Discovering Your "Why" Is An Inside Job

Discovering Your “Why” Is an Inside Job

Does the thought of your company becoming extinct keep you up at night?

Do you wonder how to motivate and keep your people engaged and focused?

The answer to the challenges that keep leaders anxious is in having a simple but highly effective business tool – know what you stand for. Know your “WHY”. The concept is simple; understand, accept and articulate your own purpose and that of your enterprise.

The path to discovering your Why begins with “I”. It is a reflective process and requires self-examination of your belief systems and where they originated. The clues are easily found. They are in the stories you tell about your life. They could be moments that deeply affected you in your childhood or in your school years.

Many years ago I was coaching a wonderful young doctor.  I asked him to share his challenges and successes from the age of 21. As I listened to the peaks and valleys of his life I suddenly felt I was missing something in how he formed his decisions. I asked f anything significant had happened earlier in his life that guided his decision making. His response changed the way I asked the question forever after – he told me that his father took his own life when he was 19. Now I ask YOU, wouldn’t that change how you behaved and how you would make decisions with such a traumatic event influencing your thinking? That story was a big clue to finding his Why.

Influences don’t have to be traumatic but they are usually formed by young minds. Examining the stories that you tell your friends, your children, or your employees is therefore the logical place to begin to discover you Why, your purpose for existence.

You may wonder how your personal Why can then relate to that of your business. When you are authentic and passionate about what you do, you will find that they are in complete alignment. People will follow you, not because they have to but because they want to. You will attract those people whose beliefs are in alignment with you.

The bottom line is that in communicating internally or externally everything you say and do will be better served through the filter of your Why.