by Sarah Haté (France)

Before training to become a coach, one of my jobs had been working in a French business school for around 10 years. Needless to say, as an English-language trainer to young business undergraduates, part of my job was to teach them business English and organisational concepts. This is when I first became aware of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and it’s a tool I now use in my coaching business, and as part of my 121 coaching program. Here is an introduction to that, together with a list of needs compiled by Marshall Rosenberg, to show you my approach to empowering my clients to identify, accept and fulfil their personal needs.

More and more people are leaving jobs and relationships, feeling trapped in the life they have created for themselves or struggling to find a balance, because their needs are not met. But how many of us actually know exactly what those needs are? One of the main questions to keep in mind is WHY we need something. There can be several answers to this, including:

  • It’s something we have been told we should have
  • It’s something that keeps us loyal to our family history
  • It’s something that ‘people like us’ are expected to have.

Being able to identify what we actually need can be complicated, especially when we have spent most or all of our life pleasing others and putting them before us. It is a common pattern I find in the people who come to me for coaching, and this is why it was important for me to find a tool that really helps them to start putting themselves first and making those changes to create the life they really desire.

I had tried a few things before remembering Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and that is when I decided to combine it with a list of needs to be found at the end of Marshall Rosenberg’s book ‘Non Violent Communication: A Language of Life’. The results that my clients have obtained from working with what follows, are amazing and form the basis of the transformation that they are so desperately seeking.

 

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who is known in business circles for his hierarchy of needs, a pyramid-shaped model suggesting that humans have 5 kinds of needs that are interdependent. He broke the mould in the 1950s, by studying mature, complete, successful and fulfilled people and concluding that we could all be that way. In his opinion, all we had to do was to overcome our inner blocks to development and maturity.

Source: iCN Issue 31  (Life Coaching: Personal & Professional Empowerment); pages 8-11

About Sarah Haté

Sarah Haté is a trainer, public speaker and certified professional life coach. She has a passion for giving her clients the space they need to reconnect with themselves and rediscover their authentic self, in order to transform their lives. She is the creator of a private, online community, Harnessing Your Potential, to empower coaches, therapists, teachers and small-business owners to heal their past and reach their full potential.

Sarah created So Free Coaching, to offer one-to-one sessions, group sessions and workshops. As she lives in the south of France, her clients are both French and English-speaking. She trained in Development Coaching with NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) with Simply Changing Limited, and is also a qualified EFT practitioner. During lockdown, she recorded several guided meditations to help her clients who were struggling with negative emotions, needing to calm their mind and get grounded. They can be accessed on her YouTube channel (see link below).

Email: sarah@so-free.life

Harnessing Your Potential: www.facebook.com/groups/619590108500061

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmvICwJoILGh1yD6rbcM6xw