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

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Here is your road map for the process of articulating your HOWs. The template
is the same for both individuals and tribes.
NARROW REMAINING THEMES
STATE YOUR HOWs

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PROVIDE CONTEXT
The HOWs Process
When you went through the process of discovering your WHY, you identified a
number of themes in the stories you told. One or two of these themes—the ones
that resonated most—were incorporated in your Why Statement. The rest of the
themes have been sitting there waiting for you to do something with them. Now
is that time. The remainder of this chapter is dedicated to showing you how to
turn those remaining themes into HOWs by following the three steps, outlined
below.
Narrow Remaining Themes
Take your list of themes and cross out the ones you
channeled into your Why Statement. Then narrow the
remaining list of themes until you have no more than five.
Why five rather than six? There’s no science behind this. It’s just that in the
thousands of times we’ve done this process, we have consistently found that the
themes can be successfully boiled down to a maximum of five separate and
distinct ideas. Sometimes there are only four, but never more than five. We’ll
show you how to focus your themes below. Since the Tribe Approach leaves you
with a list of active verbs (e.g., to embrace the unknown, to protect, to connect),
we will use an example of how an individual would work through the process
because their themes may still need some additional work. A tribe follows the
same process.

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After drafting a Why Statement, this person had eight more themes on their list:
Joy
Optimistic
Connection
Feeling of safety
Always learned from others
There’s always a solution
Protected loved ones
Problem solving
First, look for themes that express similar ideas. Once you identify these
overlaps or redundancies, you have two options—keep one and cross out the
other or combine them to create a new theme. In the example above, “Protected
loved ones” and “Feeling of safety” are very close in essence. If one felt more
right that the other, that’s the one we’d keep. In this case, we come up with a
phrase that draws on both: “Making others feel safe.”
Another overlap was “There’s always a solution” and “Problem solving.” Again,
we would keep one or combine them. Here, it felt right to keep “There’s always
a solution.”
Similarly, another pair was “Joy” and “Optimistic.” A dictionary would define
these words differently, but remember, for the purposes of the discovery
exercise, we are guided not by the dictionary but by referring back to the stories
that inspired these themes in the first place. In this case, they chose to hold on to
“Optimistic.”
We now have a final list of five:
Optimistic
Connection
Making others feel safe
Always learned from others
There’s always a solution

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