The Influence of Needs

Human’s live needed many efforts to do what they expected and what will they achieve in their lives. According to Schunk et al., 2008, to survival everyone has the most basic that they should fulfill it. It is we called as a “need”, to determine several of needs we have three main points, which explain about need, there are:

1.      Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

2.      The need for self-determination.

3.      The need to preserve self-worth.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

         Hierarchy of needs Maslow has already made it to reflecting needs of the whole person. It consists of two big parts are Deficiency needs (the basic needs) and Growth need. For make you easier to know part of those things, let’s see hierarchy below. 

Survival ---> Safety --> Belonging ---> Self-esteem ---> Self-actualization.

          So, for deficiency needs consist of four parts, there are Physiological, Safety, Belonging and Self-esteem. While, for growth need is only Self-actualization. Physiological, it means we need shelter, food, warmth, water, etc. what we need every day and could not be skip. If you cannot fulfill the first stage (physiological), it means you cannot go forward to further stages. Second is safety, it means you feel free from physical or emotional threat. Let’s say if you live in restricted area which war happening at the time, you will not feel safety because your area is dangerous. So, it is what we called as a safety needs. Belonging means acceptance from others and self-esteem refers to recognition and approval from you towards what are you thinking about yourself.  While, the highest stage is self-actualization, it belongs to growth need not deficiency needs. Self-actualization is the way to reach person’s potential through intellectual achievement and appreciation. In this stage, sometimes people never satisfied about what they have got before.

        Actually Maslow’s theory got critics from other researchers, because the hierarchy’s inconsistency and lack of predictive ability. Actually I agree with that, because in some cases that hierarchy it does not run well orderly. Sometimes, one of those hierarchies loses because we cannot fulfill it or we skip from first stage to the third stage. It can be happen depends on the situation or condition, like people who have disable condition. But in my real experiences, I crossed all Maslow’s hierarchy and it was run orderly based on the stages. I did not skip one stage to another stage, but I followed orderly. Now, I have already felt in the highest stage, there is self-actualization. It is true, when we in growth need we never satisfied, although we have already got our first goal, but we still have other goals, so on and so on. I have felt it right now, I never stop in one direction but I always try to try new things that I have never felt before.

The Need for Self-determination

     Self-determination is the ability to act and control environment to promote motivation. Actually, it has three points to measure level of self-determination people, there are:

1    Competence

Competence is the ability to act effectively in the environment. What I have got based on my comprehension, in here we always try to “show off” about how good I am in order that other to impress others. If we could not “show off” our ability or knowledge, we cannot survive in our surrounding. So that is why it will increase our competence when we face challenges in our life and we can solve it well. The teachers have the main role to influence students’ perception of competence, through some ways are:

a.       Attributional statement. It is comment from our teachers and caused students’ performance. I have remembered that my teacher ever gave me comment about our presentation, and he said that: “Wow! You were so great. You looked a professional speaker. Keep it and make it comes true”. Wow I was shocked and it made me to make it real, so that is why his comment affected me towards my performance.

b.      Praise and criticism

c.       Emotional recation

d.      Offers of help

2      Autonomy

The effective way to increase students of autonomy is to give them choices. When they try to choose their choices, they feel have a responsibility on their works.

3       Relatedness

Is the feeling of being connected to others and feeling worthy of love and respect.

Relatedness has the essential role in the school, because it relates towards others, like friendship. After it comes, need for approval, it is desire to be accepted by others. If we do not feel accepted by other, sometimes it will decrease our self-esteem.

The Need to Preserve Self-worth

            Self-worth is a reaction to evaluate our self.  The most interesting of this part for me is about “Self-handicapping”. It is really interesting for me, because I often found that case since when I was in senior high school until now, but I just knew about it last week in Motivation Class. Actually, self-handicapping is the strategies to protect their self-worth. Sometimes, it was annoying, when my friend said that she/he had not study before exam but in the end I found she/he got the best score in the class.