 What's your main emotional need? What are your emotional needs in general? That can be a difficult thing to parse out So what I want to give you today is a way to think about what you need emotionally That'll help you feel balanced emotionally and also Of all these emotional needs which one emotional lead is the most fundamentally important. So stay with me So we're talking about emotional needs here and meeting our own emotional needs is essential It's it's self-parenting really. What do I do to keep myself balanced emotionally? So quick question here from Catherine the kind of Inspire this video Catherine writes I've read your book on emotional needs. My book is free. You can check it out on my website It's called forget happiness. It basically gives you a model for understanding what your emotional needs are There's five in the model I use That's not to say everybody has only five emotional needs But I found so far that it's a pretty good template to work off if you can meet those emotional needs consistently It has a huge impact on our emotional and psychological health So captain's read the book and she says it helped helps me to understand what I need to maintain balance emotionally However, knowing what these emotional needs are is one thing actually meeting them is another So time restraints interruptions low moods all these things make it incredibly difficult How does one actually go about meeting your emotional needs and doing this effectively? So that's a great question Now the book will Tell you what the emotional needs are. I'm a bit reluctant to tell you what they are the book is free go and read it The reason I'm reluctant is that Once you hear if I was to tell you what the first one was without telling you the rest of them You might start to get a little bit defensive. The first one is is about responsibility So it can sound like I'm the self-help guy telling you take more responsibility The last emotional need is about laziness and how important it is to be lazy in your life proactively deliberately consciously lazy So, you know, if I was just tell you about responsibility for next five minutes You might start to think oh my god, this is this guy's asking me to do this and it's not like I don't have responsibilities Problem is it's a part of life, but it's not all life. So we're looking for balance here in this But there's there's three other emotional needs. There's meaning purpose creativity there's Take care of yourself physically and also the last need here and this is going to help Catherine I hope is well, what is How do I go about meeting these needs? How do I balance them because life is full of interruptions and and and disruption and complications and Restraints time restraints everything else the law that the fourth emotional need in my model is The need for reflection Now the need for reflection in my model and as far as I'm concerned is the most fundamentally important emotional need there is To take space for ourselves to sit And occasionally ask in reflection. What is it? I need emotionally. What's missing? What's out of balance? And most people think that the most fundamental emotional need is the inner child or the need for human connection What I'm talking about here in self parenting is not even about relationships I'm just talking about within your own personal self Those emotional needs the relationships are a completely separate issue entirely Equally as valid and as important, but I'm not talking about that in this In this model here How do you meet your own personal emotional needs? So it's not that the importance of the inner child and the need for connection in relationships is taken for granted here I'm talking about something else self parenting Now when we're going to try and Do something for ourselves emotionally to actually meet our emotional needs so that we're feeling less conflicted within ourselves What we are going to run into is exactly what Catherine has run into which is this is tricky This is not as easy as I thought it was So there's a few things we can talk about there, but really did the number one thing is If you can reflect Regularly just take some time to sit down and think about what it is you need as well as other things I'll talk about those in a moment It's almost as if you're just going in what worked what didn't that's called reflection The thing about it is there the need to reflect on the whole process of self parenting is essential because the way I think about it is this When you're on an airplane and you're flying across a country Really what happens is we don't fly in a straight line We fly in different directions and there's this constant course correction going on now itself parenting It's almost as if we're flying Invariably we go off course Okay So reflection is the okay. I need to a little adjustment here I need to course correct So we come in and we change and that we're back on track again But if we stay on that track now inevitably we're going to go off track again So it's this constant thing of coming back on track and how we do that is true sitting down Silently in a space for ourselves just to think to process reflect About what it is we need So reflection is essentially important because as Catherine says this is tricky And it does need kind of constant vigilance Now it's not just about Time management and things like this reflection reflection is also essentially important because When we're meeting our own emotional needs and just live in life in general, we're going to come into contact with Triggers, we're going to come into contact with disappointments emotional upset pain and Reflection is also a space where we bring that pain and that those little disappointments where we process them because Processing those those those disappointments for instance is essentially important because if we don't process them They're going to build up and it's going to knock us off course entirely So I don't want you to think that reflection is all about Looking at your schedule and scheduling and time management self parenting is about that But it's also a space where you can do other things. There's there's no real there's any amount of tools you can use in reflection Meditation inquiry The bit really looking at time management is a perfectly valid Thing to do in reflection. So there's all sorts things we can do with it But really what we're trying to do in reflection is Come to terms with the fact that my default setting as I go about living my life is to be quite reactive to things I can get triggered by things all the time and to know that that's completely natural and predictable and normal I'm going to get triggered. I'm going to feel upsets and disappointments If we don't go into a reflection we'll find ourselves in this constant reactive mode to life So reflection is recognizing the need Okay, I'm probably going to be reactive unless I because that's the default setting for us is to be reactive React into life external events and situations all the time and people Reflection helps us to come out of reactivity and to into more of a proactive thing about this is what I'm doing This is my path. This is my direction So it's essentially important for that also and the other thing about reflection is that Reflection also helps us overcome the default to beat ourselves up all the time because usually if we're struggling emotionally with something Really, what we're all doing is we're just beating ourselves up about it and blaming ourselves Putting labels on ourselves for why we're not able to meet our own emotional needs So reflection again if you slow down and recognize that tendency to be harsh on yourself What you can start to proactively do in reflection is rather than be yourself up is to use what I call fortification Where it's a deliberate practice where you're actually trying to Maybe focus a little less on the to-dos and what you need to do and what you should have done and on who am I As a person maybe I'm just a person. I need to give myself some credit here I need to support myself unconditionally and remind myself of that in something like journaling for instance It can be good to practice that So to sum it up here Catherine and for anyone else who's watching All your emotional needs responsibility meaning purpose creativity physical health reflection spontaneity laziness They all do require balance So it's gonna be it's gonna be something that we need to kind of constantly course correct on and keep an eye on in terms of self-parenting So many of us are attentive to other people's needs all the time But we neglect to look at what it is we need emotionally So we're looking for there's other tips in the book too. It's not like we have to perfectly balance these emotional needs sometimes the need for responsibility can become Quite overbearing and quite needs a lot of our time and attention But we find ways even in those situations to meet these other emotional needs The other thing I tell people too is when you're going about meeting your own emotional needs What is the most I can give to each of these needs is the wrong question We should be asking ourselves. What's the least I can give to these emotional needs? Consistently and regularly so that it actually will happen and these needs do not need an awful lot of time and energy They need what they really need is recognition and validation most of all and sometimes just a little time and energy Is more than enough than they need the difference between Everything and nothing is is the difference between something to an emotional need and nothing to an emotional need is everything Let me repeat that again the difference between Something going into an emotional need and nothing going to emotional need is everything So we just look to meet them regularly give them something and it helps us feel validated and emotionally balanced I'm speaking way too much in this video and I'm trying to cover too much The book goes into it in much more detail. But as I said, it's free on the website and feel free to go and check that out But Catherine focus on reflection and realize that it's inevitable that you're going to feel like you're going off track from time to time with this But we course correct true repeated and frequent reflection Guys thanks for being with me as always and I hope that's useful and I'll see you again soon in the next video Take care