The 5 Love Languages is a set of generalisations that help explain why certain people don’t feel loved in certain situations while others do. It is based on a book written by Gary Chapman called “The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate”.

It works on the idea that people receive and show love in five generalised ways. The five ways suggested in the book are:

• Compliments (i.e. having nice things said to you)
• Gifts (i.e. being given presents)
• Acts of Service (i.e. when someone makes the bed, mows the lawn or generally does something for you)
• Quality Time (i.e. when someone gives you their undivided attention and spends time with you)
• Touch (i.e. being held/touched)

So for example if someone feels most loved when they receive gifts then they may not feel totally loved in a relationship where they aren’t given gifts, even if they are touched in loving way and spend lots of quality time with their partner. If their partner was to begin giving gifts, even if they reduced quality time and the time spent touching then they would still feel more loved.

At the end of the day it is just another system of generalisation so take it with a grain of salt, but I have found it to be a really useful model when working on improving relationships with couples.

Recently I found this online test that is a quick and easy way to get a bit of insight into your primary love language. Well worth doing if you have a spare few minutes:

Further Reading:
The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate by Gary Chapman

This post re-iterates something that Tony Robbins is famous for sharing in his books and seminars. Tony talks about humans as having six fundamental needs. In our day to day lives we need these six things and, if they are ever missing, we change our behaviour until we get them. He goes so far as to say that all human behaviour is driven by the instinct to fulfill one or more of these six fundamental human needs.

Certainty/Comfort

Certainty and comfort are things that nearly all humans move towards. You get cold? You do something to warm up. You feel like you might lose your job? You either lift your performance or find a job that is more secure. Because the truth is that we all want comfort. And the easiest source of comfort is certainty. Certainty about what we can expect, certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow, certainty that we have a job to go to and certainty that there will be food in the fridge. If you stop for a moment and imagine those things not being true for you… it may not feel very comfortable. If you didn’t feel certain there would be food in the fridge tomorrow do you think you would be doing something about that? Yes, that is because certainty/comfort is a strong human need!

Variety

So the flip side to certainty is variety, and we need variety to feel alive. Without variety we feel dead inside. Humans can get variety by doing drugs, we can get variety by eating (Eating gives comfort AND variety.. interesting!). You can also introduce variety by setting goals, working towards challenges, starting a new job. Without variety in our lives we lack a source of adventure in our lives and things get boring and humans HATE being bored.

Significance

We all have a need to feel significant, important, special, unique – the feeling of being needed. Every single human has this need, the difference is how we go about it. Some of us pursue it by chasing material wealth, others pursue it through their spirituality while others gets significance from having more tattoos and piercings than anybody else they know! You can get significance in a positive, neutral or negative way. Some people even gain significance through being sick or having a major illness, while others fulfill their need through becoming a politician or leader of a local club. If you’ve ever heard someone say “They would never be able to cope without me” they are likely to be fulfilling their need for significance through their involvement.

Connection/Love

There is a fundamental need for people to feel part of a community. Even though there is a difference between connection and love, most people just (sadly) settle for connection. Connection is so much safer, you’re putting so much less at risk. But ideally we need love, and if we knew that we could have love without risks or dangers then we would grab it with both hands and embrace it. Not only do we want to be cared for, we have a need to care for those that are important for us too.

Growth

Humans have a need to feel like they are growing, like they are getting better and like they are advancing. This ties in beautifully with our need for variety as growth is a great source of variety. In fact, through gradually increasing the challenges involved in what we are doing, in order to grow, humans are most likely to experience the optimal human experience, flow. Anybody who has ever trained to win a sporting event, or indulged their competitive streak, has experienced the joy of fulfilling our need for growth and the challenges that brings.

Contribution

When humans feel like they are contributing it adds immensely to their experience. Whether they are contributing financially to a charity, by volunteering their time with a community group or even doing paid work for a worthwhile organisation the intangible feeling of ‘contributing’ can be so rewarding. The need to feel like they are a part of making the world a better place can be found in all of us.

So why is all this important?

Most people will pick one or two of these that are much more important to them than the others.You can probably think of someone who has a focus on Growth and Variety – maybe they are a sportsman constantly changing from one sport to another? Or someone who has a focus on Contribution and Certainty/Comfort that never really pushes their comfort zone yet gives a huge amount to their community… There are lots of combinations, but regardless of the combination, people are fulfilling some of these basic human needs with pretty much everything that they do.

When you look at that list can you think of the two that are most important to you? And, although prioritisng those two things will be getting you mainly what you want, is it possible that if you were to prioritise other needs you may open yourself up to a greater experience?

It is, by any measure, a thoroughly rotten experiment. Here is this beautiful German shepherd, lying in one corner of a metal box, whimpering. He is receiving painful electric shocks, stimuli that should leave him howling in pain. Oddly enough, the dog could easily get out. The other side of the box is perfectly insulated from shocks, and only a low barrier separates the two sides. Though the dog could jump over to safety when the whim strikes him, the whim doesn’t strike him. Ever. He just lies down in the corner of the electric side, whimpering with each jarring jolt. He must be physically removed by the experimenter to be relived of the experience.

What happened to that dog?

A few days before entering the box, the animal was strapped to a restraining harness rigged with electric wires, inescapably receiving the same painful shock day and night. And at first he didn’t just stand there taking it, he reacted. He howled in pain. He urinated. He strained mightily against his harness in an increasingly desperate attempt to link some behaviour of his with the cessation of the pain. But it was no use. As the hours and even days ticked by, his resistance eventually subsided. Why? The dog began to receive a very clear message: There was no way out. Even after the dog had been released from the harness and placed into the metal box with escape route, he could no longer understand his options. Indeed, most learning had been shut down, and that’s probably the worst part of all.

Source: Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School, 2008, J. Medina

Learned Helplessness is a term coined by Martin Seligman to describe both the perception of inesapability and its associated cognitive collapse. Or, in simple terms, how when you perceive you can’t escape you lose the ability to behave as if you have options – or learnt helplessness. These experiments were started in the late 1960’s and the results are similar with most animals, including humans.

Earlier I came upon this excellent modern day experiment on YouTube. It was conducted live on a class room of students and the results are discussed with them. Quite remarkable and well worth the time to watch:

What areas of your life could you have learnt to be helpless? Is it possible that you have limiting beliefs that are holding you back from exercising options? Or have you made limiting decisions because you felt you couldn’t do anything else? Now that you’ve read this post it could be a good time to do a bit of navel gazing and consider areas of your life where you’ve been limiting you behaviour. When would now be a good time to start re-exploring your options?

In March I was sent by Red Cross to Queensland to assist with the floods. This was my first time being activated interstate and it was into a new role, as Field Debriefing Officer. While in Queensland I was flown in and out of flood affect towns, sat for hours in airports both briefing and debriefing teams of volunteers and in between I spent as much time as I could on the phone debriefing volunteers who had returned home. This was the first time this role had been used and it meant that we could actively make improvements DURING the activation to make things easier for volunteers.

This role was incredibly rewarding. On one hand there was the visible destruction left by the floods, the destroyed homes and the emotional citizens. On the other hand there were the heart warming volunteers stories about the people they had helped, the amazing strength shown by the people affected and that warm fuzzy feeling of being part of something like the Red Cross in a situation like that. The days were long, sometimes needing to be at the airport before sunrise, and the mosquitos were vicious but the experience was overall very humbling – I wasn’t expecting such an emotional rollercoaster.

If offered the opportunity to assist again with the Red Cross I will be saying a loud YES. It blew me away just how well everything operated, and being part of such a strong team has left me with an experience I’ll remember for a very long time.