You may have heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. If the name doesn’t sound familiar, imagine a picture of a multi-layered pyramid. The bottom layer has things like food, water and sleep. As it goes up toward the peak, it goes from items that are physically fulfilling to concepts that are emotionally and spiritually fulfilling. It’s a pretty influential model in psychology and sociology.
What does this have to do with motivation? Well, the idea is that people have to meet different stages of their needs before they can move on to the next level. For example, you can’t start thinking about making your house look pretty until it has a working roof and you’re sure you’re not going to get wet every time it rains.
The need for a roof, or other shelter, sits on the bottom layer of Maslow’s pyramid, along with air, food, water and sleep. These are the physiological needs – the things it’s impossible to survive without. Sitting just above them are safety needs, such as healthcare and financial security.
As we move up the pyramid, we come to your interpersonal needs, or love and belonging. That could be family, friends or romantic relationships – the ability to trust others, be accepted by others and to give and receive affection. It’s followed by the esteem level, which includes both the respect of others and self-respect.
Now it starts getting more complicated. You have your cognitive needs, such as creativity and intellectual curiosity. There are aesthetic needs, or the desire to bring beauty into your life above just practical concerns. The top tiers of the pyramid are self-actualization, which means realizing your own full potential, and transcendence, a wider kind of spirituality that connects you to a wider idea of existence and something infinite.
Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist working in the 1950s, but the ideas he developed can be seen in the traditional philosophies of the Blackfeet tribe before him and have continued to be explored and challenged for many years since then. Not everyone agrees with the hierarchy (most people agree the tiers can overlap), but it’s difficult to understate its influence.
So, when you’re next trying to motivate yourself, perhaps looking at the pyramid will help you. It might be that you need to meet some other needs before you can move on to the next stage.
