The Need I'm Embarrassed By

My supervisor asked if I'd consider extending my time in his role, and I said no before he'd finished the sentence.

There was no pause and no offer to think it over. Six months earlier I'd said yes to the same man without wanting to.

Several years ago, while I was working at a university in Sydney, my supervisor had been offered a secondment to work on a major change project, which meant that his substantive managerial role would be temporarily open. He'd asked me to act in it and I hadn't wanted the job. I knew, however, that the alternative, hiring an external candidate, carried a lot of uncertainty. Somebody I'd never worked with, and I had no way of knowing whether they'd be any good to work with. I couldn't sit comfortably in that. I said yes. If someone was going to run that team, I felt I needed to know exactly who it was.

For the next six months I worked twelve-hour days, six days a week. I put work ahead of everything else in my life. It cost me my health and a good deal of my confidence, and it soured how I felt about work and about life in general. Near the end, with the finish line finally in view, I came down with a flu and a fatigue that flattened me, and I went on five weeks of annual leave to recover.

When he asked me to extend, I had nothing left to negotiate with myself about. I had found out the hard way what it looks like to say yes while meaning no, and I wasn't doing it again.

I wasn't aware of what this was or what to call it at the time. I've since found the words, and an August LinkedIn piece by my friend, the CROSSROADS Coach Prajesh Chhanabhai, called Nothing repeats unless it's feeding something, captured it perfectly. He describes six needs that every human has: certainty, variety, significance, love and connection, growth, and contribution. Any habit you can't shake is feeding at least one of them, usually several. In his words, you cannot talk a hunger out of being hungry. What you can change is what you reach for.

I like five of the six without reservation. Variety keeps a week from flattening into the one before it. Significance is the feeling of mattering in a room. Growth is why I read and train, and contribution is the reason I do this work at all. Love and connection is the experience of being valued for who you are, among people who share your tribe. I'd happily build a life around any of them.

Certainty is the one I have the most trouble with. Whenever I do a quiz or a survey on these needs, it lands at or near the top of my list, and it embarrasses me every time. It feels like an adolescent's priorities, an immature, even developmentally stunted preoccupation with safety and security at the expense of the spontaneous wonders of life. It also seems a little delusional, since nobody gets certainty, which means I'm paying real self-respect for an outcome that doesn't exist. Beyond survival, I've never been able to name a good result that comes from needing it.

It goes back a long way. Where I grew up, uncertainty usually meant something bad was on its way, and the devil you knew beat the devil you didn't. I carried that into adulthood. In my early twenties I settled for less in more than one part of my life because the less was predictable, and I called it being sensible.

I ran the secondment through Prajesh's method. The plain behaviour: I said yes to a job I didn't want. What was it feeding? Certainty, by a distance. I paid six months of my life to know who I'd be working with and how the work would get done. The trade made sense to me at the time, and I could still build the argument for it today.

A few years later the same need cost me more. It showed up as a run of small concessions, each one slightly bigger than the one before, until I had compromised the principle of integrity I'd always held, in exchange for the feeling of having things under control. I burned out, resigned, and spent months putting myself back together.

Certainty arrives with a need for control attached, and control is easy to mistake for a strength. Some of it is. I believe the wish to steer my own life reflects real personal agency, and I'd defend that. The trouble starts when it leaks into other people's lives and I begin managing their outcomes along with mine. That has damaged working relationships I would have liked to keep.

I knew then, as I still do now, that nothing in life is certain or constant. I could and can say it in my sleep, and knowing it still did very little for me. Understanding an idea and living by it are separate skills, and the first one is quick. Reminding myself that nothing is certain was an attempt to talk the need out of being hungry, and the need never backed down.

What changed was what I feed it with. I channelled my need for certainty into how I show up: what I'll agree to and what I won't, along with the standard I hold myself to when a conversation gets difficult. I can guarantee that one for myself, and it holds when outcomes don't. A few years ago this was a daily problem. Now it is something I watch for. It still turns up when I'm tired or under pressure, and I recognise it much sooner than I used to.

Prajesh closes his piece by saying that a habit you're embarrassed about kept something alive in you when nothing better was available, and that it deserves a nod on the way out. Certainty did that for me as a kid, in a house where uncertainty usually meant trouble. I'm learning to thank it for that.

If you want to run this on yourself, start with one thing you keep doing that you'd rather not. Describe it plainly, as you would to someone who knows nothing about you, with none of the story you tell yourself about it. Then take the six needs one at a time and ask how much this habit gives you of each. Rate each from one to ten, where ten means the habit delivers that need powerfully every time you do it. Be honest, particularly about the ones that make you wince. Anything that scores eight or above is probably what keeps the habit going. Whatever replaces it has to feed those same needs, or the old habit drifts back. Give the replacement a fortnight before you judge it.

If you'd like company while you work on this, RECKON for Men is where I do that work alongside other men. The next cohort starts on Wednesday 21 October, and applications close on Monday 19 October.

If you'd rather work 1:1 with me, book a See What Needs to Change call and we'll work out what's going on and what to do about it.