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

participants that they have permission to focus fully on the session. This may seem like an
obvious point, but individuals often hold back when they feel they should be doing some other
work that is “more important” to the company. We want participants to know that this is important
work and they have permission to fully participate.
Having an enthusiastic senior leader introduce the session will also serve to “let you in” as the
facilitator. This is especially important if your relationship with the company or group is new. By
opening up the session and giving you the floor, the senior leader effectively announces that the
company trusts you to guide the group through the Why Discovery process and asks the
participants to give you their undivided attention and cooperation.
After you have been introduced and the floor is yours, we recommend you begin by sharing a
short WHY story. Sharing a personal WHY experience can go a long way toward forging a bond
with your audience. If you’re struggling to find a story you’re comfortable sharing, you can use one
of the stories we tell in this book (such as Steve, the “man of steel” in the introduction or La
Marzocco in chapter 4) or any story you find appealing from Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why.
(His descriptions of Apple [Inc.] and Southwest Airlines as companies with powerful WHYs are
very clear and compelling.)
Whatever story you choose to tell, it should illuminate what’s possible when a group of people are
united in service to a higher purpose. It should also illustrate how a common WHY can inspire
loyalty in a tribe. The story will function both as a real-life link to the reason for the session—to
find the organization’s WHY—and as evidence of the reward to be won by those who stay present
and engage in the process.
By this point, you will have spoken for about ten minutes, depending on the length of your opening
story. That’s plenty for now. It’s time to give the group the opportunity to talk. Invite everyone to

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pair up with the person beside them (if you have an uneven number, there can also be trios) and
come up with a response to this prompt:
If you think back to the time when you joined the organization, what inspired you most? What
inspires you to keep coming back?