What is your Deepest Why?

Do you know why you do what you do?

The real why?

Not the superficial why?

Not someone else’s why?

The deepest why.

A few years ago I worked with a lady who owned a café / bar. She wanted the business to grow. Fair enough. I asked the owner why she wanted this. She said because that’s what you do. Why is that I said. Because that will make me more money she said. How deep is that why? I said. She looked at me with a knitted brow. How much meaning is contained in there for you and your family, I said. Silence ensued.

The deepest why lives in the deepest domain of your being. It is your meaning. It is your true purpose. Once you have consciousness of this, it will fuel your desire perpetually, like an everlasting flame. But you need to find it or even unearth it or you will be living and serving someone else’s why.

True meaning is the seat of your deepest why and far outweighs any material gain, for example, although not everyone is wired this way.

Tony Robbins’ mentor Jim Rohn said to Tony in his early days “What you get does not make you happy, it is who you become (that makes you happy)”. Do you think what you get will make you happy? The car, the house the bach. Look in the mirror, you know it is folly.

So why do you do what you do? If you do say ‘for the money’ you are skating on the mere surface of life’s meaning like an aphid on a pond with eight feet of a fresh water column below. Sure we all need an ‘economic engine’, as Jim Collins purported in his seminal Good to Great (2001). But Collins went on to elaborate in the Hedgehog model that success opportunity is at the intersection of your economic engine, your deepest passions and what you can be the best in the world at. Yes, the BEST IN THE WORLD.

Getting any closer to your deepest why?

Let me give you an example close to home.

I worked for 20 years as an engineer and project manager with the odd dose of ‘management’. I loved the Clients, pursuing excellence, getting the tender over the line. In truth for three-quarters of that time I was massively unfulfilled. I was a ballet dancer sitting in the crowd watching a game of crown green bowls. I just didn’t fit. I wanted my own ballet.

I was surrounded by those who were wired differently to me. As early as 28-9 years old I was thinking Is this it? But I carried on in my comfort zone, taking the money, duping myself that the career was a solid choice and there are others worse off. Fear held me back. Yes, the big F.

My upbringing in the north-east England with an architect as a father led me to think as a young person be a professional, that is what you do. That is what I will do. Being an engineer is a marvelous career choice and the world needs engineers (don’t we know it in Christchurch). But I am a ballet dancer. In short;

• It didn’t feed my soul
• I was not impassioned by the technical work
• Those around me did not excite me nor inspire me

In the end I was a corpse in front of a computer. Dead man walking.

So in 2012 at 41 years old I chose to jump in to a new life. What brought me there? Well, as Robbins says the pain of staying the same outweighed the pain of staying the same.

I followed my deepest why. A why that I always knew. Want to know what that is?

To see those around me grow and smile and succeed and live the lives they deserve.

Now it’s your turn. Write down on a piece of paper right now your deepest why. This could just hand you the flashlight in the night to lead you to the crossroads with a signpost adjacent ‘your new life’.