how to satisfy your needs in ways that are congruent with your values
It’s such a simple principle – in principle:
satisfy your needs in ways that are congruent with your values.
In practice, however, it is not so simple at all.
‘I can grasp why the fact that my values and the way I satisfy my needs reduce the causes of stress and add to my well being’, said one of my coachees. (To protect his identity I will call him Peter.) He went on: ’My problem is that I just don’t know how to harmonize one of my cherished values with my actions. ‘
It turned out that the value he cherished so much was one of humanity’s core values: honesty. And his dilemma was also one of the the most common ones: how to be honest without hurting the feelings of his friend.
How to strike a viable balance between tactfulness and honesty? We are confronted almost daily with this problem in out interactions with our friends, family, coworkers. The need to belong is one of our other basic needs while to be honest is another one.
Peter’s problem was how to tell his friend that he did not feel like playing chess with him every Thursday afternoon any more. His friend was disabled and could not leave his house and the weekly chess parties were a very important element of his social life.
We all tend to use a “white lie” in such cases and we often do, since we do not have the knowledge and/or the skills to do any better. Peter’s first thought was to say that he had to work on a new project and that he was too busy at other times with his family. But at the same time he felt that he respected his friend too much to tell him a lie.
I told Peter openly and honestly that there were no simple answers and no quick fixes but it would be a good start is to ask himself how he could express his respect for his friend and only then tackle the thorny issue.
After only two coaching sessions he had both the knowledge and the skills to navigate safely between the rock of honesty and the hard place of tactfulness and save both his self-respect and his friendship. We also worked out another way to satisfy his own and his friend’s needs for belonging and honesty.
He said that it was well worth to work on himself for something very valuable to him: friendship.
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