by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Learn To Meet Your Own Needs First Instead of Trying To Get Others to Meet Them in an Unreal Way
One thing I’ve seen time and time again in my coaching practice is that many people arrive feeling deeply frustrated because their needs aren’t being met in some of the most important relationships in their lives.
Sometimes it’s a romantic relationship, sometimes it’s a friendship, sometimes it’s a relationship with a parent – the details are always different from case-to-case but the structure of the problem is almost identical.
How it normally shows up is that the person who’s struggling has become convinced – usually without even realising it – that they can only feel ‘happy’, complete, respected, loved, safe, or whole once another person finally gives them something they’ve been waiting for.
It usually looks something like this:
- “If only my partner would open up emotionally“.
- “If only my father respected me“.
- “If only my friend was more dependable“.
The end result of holding onto beliefs like this is that life becomes an endless waiting game because what they’ve inadvertently done is place their happiness in somebody else’s hands:
They start living as though somebody else has the keys to their emotional freedom whilst they stand forlornly outside the door, hoping they’ll eventually be let in.
Unfortunately, there’s one enormous flaw with this strategy which is that you can’t control other people:
All you can really do is attempt to communicate with them and invite them to grow real with you but you can’t make another human being become somebody they’re currently incapable of being.
At the end of the day, if you base your wellbeing on waiting for them to change then you could quite literally spend the rest of your life waiting.
Fortunately, there’s another way which we’re going to talk about it in this article.
It’s called growing into Realness.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Meet Your Own Needs First: What We Cover in This Article
- Learn To Meet Your Own Needs First Instead of Trying To Get Others to Meet Them in an Unreal Way
- The Trap of Trying to Control the Uncontrollable
- Three Common Examples
- If You Chase It, It Runs Away
- Meet Your Own Needs First: A REAL Approach
- Realness Is Internal Power
- Ironically, Meeting Your Own Needs First Improves Relationships
- Practical Ways to Meet Your Own Needs
- The Real Goal: Meeting Your Own Needs for Realness
The Trap of Trying to Control the Uncontrollable
When we require a specific person to meet a specific need before we allow ourselves to feel ‘okay’ about ourselves and life then we’re attempting to control something that ultimately lies outside our control.
That doesn’t mean other people never meet our needs – it goes without saying that they can and do and human relationships exist largely because they involve the mutual meeting of needs (we comfort one another, encourage one another, challenge one another, laugh together, build families together, and support one another through difficult times, etc. etc. etc.).
Healthy relationships are beautiful precisely because needs are naturally exchanged between two people who are willing and capable of giving – the problems arise when somebody is either unwilling or incapable of doing so.
This is where many people become trapped because rather than accepting reality and taking the medicine it always has to offer, they end up spending years – or even decades of their lives – trying to negotiate with it:
- “If I explain it one more time…”
- “If I can just find the right words…”
- “If I love them enough…”
- “If I sacrifice enough…”
- “If I become enough…”
- Etc. etc. etc.
These kind of negotiations are all based on the assumption that eventually – if they beg, plead, and adapt enough – then, eventually, the other person will change:
Sometimes they do but more often they don’t because the painful truth is that some people simply aren’t capable of meeting certain needs…at least not right now.
Accepting this isn’t pessimistic – it’s realistic which is ‘good’ news because reality is always the starting point for genuine and lasting change (which is why “Real always works”).
Three Common Examples
Recently I’ve worked with several people whose situations looked very different on the surface but were driven by exactly the same underlying pattern which is that they were looking for others to meet needs that they currently couldn’t meet for them.
One woman desperately needed her partner to take responsibility for his emotions – whenever conflict appeared, he withdrew, blamed other people, or pretended nothing had happened and so she just ended up carrying the emotional weight of the entire relationship.
Another client, a young man, felt he couldn’t truly become an independent adult until his father finally respected him and so every criticism from his father brought him back to feeling like a little boy again (even though he was a successful business person and living an independent life in another country).
A third client had a close friend who simply wasn’t reliable and so, whenever life became difficult, the friend disappeared – promises were broken, plans changed, and support never arrived when it mattered the most.
All of these examples show understandable frustrations and, in fact, many of the needs that aren’t being met are incredibly basic: being emotionally responsible, showing respect, being reliable – none of these could really be classified as “unreasonable expectations” and so – at some point – the question of whether these relationships are healthy enough to continue may need to be asked.
Saying that, that’s not what this article is about because what we’re dealing with is about something even more fundamental:
Learning to recognise where another person’s limitations are pointing towards an opportunity for your own REAL growth.
If You Chase It, It Runs Away
Most people respond to unmet needs in fairly predictable ways:
- They beg.
- They plead.
- They explain.
- They argue.
- They criticise.
- They become resentful.
- Etc. etc. etc.
Sometimes, when they get desperate, they may even subtly try to manipulate the other person into becoming who they wish they were…
Ironically, though, all these kind of strategies end up doing is making the situation worse because when people feel pressured, they become defensive and when people become defensive, they become more rigid and get even more deeply entrenched in their patterns and ways of doing things.
The end result of all this begging and pleading and [whatever else] is that – instead of moving closer together – both people retreat further into themselves and the relationship slowly becomes a tug-of-war where each person is trying to make their frame of reality the dominant one.
In other words, nobody wins.
The alternative isn’t giving up but learning to start letting go of the illusion that your power is held in the behaviour of other people.
Meet Your Own Needs First: A REAL Approach
One of the central ideas behind the practical Realness philosophy is that we always have a relationship with ourselves before we have a relationship with anybody else and that the quality of this relationship affects the quality of our relationship with others.
If our relationship with ourselves becomes fragmented, then every other relationship becomes distorted.
We can start to shift into getting our needs met in a real way by keeping this in mind and changing the way we approach things – for example, instead of asking “How do I make them change?“, we can ask, “How can I become more real?“.
This changes everything because it helps us to start living from the inside-out instead of the outside-in (which means we have a more solid and real inner foundation).
To bring it back to some of the examples used above:
Needing Our Partner to Own Their Emotions More
Instead of asking our partner to own their emotions, we can start to ask ourselves how can we own our own emotions more completely? How can we stop avoiding what we feel?
How can we process our sadness instead of projecting it?
How can we take responsibility for our anger instead of expecting somebody else to remove it?
When we flip the script like this, then their lack of emotional ownership becomes an invitation to deepen our own and become even more REAL.
Needing the Respect of Our Father
Instead of needing our father to respect us before we can feel like a worthy adult we can start to ask how can we begin respecting ourselves first and foremost instead:
Can we honour our own values?
Can we make decisions we genuinely believe in?
Can we stop seeking permission to become the person we’re already capable of being when we get out of the way and start being real?
The more deeply we respect ourselves, the less dependent we become on external approval, and – paradoxically – the more likely people are to respect us anyway (without us having to chase it).
Needing a Friend to be More Dependable
Instead of waiting for an unreliable friend to become dependable we can start to think about how we can become somebody who can rely on themselves:
Can we keep promises to ourselves?
Can we develop the skills and qualities to meet the challenges in our lives?
Can we trust ourselves to handle difficult situations instead of hoping somebody else will rescue us?
In short, every unmet need contains a hidden question that can help us grow into a more real version of ourselves:
“How can I become what I’m asking somebody else to be?”
Realness Is Internal Power
This is where many people might misunderstand what I’m saying because meeting your own needs doesn’t mean pretending other people don’t matter – for example, it doesn’t mean becoming emotionally isolated or convincing yourself that relationships are unnecessary.
The truth is that human beings absolutely need connection and that we truly understand ourselves in relation to others and the world around us and so we need love, community, and a sense of belonging to feel fully REAL.
What I’m talking about changing is where our centre of gravity lives and the idea that – instead of living from external striving and endless searching and seeking – we begin living from internal power:
We stop saying “I’ll be okay when…” and instead start asking “What can I become today?” – this is an entirely different way of living because we’re no longer waiting for life to happen to us and we actually SHOW UP and start participating in creating it.
Ironically, Meeting Your Own Needs First Improves Relationships
One of the beautiful paradoxes I’ve witnessed countless times now is that people often become far more appealing and magnetic to others when they stop demanding that those people perform the impossible task of making them ‘complete’.
The reason for this is that when you stay grounded in your realness, then desperation disappear, neediness dissolves, and pressure evaporates so that the relationship suddenly has room to breathe.
In fact, when you stop trying to force another person into becoming somebody they can never be, then they often become more willing to change naturally – not because you’ve manipulated them or begged and pleaded but because you’ve stopped trying to and just met them where they actually are.
By being REAL, you change the emotional atmosphere and so you’re no longer reacting from fear and instead start responding from truth.
Sometimes this inspires growth in the other person and sometimes it doesn’t – either way, you’ve already won because you’ve become stronger, calmer, and more grounded within yourself.
If you want to go deeper into getting in touch with your realness then check out Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness.
Practical Ways to Meet Your Own Needs
If you recognise yourself in any of the things we’ve explored in this article then you might find these practical steps and questions helpful:
The first step is to raise AWARENESS by catching yourself whenever you notice yourself thinking “I need them to [X]”
Once you’ve caught yourself, pause and then ask yourself:
“What need am I hoping they’ll meet?”
Try to identify the need that you feel is unmet:
- Perhaps it’s respect.
- Perhaps it’s safety.
- Perhaps it’s validation.
- Perhaps it’s reliability.
- Perhaps it’s love.
- It could literally be anything.
Once you’ve identified the need, ask yourself:
“How can I begin giving this to myself?”
You don’t have to meet the need for yourself perfectly or completely – just by taking a small but real step that will lead you in the right direction.
For example:
- If you want respect, what would respecting yourself actually look like?
- If you want reliability, what promise can you keep to yourself this week?
- If you want emotional honesty, what feeling have you been avoiding that you can spend some time with?
- If you want encouragement, what truth could you remind yourself of instead of waiting to hear it from somebody else?
Finally, follow-up with a final question:
“What would somebody who already possessed this quality naturally do today?”
Act accordingly and – little by little – you’ll discover that the qualities you’ve been searching for outside yourself begin growing within both yourself and your life as a whole..
The Real Goal: Meeting Your Own Needs for Realness
None of this means you have to stay in unhealthy relationships forever because, sometimes, people genuinely can’t meet even the most basic needs required for a healthy relationship.
Sometimes walking away becomes the most loving thing you can do for yourself but – whether you stay or leave – the deeper lesson remains the same and it goes like this:
Every unmet need is pointing you towards a place where your own relationship with yourself can become more real.
Instead of seeing difficult relationships purely as obstacles, begin seeing them as mirrors that reveal where you’ve unknowingly handed your power away and show you where you’ve been waiting for somebody else to give you permission to become whole.
Realness is about taking that permission back because – as you become more emotionally responsible, more self-respecting, more trustworthy, more loving, and more authentic – you stop chasing life and begin participating in it.
Some relationships may naturally improve because you’ve changed the dynamic whereas others may quietly fall away because they can no longer survive without patterns you’ve now outgrown.
Either outcome is a step towards truth because the goal was never to control another person but was always to become more real in yourself.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to start becoming somebody who can meet their own needs for realness then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get in the zone.
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