No, you can’t always get what you want
No, you can’t always get what you want
No, you can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime, you just might find
You get what you need.

Another weekend spent doing many of the things we love. Cooking, hanging out with friends and family, exercising and listening to music. The Rolling Stones have always held a special place in my heart. I love the variety of styles, the sometimes poignant lyrics and the timelessness of it all.

This song has a place in our family. If you asked our kids they probably would say they had heard me sing it far too many times, usually right after one of them said something starting with ” I want …”. The focus of both the request from the kids and my response is on the wanting, not the needing. It’s interesting to consider why that might be so.

One of the themes of my writings over the past few weeks has been fear. It’s a powerful driver for us, and often we are unaware it is acting upon us. Is it possible that “wanting” is really a fear of scarcity? At work, for example, is wanting a promotion really a concern that we believe that opportunities for advancement don’t come along every day and thus

if we aren’t getting promoted someone else is taking something from us? And if we say we want to present to an executive and miss the opportunity, do we believe that we’ve also missed an opportunity to be noticed? How about wanting to be assigned to a big project as an indicator of our value to our organization?

It is interesting to apply a specific question to each of these “wants” … that is “do I really need this?” We usually find that the answer to that is no. Needs are very interesting when we look at them from solely from our own self, without projecting any relative comparisons to others. Personal development guru Tony Robbins has developed the Hierarchy of Human Needs as follows:

1. Certainty/Comfort. We all want comfort. And much of this comfort comes from certainty. Of course there is no ABSOLUTE certainty, but we want certainty the car will start, the water will flow from the tap when we turn it on and the currency we use will hold its value.
2. Variety. At the same time we want certainty, we also crave variety. Paradoxically, there needs to be enough UNcertainty to provide spice and adventure in our lives.
3. Significance. Deep down, we all want to be important. We want our life to have meaning and significance. I can imagine no worse a death than to think my life didn’t matter.
4. Connection/Love. It would be hard to argue against the need for love. We want to feel part of a community. We want to be cared for and cared about.
5. Growth. There could be some people who say they don’t want to grow, but I think they’re simply fearful of doing so—or perhaps NOT doing so. To become better, to improve our skills, to stretch and excel may be more evident in some than others, but it’s there.
6. Contribution. The desire to contribute something of value—to help others, to make the world a better place than we found it is in all of us.

It is interesting to look at each of these needs with ourselves only in mind and evaluate each need with the words “I AM” or “I HAVE” in front of each need. For example when we say “I AM SIGNIFICANT” we can look from the perspective of our strengths, skills, connections, personal power, etc and know, without ego, that we have significance to our family, our community and our organization. With this perspective we can know that this need is fulfilled and we can move to higher needs such as forming new connections, focusing on personal growth and looking for new contributions to make.

By focusing on and fulfilling these higher human needs, can we then look back at those wants we were longing for above, we see that by taking care of our essential needs our wants fade in importance, or even better, truly disappear as something we now understand as simply a creation of our ego.

So how do we use this knowledge as leaders? What if we spent our time understanding where each member of our team is operating on the the hierarchy of needs and then work with them to move to the next level? What if we focused as leaders on ensuring each person truly felt that they had significance on the team and in the organization? What if we truly understood what connections each person wants to make, where they long to grow personally and what contributions they have a strong desire to make? Would we find that if everyone was focused on these things we all would have a much more fulfilling experience at work?

I’m interested in stories from others. Any interesting musings out there about wants and needs? Perhaps a little reminder from the Stones themselves might help!

You Can’t Always Get What You Want