Step 7: ‘Fulfill basic needs’ is a very important MIR-Method step. It ensures that all the needs that you missed having fulfilled during your youth, become fulfilled. Basic needs are for example: Love, Respect, Being Noticed, Being Heard, Safety or Protection. This time I’m looking at the basic need for “Recognition”.

Half full glass of recognition

See it as an empty glass. Was your glass of “Recognition” ever filled properly? Did your father ever praise you? Did he ever tell you he was proud of you? Or that you did well? If not, your basic need for Recognition has never been fulfilled. Your glass of recognition remains only half filled. You spend the rest of your life craving the Recognition you missed so much. And you try to find this Recognition in other people. “Did I do well?” “I performed, are you proud of me now?”

The law of basic needs

There is one major law with basic needs, an annoying one. What you missed in Recognition in your youth from your father, you can never again get from him, simply because you are no longer a child.

Let go of the drive to perform

If you spend your life longing for your father’s Recognition: “Dad, am I doing it right?” or “Are you proud of me?”, you can develop the tendency to always be performing, in work or in sports, for example. It’s never enough and you continue to chase after achievements, hoping to heal the pain of missed Recognition. But you don’t resolve the pain by continuing to perform. You only lose yourself further. You cross your own boundaries.

How to fulfill Recognition

You can resolve it by giving yourself Recognition, here and now, with the MIR-Method, for example. With step 7, you supplement the basic needs you have missed so much. And Recognition is one of them. You’ll find that the drive to perform that pushed you forward, diminishes. It enables you to accept slowing down a bit and to not need to go over your own boundaries any more. And: you find yourself good enough! You don’t need to prove yourself to anyone any more!

Attention, athletes!

People, who are involved in professional sports, should think 10 times before doing the MIR-Method. The reason is that if their ability to perform is based on pain from their childhood, their ability to perform can diminish. They come into a period of refocusing. Their passion to perform will have to change from “perform from pain” to “perform from love for one’s own growth”. Professional athletes can recognize whether they live from their pain by looking at their tendency for injuries and by looking at the satisfaction they feel from their wins. If they often have injuries, chances are that they are subconsciously sabotaging themselves because they don’t want to perform any more to receive only love. And if they don’t find real satisfaction in their wins, they are performing for someone else. Athletes who do well can only do so out of love for themselves; from the pleasure of experiencing whether they go further, better, faster. Perform a little better each time, experiencing the pleasure of real growth.

Attention, business people!

People with important positions in businesses should think 10 times before starting the MIR-Method. When their need for recognition begins to be fulfilled the need to perform wanes. If it is based on pain, it becomes continuously more visible that they are running past themselves in the drive for recognition. Performing, earning more and more, scoring new projects and booking great successes pale and the real need for “peace” and “being good enough” come to the forefront. The consequence can be that years of being hollowed out by their stressful lives can change into an intense fatigue by doing the MIR-Method, resulting in symptoms of illness. Is that a bad thing? No! It’s a release! They get the chance to get back in sync with themselves, to find themselves again. Being at home, resting, truly seeing their partners and/or (grand)children again. Experiencing nature again and experiencing quality of life, can be enormously enriching for these people, an enrichment they passed by for many years. They rediscover themselves.

The ‘harshness’ of the MIR-Method

If you do the MIR-Method, it’s possible you can no longer bring yourself to do what you used to do so effortlessly. It may seem as if the MIR-Method is “bad” or “only brings trouble”. I can easily imagine people reacting in this way, until they have gone through this period and see what it has brought them. The “harshness” of the MIR-Method then appears to have been necessary to bring to light the true beauty of life.

My wish for you is that your need for Recognition becomes fulfilled and that you will start to live, giving Recognition to yourself!
Mireille Mettes

And how about you? Did you become tired at first when doing the MIR-Method, forcing you to change and that it is now bringing about positive changes in your life? I’d love to hear about it from you! Please write your story below. Thank you!
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