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

CHAPTER 6
State Your HOWs

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Up to this point we’ve focused on articulating your Why Statement either as an
individual or a tribe. The goal of this chapter is to help you complete your
Golden Circle. As a reminder, the Golden Circle consists of three parts: WHY,
HOW and WHAT. All three parts are equally important. When those three things
are in balance we are at our natural best. We are truly living our WHY. Our
WHY is our purpose, cause or belief—the driving force behind everything we
do. Our HOWs are the actions we take when we are at our natural best to bring
our WHY to life. Our WHATs are the tangible manifestation of our WHY, the
actual work we do every day. While other individuals or organizations may
express their WHY in a way that is similar to yours, it’s HOW you bring your
WHY to life that makes you unique. As a result, the combination of your WHY
and HOWs is as exclusively yours as your fingerprint.
Like the Why Statement, HOWs are not aspirational. They do not express who
we want to be. They express the manner in which we actually behave—the
things we actually do—when we are at our best. They are the actions we can
choose to take on a daily basis to help ensure that we’re creating the type of
environment in which we thrive.
You’ve already laid the groundwork for articulating your HOWs, because they
are derived from the themes you listed during the Why Discovery process. The
themes that didn’t end up in your Why Statement will serve as the foundation for
your HOWs, which take us from theory to practice.
Your HOWs Are Your Strengths
During either the individual or the tribe Why Discovery process, you identified
several themes. These themes are your strengths. It’s likely your partner or
facilitator helped you uncover themes that you didn’t even realize were such a
big part of who you are or who your tribe is when at its best. These behaviors
were so natural to you that you may have been thinking, “What’s the big deal?
Isn’t that what anyone else would have done in that situation?” The reality is
what we hold dear and the way in which we behave in the name of those values

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can differ wildly from person to person or tribe to tribe. As the partner or
facilitator, one of our favorite things is helping people see how unique and world
class they truly are—that moment when someone is able to step back, look at the
patterns and recognize how spectacularly awesome they are. Your HOWs are the
ingredients you need to be at your best. Together, they are your recipe for
success—your strengths. And this is true for both an individual and a tribe.
To understand this better, let’s look at HOWs from the individual perspective. As
social animals, we do not always operate entirely on our own; we need others to
survive and thrive. Knowing the WHY and HOWs of those closest to us can be a
huge advantage. At Start With Why, we have a culture that focuses on helping
people play to their strengths. This doesn’t mean that we don’t all work hard to
raise awareness to our weaknesses, but instead of trying to master something that
doesn’t come to us naturally, we focus on teaming up in ways that allow us to
lean in to the strengths of another.
For example, David’s WHY is to propel people forward so that they can make
their mark on the world. His HOWs are:
See the big picture
Take responsibility
Explore alternative perspectives
Tie a bow on it (i.e., if you start something, finish it)
Learn from every experience
Peter’s WHY is to enable people to be extraordinary so that they can do
extraordinary things. His HOWs are:
Make it simple
Get up on the balcony (i.e., see the wider context)
Embrace new ideas
Build relationships
Push the boundaries
Our Why Statements are aligned. While the two of us use different words to
express our purpose, cause or belief, we both strive to help others to be the best
versions of themselves. This alignment makes working together very rewarding

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for us. However, it’s our different strengths, our complimentary HOWs, that
allow us to have a far greater impact together than either of us could have alone.
A client once requested we take a hundred and fifty people through a workshop
that we generally do with forty. We thought we could do it, but for best results,
we felt we needed a full day. This client only had a four-hour window. Our initial
reaction was: Impossible! While others may have thrown in the towel right then
and there, we couldn’t help but see this as an opportunity to help one hundred
and fifty people become their best selves. (Refer to our Why Statements above!)
To figure out the best way to leverage this opportunity so as to engage and
inspire the workshop participants in the allotted time, we put our heads together
—or, rather, our HOWs together.
Both of us instinctively wanted to get clear on the situation at hand. David’s “see
the big picture” and Peter’s “get up on the balcony” are similar in nature. We
both value strategy before action. It was good we were both strong here because
it took both of us to crack the code.
In order to pull this off, we were both going to have to get way out of our
comfort zone. We would need to do something we were very familiar with in a
very different way. Though Peter is very good at and open to “embracing new
ideas,” it was David’s ability to “explore alternative perspectives” that saved the
day. David is world class at figuring out how to adapt content in completely
unconventional ways to ensure that people have a powerful and transformative
experience.
Once we had our recipe for success, we had a major challenge. Our recipe was
quite complex. The number of moving parts required to deliver this workshop
successfully were overwhelming and the details to execute were intricate. How
would we convey this to the client? Simple, we’ll simplify it. This is where Peter
took the lead to “make it simple,” ensuring everyone could clearly understand
and support the plan. In the end, we were able to deliver our workshop to a much
larger audience than usual, which brought us a great deal of fulfillment because
we were able to bring our WHYs of propelling people forward and enabling
them to be extraordinary to life.

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You might be thinking that this sounds a little oversimplified! The truth is, this
teaming thing is pretty complex. It’s messy, it’s unscripted, it’s human. That said,
our HOWs give us a shared language to see one another’s strengths, making it
easier to collaborate and lean in to our teammates to get things done. Bottom line
is when we focus on our strengths and lean in to the strengths of others, we can
make the impossible possible.