The Awake Advantage™ · 2026 · The landing finding

The Top 5 Needs of the Living

Time · Energy · Purpose · Tools · Confidence

Not employees. Not executives. Not human resources. Living, breathing human beings. When we asked what people need, they rarely named a skill. In a hundred different ways, they asked for their lives back.

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Drawn from 1,750+ pre and post responses · C-suite to frontline · 100+ organisations · 2020 to 2026

01The question

For years we asked one question: what do you need?

Not to perform. Not to hit the number. Just: what do you need? Across 1,750+ answers, from the C-suite to the frontline, the same themes surfaced again and again, and what struck us was how human they were. No one asked for another skill or a productivity hack.

The dying tell us their regrets. The living are telling us what they need, while there is still time to give it to them.

The modern workplace keeps asking what employees need to perform. The real question is what human beings need to stay fully alive while they perform. That is a far bigger conversation than wellbeing.

02The top 5 needs · Not one is a skill

Five needs. Five barriers. Not one is a skill.

01Time
“I need time for myself, without guilt.”

The barrier: the confidence to ask for it.

The number-one ask, cohort after cohort, and it comes welded to guilt. People want permission to use some of their life for themselves.

The full picture

Time was the number-one request, and it never arrived alone. It came wrapped in guilt. People did not want spare minutes; they wanted permission to spend a little of their one life on themselves without apologising for it. The striking part was how much they had already given, and how foreign it felt to ask for anything back.

02Energy
“I need to feel alive again.”

The barrier: believing that rest is earned.

The body, named before any tool. Not a productivity hack, but energy, rest and health. Three in four arrived on a near-empty tank.

The full picture

They named the body before any tool. Most arrived running on a near-empty tank: short on energy, rest and health. Beneath the diaries and the deadlines, the honest need was simple: something left at the end of the day for the people they love and the life they are supposedly living. Recovery is still read as risk.

03Purpose
“I need to know why the work matters.”

The barrier: space to reconnect the work to its why.

Clarity and purpose: why the work matters, not how to do it. The second-most-named need.

The full picture

Underneath the busyness sat a quieter question: why. People had lost the thread between what they do all day and what they actually care about. What they needed was not more motivation, but a reason worth the effort they were already making. It was the second thing they named, after time.

04Tools
“I need something that holds on the hard days.”

The barrier: simple structures I will actually use.

Practical tools and routines: small structures that survive contact with real life, not another framework.

The full picture

People were not short of frameworks. They were short of anything that survived a real day. What they asked for was practical and small: routines and structures simple enough to hold when the pressure came. Not another model to admire, but a handful of things that actually worked when everything else did not.

05Confidence
“I need to back myself again.”

The barrier: quietening the self-doubt underneath.

Belief that holds regardless of the day. The quiet constraint beneath everything else.

The full picture

For all the competence in the room, the quietest need was belief. People wanted confidence that held regardless of the day: steadier than the last result, louder than the self-doubt underneath. Not arrogance. Just the settled sense that they were enough for what was being asked of them.

The top five needs and barriers, in participants' own words · Awake pre-program open-text responses across cohorts · 2026

03The pattern is the finding

What stands between people and what they need is almost never a resource.

It is permission, confidence, clarity and belief: the internal layer that appears on no report an organisation runs. People do not always know how to ask for what is actually constraining them. People ask for relief; what they need is capacity. It is access and permission, not appetite.

We have spent decades asking people to give more to work. Our data shows what they are asking for back: time, energy, purpose, the right tools and the confidence to use them.

04Keep listening · A Wake Up Call

This page is the data. The podcast is the people.

Hosted by Layne Beachley AO and Tess Brouwer, A Wake Up Call is where the research meets real lives: honest conversations about performance, capacity and getting your life back while you deliver.

Listen to A Wake Up Call
05The keynote · The top 5 needs of the living

Put the needs of the living on your stage.

A 60-minute keynote built exclusively on this research. Layne Beachley AO and Tess Brouwer take your leaders inside the Top 5 Needs of the Living: what 1,750+ people said they need, in their own words, the barriers that stand between them and it, and what it takes to meet each need before Capacity Debt compounds. Your people will hear their own unspoken needs named on stage. Evidence-led, deeply human and immediately usable.

The result is The Human Advantage: the capacity to perform consistently under pressure, without burning out.

99% would recommend the work, across reported program data · 1,750+ pre and post responses across 100+ organisations, 2020 to 2026

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06Common questions

The needs, answered.

01What are the Top 5 Needs of the Living?

Time, energy, purpose, tools and confidence. When Awake asked people before and after programs what they need, these five themes led every cohort, C-suite to frontline. No one asked for another skill or a productivity hack; the clock and the body lead.

02Where does the data come from?

Awake's own participant research: 1,750+ pre and post program responses across 100+ organisations between 2020 and 2026, alongside a 188-person community survey and 600+ written reflections. Cohorts span insurance, rail, transport, airlines, finance, retail, professional services, men's and women's leadership and regulatory bodies, anonymised by sector. It is published in The Awake Advantage™ 2026 white paper, independently reviewed by neuro-performance scientist Dr Kristy Goodwin.

03Why “the needs of the living”?

Bronnie Ware famously recorded the regrets of the dying. This list is the counterpart, gathered while there is still time to act. The dying tell us their regrets; the living are telling us what they need, and every one of these needs can still be met.

04Is this a wellbeing list?

No. It would be easy, and wrong, to read this as a wellbeing problem. It is a human one, and now a measurable one. The barriers behind the needs are permission, confidence, clarity and belief: the internal layer that determines whether capable people can keep performing. That is human performance, and it responds to structured capacity work.

05What stands between people and what they need?

Almost never a resource. Each need has an internal barrier: the confidence to ask for time, believing that rest is earned, space to reconnect the work to its why, structures simple enough to survive a real day, and quietening the self-doubt underneath. People ask for relief; what they need is capacity. It is access and permission, not appetite.

06What is Capacity Debt?

Capacity Debt is visible performance funded by invisible borrowing against the human underneath. Capable leaders keep delivering while privately carrying exhaustion, self-doubt and a fading sense of why the work matters. It appears on no report an organisation runs, which is why Awake measures it directly with pre and post program data.

07How do organisations act on the five needs?

Start with the keynote: 60 minutes on the Top 5 Needs of the Living, built exclusively on this research and delivered by Layne Beachley AO and Tess Brouwer. From there, Awake's suite runs from the 3-hour Thrive workshop to The Edge and the flagship Elite Performance Program. One architecture, keynote to program.

08Where can I hear more?

On A Wake Up Call, the Awake podcast, and in The Awake Advantage™ 2026 white paper, available from the Awake homepage.

The Human Advantage

The living are telling us what they need.

While there is still time to give it to them. Book the Top 5 Needs of the Living keynote and give your leaders the evidence, the language and the permission to rebuild capacity.

Build Capacity. Performance follows.

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