Core Human Drives - The Personal MBA (2024)

FAQs

What are the core human drives? ›

Human beings have four fundamental, biological drives: acquiring, bonding, learning, defending. We're in the business of helping our customers. Our customers are human beings, with wants, desires, and needs of their own.

Drive to Bond: the desire to be loved and feel valued in our relationships with others. Drive to Learn: the desire to satisfy our curiosity. Drive to Defend: the desire to protect ourselves, our loved ones and our property. Drive to Feel: the desire for emotional experiences like pleasure or excitement.

McClelland's human motives model distinguishes three major motives: the need for achievement, affiliation, and power. The power motive stems from a person's desire to influence, teach or encourage others.

Jaan Panskepp, a radical neuroscientist identified human beings are driven by seven ancient instincts, or “primary-process affective systems,”. These are seeking, anger, fear, panic-grief, care, pleasure/lust and play. Interestingly, it is thought that the most powerful instinct is “seeking”.

Biology also shapes who we are and how we act. To that end, Enneagram experts have identified three key biological drives, or “instincts,” that influence our feelings and actions: self-preservation, sexual, and social. While one instinct tends to dominate in each of us, we're endowed with all three in varying measures.

Maslow was right. Once we have food, water and shelter we must feel safety, belonging and mattering. Without these three essential keys a person cannot get in their Smart State—they cannot perform, innovate, feel emotionally engaged, agree, move forward.

Let's not forget that the #1 human drive is control, so it makes sense that challenges will disrupt our natural desire for control. Good news is that we have control over our outlook, so we can choose to accept challenges that come our way and apply positive outcomes to them.

King writes that people are often motivated by the pleasure principle: the desire to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. It's our most basic, primitive motivator, and it drives virtually everything we do.

Human behavior is driven by rewards and punishments in addition to the drive to fulfill the need for a sense of significance. This is achieved through a perceived sense of control over one's life, a sense of social belonging, and a sense of effective social contribution.

In essence, Core Motivation helps us understand our fundamental personality types in order to help describe what motivates us, what makes us tick, and how we can become leaders in our own right.

What are the three core motives? ›

McClelland's Human Motivation Theory states that every person has one of three main driving motivators: the needs for achievement, affiliation, or power. These motivators are not inherent; we develop them through our culture and life experiences.

Decades of research have given us numerous theories about drive and motivation, to include: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization) Intrinsic and extrinsic motivators (inner satisfaction and desires, external rewards and payoffs)

Developed by psychiatrist William Glasser, Choice Theory states humans are motivated by a never-ending quest to satisfy 5 basic needs woven into our genes: to love and belong, to be powerful, to be free, to have fun and to survive. Specifically: Survival, belonging, power, freedom, and fun.

What Drives Us? According to Sigmund Freud, there are only two basic drives that serve to motivate all thoughts, emotions, and behavior. These two drives are, simply put, sex and aggression. Also called Eros and Thanatos, or life and death, respectively, they underlie every motivation we as humans experience.

Explanation: While primary drives are directly related to basic survival and reproduction, secondary drives are related to social factors. Money is not directly related to basic survival, but it can aid in quelling primary drives (for example, using money to buy food to reduce hunger).

In evolutionary psychology, people often speak of the four Fs which are said to be the four basic and most primal drives (motivations or instincts) that animals (including humans) are evolutionarily adapted to have, follow, and achieve: fighting, fleeing, feeding and mating (the final word beginning with the letter "M" ...

Drive states motivate us to accomplish goals. They are linked to our survival. According to Pribram, feeding, fighting, fleeing, and sex are the four drives behind every thought, feeling, and behavior.

All humans possess the four drives but different individuals may engage some or all of the drives to different degrees. Some individuals may favor one or more of the drives, such as a very friendly, warm-hearted person who favors the bonding drive, or a very combative, defensive person who favors the defending drive.