Find Your Why: a practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team pdfdrive com

Identify Your Themes
The next step in your Why Discovery is to identify themes: the recurring ideas,
words, phrases and feelings that emerged from your stories. Your partner should
take the lead during this part of the process. Remember, your partner has an
objectivity that you don’t have simply because you’re too close to see the
patterns. While you’re busy describing trees, your partner has a better view of
the forest emerging.
We see this all the time among people who want to learn their WHY. They think
they can play both roles—storyteller and partner. They try to analyze their own
stories and identify the themes themselves. We have yet to meet a single person,
however, who has successfully done it. (But we’ve met plenty who claimed they
did it, then they showed us a Why Statement that was about their business or
their family or some goal they wanted to reach. When pressed, their statements
or their “passion” for their statements fell apart.) Even when Simon developed
many of these techniques to discover his WHY, he asked someone to hear his
stories and help find the golden thread for him.
Again, your partner is focused on listening and recording and has the benefit of
objectivity. They are often hearing the stories for the first time, free of
complicating factors such as personal history, insecurities or ego. That’s the
reason the themes tend to be more obvious to them.
Just as there are no wrong stories, there are no wrong themes. If something
comes up more than once, write it down. There’s no limit to the number of
themes your stories may yield. You may end up with eight, ten, fifteen or more.
That’s okay. The first step for you and your partner is getting all the themes
down on paper.

---

With your themes all in one place, take a couple of moments to look them over.
In some cases, the theme will be in every story. However, your partner should be
able to tie each theme back to at least two of the stories you told. Remember, an
idea becomes a theme because it reoccurs in at least two seemingly unconnected
stories.
With all the themes listed, circle one or two that seem bigger than the rest—
those that jump off the page. The ones that inspire you or seem to define you and
what you care about most. Is there one you love more than the others? Ask your