The Need To Be Needed ( Living Your Life With Dr Abdulfattah Adeyemi)
To feel needed is to feel great joy and fulfillment when we are on point to help someone in need. This gives us a sense of self-worth and helps in building our self-confidence. So, you naturally feel fulfilled in helping others fulfill their needs; you feel useful without feeling used, you feel light, relevant, important, elated and in the seventh heaven.
Another point to note is that this world if full of people who need things. They need good friends to keep for life, compassionate companions to lean on, and empathetic shoulders to cry on. People need someone to provide good values for their monies as well as good products and services to make life easier for them. A husband needs a wife that will love and respect him, and a wife needs a husband that will show her love and care. Parents need children that will be their sources of joy and parental accomplishments, and children need responsible parents.
However, what happens if nobody needs you or your help? What if nobody needs your good advice, your companionship, your assistance or your product? Wouldn’t you feel devastated and rejected? We have all been made to feel unwanted before. That doesn’t mean that we are bad, useless or inadequate, but it is one thing to desire to help others; it is another thing for them to actually need or want your help.
For you to fulfill the basic human need to be needed, that desire has to be translated into positive action, because it is one thing to feel needed, it is another thing to be needed. First, you have to acquire more skills, hone in on your talents or create new set of values for yourself that others might need from you. Secondly, you need to identify where your unique qualities are actually needed and wanted. You see, context matters: how would you expect your mirrors to sell at the market of blind people? Those without heads may neither appreciate nor patronize the beautiful caps you need to sell. A skillful butcher at the abattoir may not be needed to assist in the hospital’s operating theater, and your nice voice for singing may not be needed in a mortuary! So, carefully consider what industries, careers or businesses need your unique skills, talents and intelligence.
There are lots of people, organizations and individuals out there, who need you, desire your uniqueness, appreciate your moral and intellectual values, and urgently want you exactly the way you are. They are also ready to accept you regardless of your limitations, imperfections or inadequacies: one man’s floor is another man’s ceiling.
