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How well are your basic human needs being met?

If we do not contribute in the key areas of our life, it may be because we do not have what is
needed to do so. For example, if we do not love ourselves, we cannot properly love another.
We cannot give to others something we do not have. A happy balance of contributing to
yourself and others, especially selfless, unconditional contribution is the ultimate secret to the joy
and happiness many people seek in their lives.
Contribution works both ways, both in the giving and the receiving. If the significant other in your
relationship is consistently unable to contribute, emotionally, physically, spiritually, mentally or
financially, you will feel unfulfilled and unhappy. If YOUR contribution is unappreciated, again
you will feel unhappy and even resentful. In your career, if it fails to satisfy your needs, it is failing
to contribute to your wellbeing and you will feel dissatisfied and unfulfilled.

Anything that fails to contribute in life, to the degree that it provides the satisfactory meeting of
your needs, is eventually replaced by something or someone that will.

Roles and areas

Having explored our basic human needs, we will now turn to how those needs fit into the roles
we occupy within the specific areas of our lives.

Roles
Our roles are the relationships and the responsibilities we have in life. Very few people go
through life without other people, family, friends, associates, colleagues, business contacts,
customers and others. The relationships and responsibilities we have in those contacts with others
are the roles we occupy in life.

There are roles that all of us must fill whether we want to or not, such as daughter, son, mother,
father, sister, member of the human race. Other roles form a much larger group that we occupy
from choice, and because of circumstances and experiences life has presented us, such as
spouse, partner, boyfriend, girlfriend.

Role set is the term used to describe the variety of roles and relationships you have as a result of
your status in society. For instance, a school student interacts with a variety of different people
as he goes through the school year, including teachers, guidance counsellors, the principal and
administration, and his peers. His role set includes the different behaviours, or roles, he uses to
meet the demands of this one social status of 'student.'

Everyone has a status set, or a combination of many social statuses. Social statuses include our
gender, occupation, ethnic group, volunteer associations, and hobbies. We can either choose
to associate ourselves with a status, such as an occupation, or we are born into one such as our
ethnicity.

So one person may have a status set that includes being a woman, a sales professional, a
mother, a daughter, a sister, a person with a European heritage, and a volunteer tutor.
Roles are the way that statuses get expressed. For instance, a person whose status in society is
'school student' will behave in particular ways. This behaviour is the 'role' the student is playing.
Likewise, a 'sales professional' will behave in a certain way, and a 'volunteer tutor' in still another
way. Each social status can be expressed through the roles we act out.