What is your WHY?

It may have been a SMART goal and set the appropriate measure of how you will achieve what you want to achieve, but you still fell short. We often set the structure of goal attainment by firstly identifying what we want to achieve (eg. Lose 5kg) and determine how we will achieve it (eg. Eat better and exercise more). This is a good starting point but there is a critical step that we have missed - that is, WHY do we want to achieve our goal. 

From our experience of helping thousands of people achieve amazing results, this is the most critical step. To be honest, I used to make the common mistake early in my career of starting with what and how. This stems from the learning of the many goals setting techniques available out there, such as SMART goals, Micro Goals, Visual Goals etc, not to disparage them as they are effective techniques, but I believe they overlook starting with WHY. A strong enough WHY will overcome any WHAT or HOW!

I’m going to lie; this is not a concept I spawned. This concept is inspired by Simon Sinek and his bestselling book ‘Start with Why’. I highly recommend the book for anyone who is interested in Goal attainment success or any form of success for that matter

What is your why? It’s a good question. How do you answer that question? Your why is what you associate your identity with.

“I want to be fitter, so I can keep up with my children.”
“I want to be stronger, so I am pain free.”
“I want to have more energy so I can be more productive at work.”
“I want to have more confidence so I can build more meaningful work/social relationship.”

As you can see with the above identity statements, each ‘want’ (WHAT), is followed by a ‘so’ (WHY). Example “I want to….. so that I….”

So, next time you set yourself a goal, first ask yourself WHY!