The Therapist and The Coach Podcast - EP 021

Episode 21: Needs, Wants, and the Values That Bring Us Home In this episode, Lerae and Oren turn toward a distinction that is both practical and deeply revealing: the difference between needs, wants, and values. What begins as a conversation about giving listeners a place to start becomes a rich exploration of how unmet needs can quietly shape desire, drive behavior, and blur the line between what is truly necessary and what has become a substitute for something deeper. Rather than treating this confusion as failure, Lerae and Oren hold it as part of the human experience—an understandable consequence of growing up in families, cultures, and systems that often teach people to seek outside themselves what was never fully received within. At the heart of the episode is the recognition that many wants are not shallow at all, but misdirected attempts to meet old needs. Oren speaks to the ways people can come to believe they need wealth, status, relationship, recognition, or achievement when those pursuits are actually standing in for a more foundational need—love, safety, belonging, or being seen for who they are. Lerae adds a clarifying and hopeful lens through both Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and her own coaching perspective, emphasizing that unmet needs can drive a life in ways that feel exhausting, repetitive, and ultimately empty, while values point toward what is genuinely sustaining and life-giving. Together, they illuminate how a life driven by unmet needs can keep a person running in circles, while a life oriented around values begins to restore alignment, fulfillment, and inner authority. The conversation also gently invites listeners into reflection rather than urgency. There is no demand here to solve oneself all at once, only an invitation to notice: What do I say I need? What am I driven toward? What am I drawn toward? In that distinction, a different kind of freedom begins to emerge. Lerae and Oren suggest that when people learn to recognize their needs, meet them more consciously, and distinguish them from both cultural conditioning and personal values, they begin to reclaim the possibility of living from something truer. This episode is ultimately an offering of language, perspective, and compassion—a reminder that the path home often begins with a single honest question about what is really driving us. Sometimes the first step toward fulfillment is learning that what drives us and what calls us forward are not always the same thing.