10 Ways to Learn to Identify Your Needs

As you begin to integrate the consciousness and skills of Mindful Compassionate Dialogue (MCD), you will realize how important it is to identify your needs in a given moment and how difficult that can be. Whether you are setting a life-serving boundary, making a big decision, or maintaining balance in everyday life, being able to identify your needs and speak from what’s most important to you gives you a sense of empowerment and helps you collaborate with others.

Learning to identify and speak from your needs requires concrete and specific tasks and practices. Read through the list of learning tasks and practices below and choose one or two you would like to engage.

1. Buy or make a deck of needs cards. Shuffle through these cards each time you are making a difficult decision, feeling gratitude, reflecting on a difficult interaction, celebrating something, or engaging in a focused dialogue. Notice which needs resonate.

2. Memorize the list of universal needs. Without a clear vocabulary of needs, you will likely mix up needs with the strategies to meet them at the very times when it would be most useful to recognize them as separate. 

3. Work backward from your strategy. That is, identify your request or the way you want something to go and ask yourself the question, "What needs will be met for me and the other person if it happens that way?"

4. Imagine the ideal scenario. See yourself in the ideal scenario or outcome of your current difficulty, and then ask what makes it ideal. What are the qualities, attitudes, and feelings present? What needs are being met?

5. Reflect on your experiences. Commit to a month of daily reflection practice. Each day review one positive experience and one challenging experience. Use the needs list to identify what needs were up for you in each experience. If you like to write, keep a journal of your practice. Begin each daily reflection with a period of mindfulness meditation.

6. Ask for empathy. Ask someone close to you to listen to you talk about something you are struggling with for two minutes (and use a timer to stick to this limit). Then, hand them the universal needs list and ask if they would be willing to guess what feelings and needs might be present for you regarding the situation you talked about.

7. Offer empathy. Choose a particular relationship in which you would like to practice consistently offering empathy as your first response to the other person whenever you are together.

8. Get an empathy buddy: Find someone who would like to practice offering and receiving empathy. Set up a regular empathy date. Use a timer for sharing and empathy guesses. Stick to the traditional empathy guessing phrase: “Do you feel _____ because you need _____?” Use the feelings and needs list for all of your guesses.

9. Review past relationships. Choose a significant relationship from your past. Using the list of universal needs, make guesses about the needs you think were alive for the other person relative to the events or interactions you remember most clearly. Identify the needs that were alive for you in those moments.

10. Use synonyms for the word “need.” Sometimes, more familiar language will give more access to identifying needs. Instead of asking "what do I need?" try asking yourself:   

    "What's most important to me about this?"

    "What do I really care about here?"

    "What matters most to me about this?"

    "What do I value most?"

    "What am I committed to right now?"

Practice

Choose one or two learning practices from the above list and decide for how long you would like to commit to them.