildren (our grandchildren), spent more years with his life partner or attained any more of his lifetime dreams.

If you have lost a parent, particularly of the same gender, you can probably relate. It’s the weird sense of inhabiting a body that corresponds with the final year and months of life of someone you were deeply connected to. Finding it unimaginable that the vibrancy you feel in your own body held decline within theirs. For me that experience was more than a decade ago as I lost my mother when she was in her early fifties. That year in my life became a real turning point in prompting my own reflection.

Awareness of life’s impermanence also has a bittersweet aspect to it. There is a sense of deep gratitude that we are living beyond the death age of our same gender parents. Having the ability to experience more of life into the future. No longer taking for granted the additional birthdays we can celebrate.

It was interesting for us to compare the possibilities for living to midlife compared to the experience of adding several more decades and living into our eighties or beyond. Particularly the potential of seeing more life change and welcoming new generations into our family. We realized we had been gifted with the ability to write a longer life story than our parents.

‘The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had: That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape, but it’s always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.’

Susan Cain

Our lives have a truly unexpected quality. Some of our deepest and most painful moments can also be some of our most meaningful. They can help us appreciate life, support each other more and motivate us to prioritize those things we most cherish. Having a sense of the bittersweet nature of life also provides us with pathways to heal from our own traumatic past experiences.