The Six Human Needs

Human Needs Psychology

Anthony Robbins and Cloe Madanes pioneered the field of Human Needs Psychology, a breakthrough blueprint for recognizing human potential, reviving the human spirit, and finding lasting fulfillment.

Other attempts to illustrate a salient system of human needs have met with resounding inadequacy. Famous models like Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs have been helpful discussion starters, but proven woefully lacking when applied to the full range of human emotion and experience in the pursuit of success and fulfillment. Studies as far back as 1976, such as Wahba and Bridgewell’s Maslowe Reconsidered: A Review of research on the need hierarchy theory, and as recent as 2002, such as Cwisfa Lim and Vesh Khruschev’s Maslowe’s Pyramid – a necessity?, have acknowledged both the usefulness and inadequacy of Maslowe’s Hierarchy.

This is not to suggest that Human Needs Psychology does not still have more to uncover about the complexity and sophistication of human beings and their abundant needs, but it is incredible how comprehensively the Six Human Needs Model accounts for human need and the elements necessary to produce a truly fulfilling life.

With all this in mind, let’s take a look at what Human Needs Psychology calls the Six Human Needs.

The Six Human Needs

"I don't care about money. I just want to be wonderful."

- Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)American actress

Human beings have a wide diversity of desires. Some people want boatloads of money and others couldn’t care less about pieces of paper with dead presidents printed on them. Some people want to fill their lives with enough money and power to make Solomon blush and others just want one special person to spend their lives with.

Those are all expressions of desires, and while desires may differ from person to person, these six human needs are, I believe, universal. In fact, these needs are so fundamental that anytime a human being finds a behavior that meets two or more of these needs, unless that person consciously evaluates how healthy their action is, they'll keep doing it, even if it causes casual or terminal harm to themselves or someone else.

Why do people smoke when they know it will kill them? Why do people join gangs when they know violence tears us apart? Why do people go on crusades whose ultimate aim is to bring about someone else's death? Because at some level, that ambition, that action is meeting two or more of their needs. Now, it may not meet those needs at a very high level. In fact, on a scale of 1-10, it may meet those needs on a minimal level of 1 or 2. But as long as they're being met, they'll continue to do what they do.

The first four needs belong to what Robbins calls the Science of Achievement, or the needs of the personality. These are the needs that, when met, will take someone from rags to riches, from the lowest level of the totem pole to the tallest tower in the Emerald City. In life, almost everyone finds a way to meet these first four needs. They can be met through work, through smoking cigarettes, through promiscuity, through any number of avenues.

But these four needs alone will not produce fulfillment. When only these first four needs are met, that’s the sad, tragic experience of someone who manifests total achievement in their life but is still left wondering, “Is this all there is?”

The last two needs belong to what Robbins calls the Art of Fulfillment, or the needs of the spirit. These last two needs are the secret to finding the personal power to live and give a fulfilling life.

Because after all, achievement in itself is simple science. You find the formula, you crack the code, you get the result. And once you've mastered the method, then you know what to do - you up the ante. You build a bigger business, you run seven miles instead of six, you add a third home to your mortgage.

That's achievement. But fulfillment? Fulfillment is an art because it’s about change and growth. It's about challenging yourself and making a contribution. It’s about developing the desire to give and live outside of yourself.

You must meet all six of these needs to master achievement and fulfillment.

Think of your life like a car. Does a car need fuel – yes or no? Will it run without fuel? Of course not! Because of this, it would be easy to focus solely on the need for fuel and make finding fuel the only priority in running the car. And for a reasonable amount of time, that priority would seem to keep the car healthy. You find fuel, you fill the tank, you drive the car.

But what other needs will eventually come up that mere fuel won’t answer? What about air in the tires? Oil in the engine? Water in the radiator? Without these needs being met, how long until the tires go flat and the engine overheats? You can run the car without meeting these other needs, but if you do, it won’t be long before it won't run well, and soon, won't run at all.

Likewise, we can skate by with meeting only two or three of these needs, but unless they are all met, our lives come to a standstill and our fulfillment fizzles.

Fortunately – or unfortunately – the human body is an extraordinarily adaptable machine and when one of its needs isn’t being met, the human body finds some way to meet that need on some level. As we’ll see, though, the strategies we use to meet our needs, whether by deliberate decision or unconscious impulse, aren’t always the most healthy approaches, and they can be the unacknowledged element that makes the difference between failure and success in our lives.

And yet, we'll also see that like a good government, each need has a competing need that checks it and keeps it in balance. Each of these dichotomies may seem contradictory at first - what's called a paradox - but don't worry. It should become increasingly clear that each is, in fact, complimentary of the other.

The Six Human Needs are:

1. Certainty
2. Uncertainty
3. Significance
4. Love and Connection
5. Growth
6. Contribution

Certainty

The first, most fundamental human need is the need for certainty. Certainty that we can find food. Certainty that we can take another breath. Certainty that we can survive and feel a minimum of pain.

Even if you're someone who loves living on the edge, flying by the seat of your pants, playing MacGuyver every moment of every day... how certain are you that that's who you are?
Is this starting to make sense?

Before we can be certain of anything about the world, we must have certainty that we are there to be certain. That is, we must know that we, the part of us that's there to even be aware, exist.

The classical method for ascertaining our own existence was popularized by Rene Descartes when he said, "Cogito ergo sum" - that is, "I think, therefore I am."

After all, the place where every human being absolutely must meet the need for certainty is their identity. Now I don't mean becoming someone who dogmatically locks into a set of opinions, beliefs, and behaviors, and never admits the possibility that they should change or grow from what they are. That's an unhealthy fixation, an obsession with certainty.

I don't even mean all the healthy trappings of identity we accumulate throughout our lives - "I'm a painter," "I'm a public speaker," "I'm a mother or a father." These are all healthy labels, but they're still not the ultimate element of identity. What is?

The part of you that, beyond all the labels and trappings and accouterments you accrue throughout your life, that simply is. The active awareness that exists independent of all these "things". The you that calls itself "I". The part of your consciousness that exists behind the curtain, behind all the joys and dramatic sorrows of this life, behind all the possessions and pleasantries.

It's not your body. It's not your job. It's not your achievements. It's the part of you that remains when all these things are stripped away.

That may seem almost elementary, but really consider how many people have a strong hold on this sense of certainty about their identity. When we look at where most people's certainty about their identity comes from, it's in their friends, family, accomplishments, possessions.

But without a sense of certainty rooted in a primal "I", in a part of you that doesn't depend on the material or social world as a point of reference, but instead understands Descartes maxim, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune will buffet your sense of self like a hurricane, and when the wind blows and the rain pours and the armies of life besiege the material citadel where you've built your identity, you will come to what's commonly called an Identity Crisis. A point when you realize all the things you've built your identity on are fleeting at best, and never last the test of time.

It's the part of you that wakes from its stupor when there's an earthquake or a car crash or some other kind of brush with death. The part of you that forgets about watching your favorite sitcom, those shoes you planned on purchasing, the award you hoped you would win. The part of you that simply wants to survive.

As near as I can tell, that's true regardless of what worldview one ends up at. Whether it's a Christian worldview that requires surrendering the self to God, or a Buddhist worldview that requires abolishing the sense of self altogether, or any of the other multitudes of worldviews available, one can neither surrender themselves nor abolish themselves without first becoming certain about themselves.

But what happens when we become certainty obsessed? Imagine you had spent most of your life wondering where your next meal would come from. The promise that every day you'd have a healthy plate full of food put in front of you would provide some comforting certainty.

But later on if you realized that plate of food was always, every day, every time going to be a hamburger, suddenly that certainty becomes a problem. Some days, you might even choose to go hungry just so you didn't have to eat another hamburger!

Or to put it another way, if you knew every time you watched a competition who was going to win, how entertaining would that be? If you knew every time you attempted something you were never going to risk any kind of failure, how tedious would that become?

After all, what's the consequence of having absolute certainty about everything? BOREDOM.
That's why we're designed with our second human need:

Uncertainty

If you woke up tomorrow morning and found a check for $1,000,000 in your mailbox, would that be a delightfully unexpected turn of events - yes or no?

If you woke up tomorrow morning and discovered every dime of debt you were in had been dissolved, would that be a nice surprise - yes or no?

So it's safe to say human beings in general are fond of surprises, right?But what if you woke up tomorrow morning and found a letter declaring the IRS was going to audit you?What if you woke up and learned the love of your life was leaving you?

Those things were certainly unexpected, and we already established we like surprises. So what's the difference?

The surprises we want we call pleasures. The surprises we don't want we call problems. But the trick is that we need both of them to live a fulfilling life.The need for uncertainty - for surprise and variety - is so strong that when we don't get it, we'll sacrifice almost anything to get it.

Let me ask you. Have you ever known someone, or maybe been someone, who was in a relationship where you started to know the person so well that you knew with utter certainty what your significant other would say in every situation? What food they wanted to eat every night, what story they would tell in any given situation, what moment they always wanted to make love?

And when that happened, was there at least the urge - and often times, the action - where you wanted to pick a fight over nothing? Even though you knew it was pointless, that forgetting the milk on the way home or popping their bubblegum wasn't half as catastrophic a complaint as you were making it into!

I'll give you an example from my own life. At one point, I was delivering a sales workshop, and while I certainly hadn't lost my sense of joy from bringing people knowledge and skill that would help them succeed at a higher level, I had taught the workshop so many times and conditioned myself into such physical and mental certainty that I could have facilitated the workshop with my eyes closed, both hands tied behind my back, and a rifle range roaring next door.

And then suddenly, my sleep became erratic, my digestion went haywire, and my energy went through the floor. At first, I couldn't figure out why. No imbalances in my diet, no new physical exertions, no relationship upsets. What on earth was going on? It was disorienting in every way, and suddenly the certainty I brought to the table during these workshops was teetering on the edge of terror.

The Bible says that a wise man seeks the counsel of many men, so I started asking everyone for their insight, including on one day getting some of my participants in one of the sales workshops to give me their perspective.

And they hit the nail on the head. I had become so certain about the workshop - i.e., bored - that my brain was automatically creating the circumstances to inject the workshops with a little more variety. After all, once my energy level plummeted, my sleep went wonky, and my digestion went haywire, I never knew what was going to happen during the workshops or any other moment of my day.

The truth is, when we take our lives to an extreme of certainty, we automatically, unconsciously react in a way that creates uncertainty and variety, too. Sometimes we do this by changing what we eat for breakfast this morning. Sometimes we call a friend we haven't talked to in some time. Other times we start sabotaging things, like relationships, for the thrill of uncertainty that comes from conflicts and upsets.

Significance

Every human being has the need to feel uniquely important. Like all of our needs, each human being can find a fairly creative, individual way of meeting it.

Some people try to feel significant by creating enough havoc and mayhem in the world to make headlines. Other people try to feel significant by covering their bodies in more artwork than the Sistine Chapel. Others go after significance by becoming wealthy, starting a family, building a home, burning down a home.

One of the most common ways of gaining significance is by destroying something or someone - even when it's ourselves. If someone has gone through a period of time where they felt unimportant, unnoticed, insignificant, they might change this by building up their problems to mindblowing proportions. Whether they got stuck in traffic or won the lottery, there's something nightmarish about it, something that makes their concerns swell up to the size of skyscrapers.

Don't you know someone who no matter what happens, they seem to complain about it? And sometimes, even when it's clear nothing's really wrong - in fact, from the outside, it looks like something amazing just happened - they find something wrong with the situation?

Sometimes this is because the person has built up a system of belief that turns everything into a negatively charged event. But oftentimes, even when that is the case, the person has learned to do this because it fulfills their need for significance. It makes people notice them and gives them a feeling of uniqueness. "Think you're important? Well, look at me! I'm broken. No matter what happens, I'm depressed. I win the lottery, I'm depressed. I get a promotion, I'm depressed. I meet the man or woman of my dreams, I'm depressed. Try and top that!

But there's also another more pervasive reason for the common condition I call Chronic Complaining. Think about it like this.If someone asks you how you are and you answer, "I'm great! I lost twenty pounds. I have a family that always calls to check on me. I've got great friends that always tell me the truth. I'm living the dream!", what are people most likely to say to you? They're probably going to tell you to get your head out of your behind!

But if someone asks how you are and you answer, "I'm okay, I guess. I gave up all my favorite foods and feel out of place at just about every restaurant I go to. My family can't just let me live my life. My friends are always so hard on me. It's a nightmare," what are most people likely to say to you? They'll say, with infinite compassion, "I understand."Why is this? Because at this time, we live in a culture that rewards us for having problems, that treats complaints as a sign of significance, and when we see someone successful who lives with certainty and outspoken gratitude for the accomplishments in their own life, we see them automatically as arrogant, egotistical, and narcissistic.

That's not to suggest that there aren't some real outspoken narcissists out there. But we do tend to lump anyone who's certain of themselves and outspoken about their own success into the pile of egomaniacs by default.We do this out of many different motives.

Very often, it happens because in life, when we see someone who has succeeded more than we believe we have, who has more significance than we do, we naturally want to even things out, and there are two immediately apparent ways to do this.

One is to rise to the challenges of our own lives, to find a way to discover our own meaning within the world, to achieve something of extraordinary value simply because we believe in it, to take our lives to the next level.

The other way is to see other people who have succeeded, who seem to have more significance us, and not only to see them as a threat, but to neutralize that threat by bringing them down, either by discouraging them directly or damaging their reputation behind their back.I urge you: when you see someone who has succeeded at a level beyond you, choose the former option. Don't level the playing field by destroying someone else. Instead, see someone else's success and significance as inspiration and take your own life to the next level.

You must find a fulfilling source of significance because this need shows up in every area of life.In many marriages, spouses have learned to gain a feeling of significance by controlling their spouse. The stereotype is that men do this, but it's a sickness just as many women fall prey to.

In many family, parents have learned to find a feeling of significance through their children. This is one of the most healthy sources of significance until it becomes someone's only source of significance. Then even after the children have grown, gotten married, and had their own children, the parents are adrift, still desperately struggling to maintain some sense of significane from controlling their children's lives.Or take an example from the corporate world.

I do a lot of work with big businesses, and interestingly enough, the need for significance is the source of most major conflicts between coworkers. Why?Imagine. You put two people in an environment where they're uncertain about their importance within their lives in general or the business in particular. When that happens, every time someone else succeeds, it seems like a threat to the person who doesn't feel significant. So they set up ways to sabotage other people or to steal other people's thunder or to create complications and delays in their own process to inflate and exaggerate their own role and responsibilities. When someone's given a task that should take two days, but those two days turn into two months, there are a variety of legitimate reasons that may be the cause, and one of these is that the person may be trying to fulfill their need for significance by supersizing the responsibility.

The quickest way to gain significance if you have no education and no belief in something constructive is to use violence. If no one's noticed me, or has noticed me, but has always belittled me, and suddenly I put a gun to their head, how certain am I that I've just taken on a significant place in that person's life?

Take the rash of school shootings that has overtaken the United States. What did the young men who marched into a school in Colorado say their motive was? They wanted to take revenge on the ones who had made them feel insignificant.

Now I'm not suggesting that everyone acts on this impulse completely consciously. But when we see the many destructive ways these needs can take shape in our lives - addictions, sicknesses, acts of violence - it's not hard to see why it's so important to find healthy ways of fulfilling our needs. It's absolutely essential to understand that we must find a positive way to fulfill our needs because if we don't, we'll still find some way to meet them, but there's no guarantee it will be in a positive way.

Don't roll the dice. Find your significance from something that builds you up and serves the people you're privileged to come in contact with. Build other people up. Build a house.

Set a world record. Serve in public office. Become a counselor or school teacher. Then the fuel for your significance will be lasting and fulfilling.

But what happens when you're totally significant? To do that, you have to become totally unique, and when you're totally unique, you become separate from everyone else. That's why we're designed with a fourth human need:

Love/Connection

No matter how driven for significance someone may be, it's impossible to ignore the need for love and connection. The problem is that the need for significance can often be boiled down to achievement.

But love? Love is mystery. Love is looking into the unknown. Love is vulnerability and has as much power to produce deeply fulfilling pleasure as it does blindingly intense pain. Much safer to ignore the need for love and try to satisfy our need for significance, right? And that's why so many people enter loving relationships, but later lose themselves in things like work or sports.

That's a tragedy, because in order to live a truly fulfilling life, we must meed the need for love and connection.

Dr. Martin Seligman, founder of Positive Psychology, embarked on a painstaking search for the common denominator among the most fulfilled human beings. The most common element among these people? They all had richly fulfilling relationships.

Now, if you're an introvert who prefers a small number of intimate friends, don't panic. The common denominator isn't the quantity of one's relationships. It's the richness.
So what produces the richness of those relationships?

Love is comfort, commitment, the certainty that two people are compatible enough to support each other over the long term. It's one side of intimacy, the part that pries itself open and dares to share your life with someone. This is the seed of lasting commitment. But it must be complemented by connection. Why?

Because when the entire makeup of a relationship - say, a marriage - is love, but no connection, the marriage turns into a promise that's persisted for forty years, but both spouses have become much more like brother and sister than husband and wife.

Connection is chemistry, electricity, an abundance of moments charged with abandon and bliss. It's the flame burning in both the quiet moments between the two of you and the hours of adventure you go on whenever you're together. It's a sigh of satisfaction.

But what happens to a relationship built only on connection? It's like a rollercoaster! It's constantly up and down, dips and spins, climbs and dives without warning or release. While those emotions can become quite addictive, and while this relationship can give you lots of intensity, it's not going to be sustainable because ultimately, it doesn't provide the comfort or compatibility necessary for long term commitment.

So let's imagine you build a life filled with rich relationships. What happens when you're completely surrounded by people that encourage you and support you? Yes, you might just start to succeed at a few things - namely self-esteem - but you can also easily become comfortable, content, and then... complacent. Too comfortable to change or be challenged. That's why we're designed with a fifth human need:

Growth

Human beings all have the need to grow, to change, to be challenged. After all, it's a law of life that anything that isn't growing is dying. This is true in ever area of life, whether it's health, wealth, or relationships. There is no such thing as breaking even.

Imagine if you buried five hundred dollars under a rock. In five years, will it still be five hundred dollars? No! Why?

Because while that five hundred dollars has been sitting stagnant under a rock, the rest of the world's economy has been growing and expanding - or, as we call it, inflating.
This principle is true in finances, in fitness, in ever area of life. The clinical definition of death could easily be summed up by saying something is dead when it doesn't grow anymore.
That's why it's so important to choose friends and environments and activities that will not only support us, but challenge us to change and change for the better.

Imagine what the world would be like without growth. If you had grown beyond your baby clothes, but your food portions had stayed the size of baby bottles? If you had an amazing night with the person who became the love of your life, but the joy and fulfillment you felt from that moment never grew beyond that instant? If you achieved what had once been the driving goal of your entire life, but then never discovered what waited beyond it?

That's why so many people find themselves in relationships or even in the throes of ultimate achievement, but still end up asking, "Is this all there is?" Because while they've come to a place of certainty and security, they've forgotten to continue to be challenged and to continue growing beyond their current capacities and abilities.

But what happens when you become totally immersed in your own growth? That's when we become so self-absorbed we couldn't see someone else's point of view if it was carved into Mount Rushmore. When we become consumed with our own growth, we become submerged in our own concerns, and then it's no time at all before our problems start to seem larger than life and our own growth gets divorced from the greater good. That's why we're designed with a sixth human need:

Contribution

Contribution is a mystery and an art waiting to be discovered and at last understood. The problem that most people have is that they lose the confuse selflessness with charity. What's the difference?

Selflessness is still focused on the self. Let me say that again: selflessness is still focused on the self. Therefore, selflessness is not contribution. Why?

Selflessness is focused on denying its own needs. It gets it significance from its own sacrifice. This is a self-made martyr, someone who's focus is on the fact that they're giving up what they desire.

Charity is focused on the other person. Charity doesn't forget to consider itself, but it's primary focus is on the other person's needs. The motivation here is not to gain some sense of holiness from sacrificing our own needs, but to feel true fulfillment because we gave someone else what they needed. Charity asks someone what they need, and whether it agrees with what we need or not, whether it's what we assume the other person should need, we give them what they do need.

I'll give you an example from my own life. For the longest time, my dad was always telling me, "I'm proud of you". Now that's a strong, encouraging sentiment in itself, but it was always devoid of any context. In fact, he deliberately avoided any context, because he believed he should express his pride in me regardless of any action on my part.

The problem? That's in immediate conflict with the kind of compliments that actually do encourage me. I'm inspired by compliments that are based on something specific. "I'm proud of you because _____________", and fill in the blank with an accomplish or a character trait I hold dear.

When I asked my dad to make a small shift in his statements and make them about something specific, interestingly enough, the discussion turned into a debate! "I'm just trying to encourage you," he kept saying. I let him know I appreciated the attempt, but needed something slightly different to actually be encouraged. The breakthrough came when I said him this:

"Dad, I love you, and I appreciate all of the effort you make to encourage me. But are you insisting on telling me, 'I'm proud of you' without any reason because you know it does encourage me, or because you believe it should encourage me?"

"Because I believe it should," he said.
"OK. I appreciate your effort. That does encourage me. But the way you word this compliment doesn't."

Then a thousand watt light bulb went off over his head. Every compliment he gives me now has a very specific context, and not only has it been amazing for me to have the constant encouragement my dad provides, it's been amazing for him to focus his energy on what people do need versus what he thought people should need.

It's so important in life to get into the art of contribution because this human need is the North to which all the other needs point. We've all been told and it's turned into a cliche to say that "the secret to living is giving" and that "it's not about me, it's about we."

But when we recognize that the reason the themes of kindness and contribution keep creeping into our consciousness is because contribution is the most fundamentally fulfilling reason to live, then the cliche comes back to life and starts to mean something .

After all, the reason we grow is so we have something of value to contribute outside of ourselves. If we've already recognized the powerful appeal of community across humanity, then it's another small step to see that the best way to succeed is to help someone else succeed. That the power to push past our own failures and frustrations is in our power to give the gift of fulfillment to someone else.

The world is filled with people paraded across the headlines and nightly news who have enjoyed enough success to set world records, and yet who spend their lives going in and out of rehab and, too often, end their lives in ultimate tragedy.

When a young man with as much potential and acclaim as the actor Jonathan Brandis wastes away in alchoholism and hangs himself... When a man with as much popularity, love, and laughter as John Belushi loses himself in addiction and died from an overdose... it becomes clear what happens when we lose ourselves in our own accomplishments... and therefore in our own failures.

But the levels of delight, desire, and fulfillment that become available to people who don't just talk about making a contribution, but go out and live it are beyond our wildest dreams. People like Mother Theresa. Organizations like Habitat for Humanity. Causes like Amnesty International.

Regardless of whether these people or groups agree with your political or personal positions, the personal power they have exercised to make a true contribution makes them a testament to the power of the human spirit when we dare to see outside of ourselves.

12 Common Disempowering Beliefs

Below you'll find a list of twelve common disempowering beliefs identified by Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Therapy.

As you look at each of them, honestly consider whether you might hold that belief, and then look for a positive, empowering alternative.

1. I need love and approval from those significant to me, and I must avoid disapproval from any source.
2. To feel happy and be worthwhile I must achieve, succeed at whatever I do, and make no mistakes.
3. People should always do the right thing. When they behave obnoxiously, unfairly or selfishly, they must be blamed and punished.
4. Things must be the way I want them to be, otherwise life will be intolerable.
5. My unhappiness is caused by things which are outside my control, so there is little I can do to feel any better.
6. I must worry about things that could be dangerous, unpleasant or frightening, otherwise they might happen.
7. I can be happier by avoiding life’s difficulties, unpleasantness and responsibilities.
8. Everyone needs to depend on someone stronger than themselves.
9. Events in my past are the cause of my problems, and they continue to influence my feelings and behaviours now.
10. I should become upset when other people have problems and feel unhappy when they’re sad.
11. I shouldn’t have to feel discomfort and pain. I can’t stand them and must avoid them at all costs.
12. Every problem should have an ideal solution, and it is intolerable when one can’t be found.

The most common cause of unwanted weight and all disease

What if I told you there was one root cause of all unwanted weight and all disease?

Does that sound unbelievable?

And yet that's the power of Alkalinity - the power to produce profound health and age-defying effects in the body, or the power to make us vulnerable to even the slightest attack by microorganisms and bring about premature aging at an alarming rate.

What is Alkalinity? It's a measure of the body's balance on the pH scale.

The pH scale measures how acidic or alkaline something is. It ranges from 0-14, where 0 is pure acid and able to melt through steel, and 14 is purely alkaline. Pure water is right in the middle at a neutral 7.

So what is a healthy level of alkalinity? The body needs to be slightly alkaline on the pH scale to be at optimum health. To be precise, it needs to be at 7.36. This point on the pH scale is essential for survival. It's what produces the electric charge within the body and allows oxygen to flow through the systems. It's so essential that if the body becomes acidized enough to go to even point 7 on the scale, you will lapse into a coma and die.

Every point up or down the pH scale is ten times as acidic or alkaline as the point preceding it. That means that moving from 7 to 8 on the pH scale means becoming ten times more alkaline, while moving from 7 to 5 means becoming 100 times more acidic. When put in those terms, it's

easy to see why slight shifts on the pH scale produce such powerful effects on our health.

What happens when the body turns too acid? It first tries to rid itself of the acid through the waste processes. To do this, it reaches for its alkaline stores. That means borrowing minerals from the vital organs and bones of the body to buffer the acid and get it out of the body as fast as possible, even if this means profound injury to bone density, kidney health, and liver function. Why? Because the body knows that it can overload these organs and at least be around to try and repair the damage later. But if it doesn't protect itself from the acid, it will be eaten alive.

But what happens when the body becomes so acid that it can't rid itself of the acid waste? The body goes into panic mode and starts sandbagging against the flood of acid. It literally starts

building up walls where the acid can be stored or guarded against. What are the body's sandbags? Fatty deposits. Adipose tissue.

The body builds up these fatty deposits and dumps the acid into them as far away from the vital organs as possible. What areas are easy for the body to build fat stores and as far away from the vital organs as the body can find?All the areas people complain about becoming fat! The thighs, the buttocks, and the belly.

The number one reason for obesity is that the body has become so acidified that it's clearly told to start storing fat to protect itself from acid and breakdown.

When the body becomes too acid, the bones and vital organs start breaking down. When the bones and the body's organs break down, what do you think will be the next thing that suffers? The immune system.

As the body becomes more acid, its immunity becomes quickly compromised, and that swings the door wide open for disease to waltz into the body.

The connection between acidity and disease is not a new one. As far back as 1933, Dr. William Howard Hay published an ahead-of-its time book that demonstrated all disease was the result of the body's immune system becoming compromised by excess acid in the body. He wrote, "It may seem strange to say that all disease is the same thing, no matter what its myriad modes of expression, but it is verily so."

Where the body may be on the pH scale is directly proportional to how much energy we have and how quickly we appear to age. Why? Oxygen.

An environment rich in alkaline properties is by nature very oxygen rich. An acid environment by nature is oxygen deprived. What effect does that have on the body?

Let's start with the blood. Acid coagulates the blood. It thickens the blood cells and clogs them up until there's a veritable traffic jam of sluggish cells slowly trudging through the body.

This means the skin gets deprived of blood and oxygen, plus it

gets attacked by acid, which results in the skin losing elasticity and wrinkling.

Facelifts and lipsuctions can fight the rising tide, but unless the body becomes less acid and more alkaline, the skin is on a sinking ship.

So how can you become more alkaline? You must change the fundamental makeup of your diet

and your emotions.

Let's start with diet.

According to Sang Wang, author of "Reverse Aging", the only difference between "good food" and "bad food" is that "good food" will have less acid waste in the body and a more alkalizing result. What does that mean? It means that your pH balance depends on what's left after metabolism. That's why something like lemon juice, which would seem to be acidifying as it contains "citric acid", actually has an alkalizing effect on the body.

Take another example of two commonly consumed liquids and

the effects they have on the body's alkalinity. Pure water is neutral, or 7, on the pH scale. Carbonated drinks like Coke, whose primary ingredient is phosphoric acid, has a pH of 2.5. That's almost 50,000 times as acidic as neutral water, which means the body needs 32 times that amount of neutral water to counteract the consumption of Coke.

This affects not just the makeup up the body and the nutrients it already contains, but also the food we consume after the fact.

When the body becomes acidified, it also prevents us from absorbing the nutrients we may have started supplementing our diet with. Each mineral has its own pH level at which it can be assimilated by the body. All the minerals our bodies have become deficient in, especially those we've started supplementing our diet with, are already being rejected and excreted simply

because our bodies are too acid to absorb them.

Along with our diet, there's another primary producer of acid in our bodies: our emotions. When we go through emotional turmoil - anger, disappointment, frustration, fear - the stress creates enormous amounts of acid in the body.

So look at our previous example of crash dieters. Again, what happens after most people diet? They usually put the weight back on... and usually they gain even more weight! Along with the effects of starving the body, the stressful emotional environment they've created may have produced so much acid in the body that their tissues and organs have gone into panic mode and started storing fatty deposits to protect themselves. So along with having prompted the body to store everything they eat by entering "famine mode", they've also acidized the body and demanded it protect itself by building fatty deposits.

So you can get started alkalizing your diet and your emotions, take a look below at a short list of acidifying and alkalizing foods and emotions.

Acidifying foods

• beef, carp, clam, pork, salmon, shrimp, turkey
• bread, corn, flour, rice, wheat
• cashews, peanuts, walnuts
• black beans, chick peas, lima beans, soy milk
• cheese, milk, butter
• beer, liquor, spirits, wine
• blueberries, cranberries, olives

Acidifying emotions

• Anger
• Fear
• Frustration
• Disappointment
• Hate
• Overwhelm
• Revenge

Alkalizing foods

• asparagus, broccoli, cucumber, lettuce, peas, pumpkin, wheatgrass
• apples, apricots, avocados, bananas, oranges, lemons, peaches, pears
• daikon, shitake, kombu, reishi, nori
  
• almonds, chicken breasts, eggs, flax seeds, yogurt
• chili pepper, cinnamon, curry, ginger, miso, sea salt
  

Alkalizing emotions

• Affection
• Compassion
• Courage
• Enthusiasm
• Excitement
• Generosity
  
• Happiness
• Love
  
• Joy
• Patience
• Understanding

Famous Failures

Try to imagine how these icons of success must have felt when they failed:

• Albert Einstein was 4 years old before he could speak. He went on to revolutionize modern physics when he proposed the Theory of Relativity. In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
• Isaac Newton was considered an academic failure. One teacher described him as "unpromising." His Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica is considered to be the most influential book in the history of science . In a 2005 poll of the Royal Society, Newton was deemed more influential than Albert Einstein.
• Thomas Edison had a teacher who told him he was “too stupid to learn anything.” His teacher suggested he go into a field where he might succeed based less on intelligence and more on his pleasant personality. Later he developed devices that changed the world, such as the phonograph and a long lasting light bulb.
• F.W. Woolworth got a job in a dry goods store when he was 21, but his boss wouldn’t let him wait on customers because he "didn't have enough sense to close a sale." He founded F.W. Woolworth Company (now Foot Locker) and pioneered the model Sam Walton used to start Walmart.
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. So was Bob Cousy. They’re both in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
• Walt Disney was fired by his newspaper editor because he "lacked imagination and had no original ideas." Among his many “unoriginal achievements”: creating Mickey Mouse, receiving fifty-nine Academy Award nominations (and winning twenty-six of them), and founding Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
• Winston Churchill failed the 6th grade. He went on to become one of the United Kingdoms most celebrated Prime Ministers for his leadership during World War II. When he died, the Queen gave him the honor of a state funeral, which saw one of the largest assemblies of statesmen in the world.
• Fred Smith received a nearly failing grade for a business idea he presented to his business management class while studying at Yale University. The idea? He believed parcels could be delivered overnight at a profit using a private airline system with a centralized hub. Welcome to FedEx.
• Babe Ruth struck out 1,300 times. Now that’s a Major League record!

That's the kind of failure that stretches behind the road the success.

The difference between those who elude success and those who enjoy a life of achievement is in how they define failure.

"This thing we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
-Mary Pickford

Making Progress: Building your house on stone and constantly correcting your course

Have you noticed that what most people are capable of is often quite extraordinary, but what people will actually accomplish is too often very little?

If you're on the path to success, I want to congratulate you as one of the few who do! Rarely do people decide to succeed, and even more rarely do people take action. I encourage you to celebrate coming this far.

So you can sustain your momentum, take a second look at the first of the three elements that must be part of your success: your Target.

In order to be successful, you must make certain your Target is a goal that meets not only your desires, but your needs as a human being. Your Target must be truly fulfilling. Otherwise you’ll just have one more “to do” keeping you busy, and honestly, who needs that?

After all, when we busy ourselves with things that are unfulfilling and do not meet our needs as human beings, we leave no room left for those things that would enrich our lives, give to the greater good, and bring us success at the deepest level.

Think of your life like your stomach. If you pig out on junk food, it doesn't matter if you suddenly decide to have a healthy meal. You haven't left any room for nutritious fare.

If you do want to start eating healthy, you'll have to wait until your body reverses the damage you've done and cleanses itself of all the junk you've ingested. The only way to speed up that process is to consciously cleanse your body of the junk. It doesn't take going through an aenema to know they're no fun.

But if you want to produce dramatically different results in your health or in any other part of your life, this sort of reversing the damage is a must. You can't simply start from the state you're in. If you've built a house on sand, it does no good to begin planning the new wing of the house until the house has been pulled apart and rebuilt on stone.

Granted, the metaphor is imperfect. You could just abandon the old house and build a new one at a new location. But as far as I know, this is the only body, and the only life, you get, so abandoning it is what I believe they call suicide.

Progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. That place may be better health, more wealth, greater grades in school, more love in your relationship, more contribution to your community. But if you've gotten off the road to where you want to be, no matter how clear you may become what and where your Target is, it's useless unless you do an about-face and get started on the right road. Much like in arithmetic, if you realize after all your work you're actually very far from the right answer, the sooner you start over the better.

"(If) we are on the wrong road, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on."
- C. S. Lewis

Plus, as you travel towards success, you must constantly check your compass and correct your course. Your life will be much like an airplane soaring through the sky.

As an airplane flies toward its destination, the pilot is constantly going off course. In the journey from New York City to Las Vegas, the airplane may end up going the wrong direction literally hundreds of times. But how many flights have you heard of that end up landing at the wrong destination? Very few. Why? Because the pilot is constantly, consistently correcting the airplane's course.

In the same way, you must regularly reevaluate your progress and whenever necessary, however hard it may be to admit it, however much you may have become attached to your current strategy, you must correct your course and get back on track.

There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake.
- C. S. Lewis

The three things that must be part of your plan for success

Think of success as the mission and your life as the missle.

In order to fire the missle and know with certainty that it's going to land where you want it to, there are three things you must make part of your plan for success.

They are:

1. Your Target
2. Your Map
3. Your Fuel

Plus, there's a secret ingredient that must be included or all three of these things are useless.

Your Target

If all you do is fire a missle without asking where it's aimed, what's the likelihood it's going to impact in a place that fits your purpose?

Next to none.

You might end up taking out your next door neighbor or your own rose bushes.

And yet, this is what happens to most people when they decide to succeed. The number of people who set out determined to accomplish something great is huge. The number of people who actually achieve a great goal is very, very small. Why?

The problem is that most people have formed their goals in the negative. What does that mean?

Most people haven't decided what they want. They only know what they don't want. They haven't decided to "become wealthy." They have only decided to "not be poor." The difference between those two things might seem like pure semantics until you do the math and realize what a great gulf there is between poverty and prosperity. You could be, relatively speaking, quite far from poor, and yet nowhere near riches.

Or to use another analogy, it's the difference between deciding you want to be in the Bahamas and saying you don't want to be at work. If your Target is, "I don't want to be at work", think about all the other places you can end up that certainly aren't "at work"... and definitely aren't the Bahamas!

If you have framed your goal in the negative, this is not a target. Just because your missle isn't aimed at the neighbors doesn't mean it's aimed anywhere useful.

While it's certainly helpful to know where you don't want to go, what you don't want to do, and who you don't want to be, at some point, you must recognize that aiming away from something still aims you toward something, and that may not be anything you're interested in. Just because you aim away from something you don't want anymore doesn't mean you'll automatically aim at something you do want.

Plenty of people leave jobs they hate and end up at jobs they hate even more. Why? Because they suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? Because God and the Universe hate them?

No. Not even a little.

Most people bounce from one awful situation to another because they've spent their lives focused on what they don't want and haven't identified what they do want.

So take a moment and honestly ask, "What do I want? Where do I want to go? Who do I want to be?"

Once you know what your Target is, next you'll need your Map.

Your Map

Your map is your understanding of where you are, where you want to be, and what it's going to take to cross the distance between those two points.

For example, if you know you're in London and you want to be in Paris, but you have no idea how far it is to Paris or even what direction you should set out in, how likely is it that you'll make it to Paris? It's not impossible... but it's not likely.

Or let's say you entered the workforce without a high school diploma and you've decided you want to climb the heights of academia and earm a PhD, but you have no idea what kind of colleges are available to you or how long you'll need to be in school. What's the likelihood you'll be called Doctor one day? It could happen. Maaaaaaaybe.

The point is that your Map is only as effective as your knowledge about the journey you're going to have to take to get from where you are to where you want to be.

Why? Because the journey from high-school dropout to PhD follows the same principles as the journey from Las Vegas, Nevada to the top of Mount Fuji. You need to know where you are, where you're going (not where you're not going - because knowing you're not going to Istanbul is still a long way to the top of Mount Fuji), and what kind of journey you're setting out on to get there.

So figure out where you are, measure the miles it's going to take to get from here to there, plot out the time it's going to take, and then, find the fuel you'll use to get there.

Your Fuel

Your fuel is the energy, the inspiration, the drive you'll use to power yourself across the distance between where you are and where you want to be. This is an element of success that is as important as it is often ignored.

The fuel you'll use for success is of ultimate importance. You must choose your fuel wisely. Why?

Because it's like starting a campfire. If you need the fire to burn all night, but you choose the thinnest, driest brush as your fuel, the fire won't last the hour before you'll be forced to find a whole new fuel.

Or if you're going on a marathon run and you fuel up on a Honey Bun, how likely are you to make it across the finish line?

The fuel you choose must be lasting. It also must be healthy for your whole life.

Why?

One person chooses to build a business into the most successful of its kind because they want enough money and power on their hands to make Solomon blush. Another person chooses to build a business because they know with more success they can make an even greater contribution to the people in their life.

Some people fuel themselves through anger, envy, or revenge and even when they make it to their target, they find no fulfillment. They end up asking, "Is this all there is?"

Don't let that happen to you.

Choose a fuel that deserves to be burning at the core of who you are. Choose a fuel that honors you and the people you're blessed to be in contact with. Choose a fuel that brings you closer to your Creator.

Plus, there's a secret ingredient that must be included or all three of these elements are useless.

The secret ingredient

Your Target, your Map, and your Fuel are useless without the secret ingredient:

Honesty.

For your Target, your Map, or your Fuel to have any meaning, you've got to be absolutely honest about who you are and what you want from your life. When you determine your Target, Map, and Fuel, it's neither the time to delude yourself into thinking you're already at the pinnacle of perfection, nor is it the time to fool yourself into thinking you're a failure at every level.

Don't lie to yourself. That just delays you from achieving true success. The truth is, you may be far closer, or far more distant, from your target than you originally assumed.

Be honest about the gap between your desires and your destination and you'll be that much closer that much sooner to bringing your dreams through the window of your mind and out into the waiting world.

What separates a pet dog from a pet rock

What separates a pet dog from a pet rock? ENZYMES.

What are enzymes?

Under a microscope, they look a lot like proteins. In reality, the protein structure is what houses the energy of enzymes.

Think of them like a battery. It's not the battery casing that provides the energy, but the substances inside the battery. Make sense?

Enzymes are the catalysts that create our metabolism, the energy behind our actions, the power that propels our thoughts. They're what separates a pet dog from a pet rock. Why?

Without enzymes, a substance is just a collection of lifeless chemical substances - vitamins, minerals, protein, water.

With enzymes, a substance becomes a living thing, capable of metabolism, energy, action.

Perhaps you wonder what happens when we run out of enzymes. You might think when we run out, we die.

Well, you're right. Part of the mystery of life, aging, and death is that once our bodies run out of enzymes, the living part is over.

How does that relate to our diet?

Despite the FDA's well-intended, even-better-marketed message that what's missing from our diet is enough vitamins and minerals, that's simply not the whole story. In fact, with everything Calcium fortified and pumped up with protein, many of us now have an overabundance of these lifeless substances in our diet.

There's even evidence that diets so highly saturated in protein are a primary cause behind tumors and cancers.

This is what happens: High protein diets can cause blood and cells to become too richly supplied with protein. When this happens, the body does what is always does when it encounters excess: it attempts to secrete the excess, and failing that, decides to store it. When the lymphatic system becomes overwhelmed with protein, protein "traps" (tumors) are created, which are then isolated by the body to protect itself from the tumor's contents. When these tumor cells are deprived of oxygen by even 30% - not a huge number when we consider how acidic, and therefore oxygen deprived, the Western diet is - these tumor cells can quickly become malignant cancer cells.

What's the other consequence of a diet rich in fortified elements, but almost devoid of enzymes?

Enzymes are the source of our energy, the spark behind what separates animals from minerals.
Without them, we begin a slow descent into a necessarily sedentary life that culminates in us making a premature return to the ground.

After all, if vitamins, minerals, and protein were all we needed to be healthy, energized, and alive, then the ultra-fortified food that characterizes the Western diet would have us all climbing mountains and running marathons.

Is that the case?

No. Not even a little.

Most of us have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, surviving the day at work, and mustering the enthusiasm to do more than maybe visit the gym, make some dinner, watch some tv, and crawl into the bed.

Many times, we are smart enough to eat foods that happen to be rich in enzymes, but then we burn them out of the food by (over)cooking it. Overcooking food burns off 100% of the enzymes within it, so even when we add a healthy vegetable to our meal, we often cook it until its nutritional value becomes just as lifeless as a vitamin supplement.

That's not to suggest anyone should abandon all cooked foods and go totally raw, though it's clear that there are an enormous number of benefits to introducing as many raw foods into our diet as we can.

For example, look at the Pottenger Cat Experiment, which has been published in several books and even made into a movie. In this nearly ten year study, a number of cats were split into two groups. The first group got only cooked meat and pasteurized milk, while the second group got only raw meat and unpasteurized milk. The cats who were fed the cooked diet developed symptoms of all the major degenerative diseases found in humans. In every successive generation, the diseases became increasingly intense. At the same time, the cats who were fed the raw diet continued to produce litters of disease-free, healthy kittens for four generations. After that, the experiment was done.

What separates a pet dog from a pet rock? The presence of enzymes. These are what make your rock a lifeless collection of minerals and your dog make a tail-wagging, frisbee catching, car chasing, face-licking, howling bundle of love.

Though considering we tend to feed our pets the same brand of lifeless food we eat, it's easy to see how we're closing the gap in all our lives between animals and minerals.

Consider all this food for thought, and maybe the enzymes for action. Try adding a few enzymes to your diet. Pay attention to your energy levels, and report back what you learn.