Meeting Your Essential Needs Drives Your Behavior!
Something that I share with my clients at The Visionetics Institute is that there is no such thing as insignificant or inconsequential moments. We have a tendency to dismiss this we don’t understand or can’t find relevance in, but dismissing or ignoring something does not eliminate its meaning or impact.
All human behavior is need-driven, even when we attributed it to desire. If you want to understand and manage your behavior, you must first develop a lucid perspicacity of what drives that behavior — your fundamental needs. Every person on this planet is driven by certain universal and fundamental needs. These fundamental needs are “certainty,” uncertainty (which actually combats the boredom and feeling of unfulfillment associated with absolute certainty), significance, and connectivity (which includes the feeling of being loved and respected by others).
There are multitudinous ways that people meet these specific needs, with some being good and others being bad for everyone involved. For instance, some people achieve certainty in life through their sense of identity. Because their self-image is such that they believe in themselves, they have developed an understanding that they have the capacity to overcome any challenges that they may face. Others find certainty in their faith in a higher power, believing that their relationship with the higher power provides the resourcefulness necessary to overcome the obstacles they face.
Conversely, there are those who choose to use deception and cheating to provide their sense of certainty. They seek unfair advantages that tend to create weighted situations where things fall in their favor. Of course, there are always negative consequences to this type of behavior but rarely do these individuals make the connections.
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Fortunately, there are two principles that also serve as character needs — not part of the essential needs cluster, but needs that help guide behavior to produce a more positive lifestyle. Basically, the way that I ensure that the behaviors I exhibit in order to me my essential needs are acceptable is by using the fifth and sixth needs as a collective barometer. I ask myself if the behavior that I have exhibited is leading to personal growth — is it expanding my capacity and reach to help empower, inspire and encourage others?
Next, I take an introspective examination of my
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behavior to determine if it is serving needs outsides of myself. Is my behavior facilitating my “work” and not solely meeting my own fundamental needs. This means that when you are working to live life at the level of your design, you are living to impact the world around you in a positive way that sees people grow as well as become inspired and empowered.
If your behavior is not producing personal growth and you are not expanding in the area of external contribution, you are not living life at the level of your design. You are not fulfilling your purpose. You may be meeting those essential needs, but you are doing it using a modality that does not possess any intrinsic value. How you meet your fundamental needs is immensely important to the process of optimizing your impact on those in your periphery, which is the key to personal fulfillment and happiness! ~ Rick Wallace, Ph.D., Psy.D.
Dare to be different! One of the saddest things that I witness on a regular basis is people attempting to fit in — trying their hardest to be like everyone else. There is a reason trying to be like everyone else seems so difficult and uncomfortable — you were not designed to be like anyone else on this planet. You are unique in some very important ways that determine your complete makeup as a person.
When you attempt to squeeze into a box that was not designed to hold your massive potential, you force your potential to go dormant and unactualized. You literally squeeze the vastness of your existence into something that is not designed to hold or support it. Dare to be different. Dare to live in the fullness of your design. Dare to become the fullest expression of your potential and purpose. Dare to step outside of the marginal expectations that others have placed on you to live in the effusiveness of your God-given capacity to elevate and become great.
Dare to Be Different!
Your voluminous potential is pregnant with awesome wonders and extraordinary accomplishments, but in order to birth these things, you must be willing to escape the proclivity to bend toward mediocrity for the sake of fitting in. There is nothing honorable about making yourself small in order to make others more comfortable in your presence. There is nothing befitting your purpose and potential about the complacency so common in a culture that is replete with mediocre performers who take solace in being average.
There is nothing respectable about being average. “Average” is a human default reality. If you simply wake up every day and do what everyone else is doing, you will definitely be average. Being average does not require any great effort of focus. It does not require focus and commitment. You can sleep in and be average. You can show up late to work and be average. You can whine and complain and be average, but if you want to experience achieving the level of phenomenal, then you better be prepared to get up earlier than everyone else. You better be prepared to raise your standards higher than others. You better be prepared to spend more alone time with yourself, as you will inherently separate yourself from the pack. Dare to be different.
The people that you look at and admire now are visible to you because they chose to be different. They stand out and tower among most people because they chose to do things differently. If you want to live a life that most people are not able to live, then you have to be willing to do things that most people are not willing to do — dare to be different. ~ Rick Wallace, Ph.D., Psy.D.
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There is no question that the manner in which you start your day will have a massive impact on your capacity to effectively navigate through the labyrinthine corridors of resistance that everyone must face. Fortunately, there is a way that you can ensure that you are at an optimal state each and every day — priming. In the world of neuro-psychology, priming refers to the techniques used to influence the implicit memory effect of the mind and brain in which exposure to a specific stimulus influences a later response to the same stimulus. This technique can be used in both, positive and negative ways.
While priming can be used to help improve memory, it can also be used to help a person set and sustain a desired state (Total state of existence — mind, soul, body, and spirit)
In the world of neuro-linguistic programming, we discover that the state we are in at any given moment will dictate how we interpret any given situation or event. The lower the state you are in, the more open you will be to the influence of negative situations and the more diminished your capacity to effectively respond to the event will become.
Priming is a practice that is designed to be used at the beginning of the day to help you set your state. When you are in an optimal state, there is no existence of anger, fear, anxiety, worry, bitterness, procrastination or any other negative state of mind. When you are functioning at an optimal state, you are in perfect equilibrium — mind, soul, body, and spirit.
Priming must become a daily ritual — something that you practice daily — in order for it to be consistently effective in your life. The truth is that we are all governed by rituals — the things we do and the things we think about the most. If you want to change your current situation, examine your current rituals and get rid of the ones that are supporting negative behaviors that are not conducive to the goals and desires you secretly aspire to.
You are not being held back due to any exogenous forces that are moving against you, you are living in the reality created by your daily rituals — the rituals that govern your behavior and your thoughts.
Everyone morning when I wake up the priming process begins with me awakening a heart and mind that is centered in gratitude. Gratitude has to be the foundation on which you build or your edifice will consistently crumble when it comes underneath the weight of pressure, difficulty, delay, frustration.
No matter what is going on in your life, there is a reason to be grateful, and once you find that thing for which you are grateful, embrace its meaning to your life. On the foundation, you then build an edifice constructed of positive and unlimited beliefs concerning what you are capable of and what you expect from life. God/The Universe will only meet you at the level of your expectations. If you want more out of life, you must raise your expectations. As Earl Nightingale, Bob Proctor, Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn, Les Brown, Tony Robbins and others who have come before me have stated, “Life will pay whatever price you demand of it.” The problem is that you are not demanding much.
Instead of exploring your power to change the world around you, you have simply accepted what has been handed to you. Wake up in the morning and tell yourself that you are powerful beyond measure and that you have the capacity to create and sustain new realities by shifting your paradigm to embrace the new reality. Tell yourself that you are built for every challenge that you will face over the course of the day and that nothing you encounter will cause you to become shaken, frenetic, unglued, fearful, anxious or worried. Simply put, you are built for this. You, my friend, are a beast, now it is time to do what beasts do! ~ Rick Wallace, Ph.D., Psy.D.
It is time to reach into the power of expanded beliefs ~ faith in motion moves the universe. For those who have followed me for any length of time, you already know how passionate I am about developing the capacity to manage your thoughts and the beliefs that produce them. It is no secret that your thoughts are the seeds of your destiny, and your thoughts are the fruit of your core beliefs. Therefore, if you want to change your reality, you have to change your core beliefs, which will result in a change of perspective — a shift in paradigms.
While it may sound cliche-ish, you are what you think. Your thoughts are the seeds of your future reality — the seeds of a future harvest. As in physical science, the seed always produces what it is designed to produce. An acorn does not produce an apple, it produces an oak tree, and so, you can never expect a negative or limiting thought to produce a positive and powerful result.
The process of mastering your life begins with creating a paradigm shift that is supported by expanding beliefs that replace limiting beliefs. When have the capacity to create a paradigmatic shift in your life, you will never find yourself perpetually stranded at any point along the continuum of life.
An expanded belief is literally faith in motion. When you possess an authentic faith that underwrites the idea that all things are possible, you possess the capacity to move the universe on your behalf, and I am not speaking in a figurative sense. Everything in the universe is energy and energy responds to energy.
Here is the thing; like attracts like when it comes to the emittance of energy. It is called resonance, and what your energy resonates with is what you will attract. Energy is emitted in frequency and the level of the frequency determines the power of the vibration. The higher the frequency, the higher the vibration.
When you observe people who seem to experience constant success and maintain a positive attitude, they have developed the capacity to manage their thoughts and elevate the frequency that they operate in. Allow me to give you a prime example of energy resonance.
Have you ever seen a show or commercial where an opera singer hit an immensely high note and shatters a class in the room? As a kid growing up, I used to see this all of the time, and I initially did not believe it was possible until I saw it replicated in a science experiment in school. What is actually happening is the sound emitted by the singer has a specific frequency as it moves through the air, and so does the glass (everything in the universe is made of energy, even inanimate objects). If you were to take a tuning rod and tap the glass it would emit a sound, and that sound has a frequency, when the frequency of the singer is the same as the frequency of the glass, the glass resonates with the vibration and absorbs it — because the vibration is so strong it shatters the glass.
This is the same way that the energy emitted by your thoughts will resonate with other energy. Please understand that you can only access and obtain those things that are on the frequency you are currently admitting. If you want different results, you must be willing to change your frequency and that begins with creating a paradigm shift that opens up the possibilities of life in your mind.
I teach people how to create powerful paradigmatic shifts when I work with them one-on-one, and I also created a course that teaches people how to create a paradigm shift in their lives. The key is to invest in yourself to get the results that you are looking for.
You are the one responsible for changing your life, and no one else can do it for you until you become committed to changing. Change starts here! ~ Rick Wallace, Ph.D., Psy.D.
When I work with my clients, there are so many things we have to cover in a relatively short time, but one thing that is constantly inculcated into their minds is the importance of purging their periphery — getting those negative-minded people out of their inner-circle.
Because we are social creatures, those we allow into our inner-circle have an immensely powerful impact on how we think and behave — association brings about assimilation. There are minimal-minded people who love nothing more than whispering the sweet-nothings of negative into the ears of those who aspire to something greater than they are currently experiencing. It seems these people have literally made it their responsibility in life to show everyone why they can’t do something beyond what is considered ordinary or average.
Many times, these minimal-minded naysayers will be those whom you love the most, and they will often have good intentions, but intent becomes irrelevant when you confuse sugar with cyanide when making my coffee. Many times you will be working to improve yourself so that you can be a benefit to the very people that are constantly trying to tell you that you are crazy for trying. You will likely have to temporarily separate yourself from them in order to make the progress you are looking for.
Replace the naysayers with like-minded people who are at least headed in the same direction you are headed in. Also, it will important to include some people who are more advanced in thought and accomplishment that yourself. These are people who you will want to model your behavior and thinking after. Sometimes the behavior that you are modeling will not make sense logically because you have spent a significant part of your life thinking differently and seeing life through the lens of a different paradigm.
To get rid of those limiting beliefs that have served to keep you boxed in for years, you will need to create a paradigm shift — changing the way you view the world, how it impacts you, how you impact it and how you view yourself in general. When you are working to create a paradigm shift, you do not need people around you constantly attempting to reinforce the old paradigm you are breaking free of.
The truth is that the only limitations you have in this life are the ones you accept in your mind. When you are able to create a paradigms shift, you can completely replace those limiting beliefs with powerful beliefs that focus on what’s possible instead of labeling things as impossible.
Your thoughts are the seeds of your destiny — change your thoughts, change your destiny. ~ Rick Wallace, Ph.D., Psy.D.
Read The Internal Book You’ve Written with Your Life
Read the internal book that you have written with your life. One person who I admire and have a great deal of respect for is David Goggins. Those of you who know me will know why I admire and respect him. He lives life on his terms. One thing that David stresses is the importance of reading that internal book that you have written over the course of your life.
We live in a world that has no shortage of experts and gurus, including your’s truly, and there is no shortage of books and material prepared and presented by these experts. What David Goggins suggest is that more emphasis is placed on reading the book that we have written, and there is so much that can be gained from an experience like this.
There are multitudinous challenges associated with reading books written by others, with of the most emphatic being the proclivity to write off their successes to extraordinary talent, a silver spoon or luck. The truth is that success is not about how much talent you have; it is about how committed you are to go the distance.
If you have followed me for any time you know that one of my favorite quotes is from the movie, “Lawless.” In the movie, one of the younger Bondurant brothers has been beaten within an inch of his life by a crooked cop. His older brother asks him what is he going to do about it and he responds by telling his brother that he is not tough and violent like him. His brother’s response is priceless. He simply replies, “It is not the violence that sets a man apart, it is the distance he is willing to go.”
Toughness is the willingness to go the distance. When you read that internal book, you will find points in your life in which should not have survived or overcome, but you did, it is a reminder that you are built for the battle that you face. Read your book to not only learn what you are doing that you should be doing differently but also read your book to be reminded of the stock you are made of at the core of your existence. Go back in that book and find those moments when you were written off, but somehow you survived.
If you are like me, when you read your book, you will discover that you are not where you would like to be, but you are far more than you are currently giving yourself credit for. This does not mean that you should rest on your laurels, but you should use this knowledge as fuel for you confidence — understanding that you are built for everything that you will face in life. I don’t care how bad it gets, how dark it becomes, how many people turn against you — you are built for it! ~ Rick Wallace, Ph.D., Psy.D.
To learn more about how you can work directly with Dr. Wallace, email LifeChange@rickwallacephd.link or visit our Elevation & Empowerment page!