What Do You Need to Be Whole?

In this episode of The Daring Well Podcast, host Rita Mercer invites listeners to reflect on a powerful question: What do you need to be whole?

Building on last week’s discussion about betting on yourself, Rita explores how understanding your core needs—based on Dr. William Glasser’s Choice Theory—can help you live with greater balance, self-awareness, and fulfillment.

Rita breaks down the five basic human needs—love and belonging, power, freedom, fun, and survival—and reveals how our daily choices often reflect our attempts to meet them. She guides listeners in identifying where they might be confusing wants with needs and how this mix-up can lead to exhaustion or emptiness.

This encouraging episode reminds us that wholeness isn’t about perfection—it’s about living in alignment with your true self. When your wants align with your needs, your choices start to serve you instead of stress you.

🪞 Key Topics Covered

• Choice Theory & Wholeness: Understanding the five core human needs that drive behavior.
• Wants vs. Needs: Why confusing them can leave you feeling unfulfilled.
• Emotional Awareness: How journaling and reflection build self-connection.
• Alignment Over Perfection: Making choices that nurture, not drain you.
• Wholeness as a Practice: Meeting your needs with love, grace, and authenticity.

✨ Reflection Questions

• What have you been chasing lately—success, love, validation, or security?
• Which of the five needs (love, power, freedom, fun, survival) does it truly meet?
• Is this pursuit bringing you closer to or further from balance and wholeness?
• How can you honor your real needs with compassion this week?

🌸 Quote from the Episode

“When your needs are met — love, belonging, power, freedom, fun, survival — you don’t have to chase wholeness. You become it.”

Wellness Spotlight

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💖 Connect & Support

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Transcript

Welcome to The Daring Well Podcast with Rita Mercer.

The Daring Well Podcast is a podcast about the health and wellness of people with chronic illness including 100% soy wax candles that are healthy for you and the environment, wax melts, solid lotion bars, and aromatherapy nasal inhalers.

You can shop online at www.daringwellshop.com.

And that's www.daringwellshop.com.

Hello, my dear.

Welcome back to The Daring Well Podcast.

If you tuned in last episode, you'll remember we talked about what it means to bet on yourself, to move way past out, to quiet all the noise, all the negative self-talk, and to build trust in your own self-worth.

Today, I want to take that conversation a step further and ask you some questions to help you to reflect a little bit deeper, hopefully to help you to walk away today with a way to shift how you see yourself and the choices that you make.

What do you need to be whole?

What do you need to be whole?

So Dr.

William Glasser developed choice theory.

It's a model to better understand the why and the what that's attached to what we do.

At the heart of choice theory, Dr.

Glasser teaches that all behavior is driven by five basic needs.

So if you remember from your high school psychology class, it's similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

But what I love so much about choice theory, not only in my professional life, but also my personal life, is because it goes so much deeper.

It helps us to better understand all of our basic needs.

And so choice theory talks about these basic needs.

And typically, as we walk through these, you'll find that there's one that's dominant.

So we have all these needs, but usually out of all the five, one is more dominant.

So here's the five basic needs, and they're not in any particular order.

But just take a moment as you reflect of which one's your dominant.

And so love and belonging.

So love and belonging looks like connection, looks like identity.

It looks like relationships.

The next need is power.

So power could look like the drive for achievement or success or very goal oriented.

Freedom.

So freedom looks like freedom to choose, freedom to be, freedom to create, freedom for time.

I will say for me, freedom is one of my strongest needs in this season of my life.

The next need is fun.

So when have you done something that was fun?

So fun looks like travel.

It looks like anything that you do with your hobbies.

So things that you do in your leisure time, things that light you up, things that bring you joy, things that hopefully turn off your brain for a moment so that you can unwind.

The last need is survival.

So we all have a strong need for survival or else we wouldn't be here today.

But survival looks like our very basic needs.

It looks like our health.

It looks like our sex drive.

It looks like our having our basic needs met as far as like housing and shelter.

It looks like food.

So all of your very basic needs for daily living, so that's survival.

Many times, we are driven to fulfill all these basic needs unconsciously.

So meaning it's out of our scope of awareness.

But if you take time to journal and to reflect, you can learn to increase your awareness.

You can learn to learn more about yourself, your connection to your actions, your connection to your emotions, your thoughts, and even down to your relationships.

So if you are feeling disconnected, this is a great way to feel more connected and more whole and more balanced, is to tune in to your needs.

The truth is, every choice that we make, whether it be good, whether it be bad, it's often our best attempt to meet one of our five basic needs.

So there's no shame or no guilt for trying to meet your needs, but try to think about a way that you can do it in a healthy way.

Sometimes what we want doesn't actually meet what we need.

Let me say that one again.

Sometimes what we want, it doesn't actually meet what we really need.

So think about, what do I want?

What do I need?

Now, let's take a moment to think about what do you want most for your life, for your family, for your career, for your relationships, for your health?

What do you want most?

So just to be clear, a want is not liking, like wishing up on a star.

Like a wish is just more fleeting.

But a want, it's a strong craving.

It's something that we choose because we think it's going to make us feel better.

But many times, it looks like validation from others.

Maybe it's control that we're seeking after.

Maybe it's comfort that we're seeking after.

Many times, a want is only focused on the short term.

So these temporary gains.

So when you think about what you want versus what you need, is it only short term focused?

Or is it long term focused?

So the difference from a want versus a need, so a need, it's something that goes a bit deeper.

It's what your heart, it's what your body, it's what your spirit requires to make you feel whole, to make you feel balanced.

When we confuse a want versus a need, we end up chasing things that actually drain us.

They drain our energy, they drain our life, they drain our joy.

Instead of things that actually nurture us, and things that fulfill us.

We might want to do all the things to prove our worth to others, when what we really need is to feel loved and accepted.

And that my dear, that's an inside job.

No one or nothing on the face of this earth can make you feel happy and whole.

It all starts with you and the choices that you make.

So, it's not somebody made me feel this way.

They did this, this situation happened.

Yes, those things do happen, but it all starts with you.

How you choose to receive it, how you choose to perceive it.

We might want to constantly find ourselves being busy, just for, busy for the sake of just being busy, because it feels productive, it feels predictable, it feels safe.

But what we need is rest.

What we need is reconnection, a reconnection back to our mind, back to our body, back to our spirit.

Wholeness is not about striving for perfection or pretending to have everything all together.

While you're internally struggling and stressing and feeling anxious, but being whole is about learning to live in alignment with your purpose, your truth, your values, your worth.

When what you want starts to match what you need, your choices, they start to serve you.

Let me say that again.

When what you want matches what you need, when it matches the energy, your choices for the actions, how you show up, what you do, it starts to serve you.

Those choices start to serve you instead of stress you.

So let's just pause and take another quick moment to reflect.

So what have you been chasing?

Is it a relationship?

Is it success?

Is it money?

Is it promotion on your job?

What have you been chasing?

And if you've been honest with yourself, how does the things that you're chasing, how does it meet one of your basic needs?

So those basic needs again are love, love and belonging, its power, its freedom, its survival, its fun.

So how does what you're chasing, how does it actually meet one of your basic needs?

One of your core basic needs.

Or is it pulling you further from balance and wholeness that you crave?

Wholeness, it grows from awareness.

You have to choose to be open, choose to be aware, and it definitely takes some practice to go deeper and to reflect.

But it begins the moment that you decide to choose differently.

The moment you choose to meet your real needs rather than feeding into your fears, feeding into your insecurities.

As we wrap up today, I just want to remind you that broken crayons still color.

Broken crayons still color.

So nothing is lost.

There's still an opportunity.

You just have to remember that it's all a choice in how you choose to see your circumstances.

When you choose to shift your focus to honor your needs with loving kindness and with grace, you are learning what it really means to meet your needs in a healthy and a life-giving way.

So this week, I invite you to journal.

I invite you to just simply be mindful and notice your choices.

What are you doing?

Is it in alignment with what you really need?

When you think about your wants, is there a mismatch between what you want and what you need versus what you're actually doing?

Ask yourself, is this choice or is this action meaning a real need?

Or is it just a temporary want?

You might be surprised by what you discover when you lean in, when you stay open, when you stay curious, without the weight of negative self-talk.

Because when your needs are met, love, belonging, power, freedom, fun, and survival, you don't have to chase wholeness, you become it.

Remember, you are worthy of all the things that make you whole.

All right, my dear, that's it for today's episode of The Daring Well Podcast.

Thank you so much for stopping by.

If this episode encouraged you, please do me a favor and share it with someone else who needs it.

Don't forget to leave a review.

It helps me to share this message of hope and wellness throughout the whole world.

Until next time, keep living, keep loving, and keep daring well.

Take care, my dear.

God bless.

Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of The Daring Well Podcast and One Step at a Time.

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