And How Belonging Needs and Self-Esteem Needs
Apply To Me
Dallas Hill
Everest University
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
And How Belonging Needs and Self-Esteem Needs
Apply To Me
Human’s communicate to meet a variety of different needs (Maslow, 1968).These needs can range from the most basic and primal needs to the most abstract. We communicate to tell people we are hungry, that we are looking for a place to stay the night, or that we want to spend time with friends or family. There are an nigh infinite reason for why we would communicate with another person but Abraham Maslow (1968) placed all these reasons into 5 separate categories and stated that the most primal and basic needs must be met before the more abstract ones could be.
Literature Review
In the first chapter of her book, Interpersonal Communication Everyday Encounters, Julia T. Woods (2013) examines how various interpersonal communications satisfy basic human needs. She starts off by examining Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs places the most important needs as the Physical Needs for Survival (1968). These include the need for air, food, reproduction, and all the other needs for basic survival as a species. While some of this may be obvious in our communications, i.e. a baby crying because it’s hungry, not all of it is. We are satisfying this need when we speak to our doctors about symptoms we may be having. Communicating our Physical Needs of for Survival is, at its heart, any communication we do that may help us stay alive.
The next level in Maslow’s Hierarchy is Safety and Protection Needs. These needs encompass all the needs to give us shelter, make ourselves and others feel safe, to protect us. Examples of these include offering to be a designated driver, asking security to walk you to your car at night, notifying your supervisor of unsafe working conditions (Woods, 2013). All of these are used to create the safest environment for