What is Your WHY?

Create and Develop your passion for…..

By Coach Ernest Allen

What is your reason for getting up this morning? What gets you going? What inspires you? These are the questions that you should ask yourself. Answering these questions honestly help you pinpoint your "Why", keeping you focused on your path to reaching whatever goal(s) you want to achieve. Finding your "Why" will carry you past passion when you have self-doubt and your passion weakens and starts to fade. Finding your "Why" will help fill in the gaps when tough times hit, and help carry you to the next step on your path to success.

My "Why" is and always has been to help and serve people. That is one of the reasons I love team sports, it gave me the opportunity to be apart of a team and be apart of a collective unit.  I never really paid attention or put a high value on my individual stats, my main goal was to be the best team player I could be and do whatever it took to win.... with a team-first mentality leading my actions. Some of my old teammates would say I fell short of this objective a few times. Every successful year I had stat wise as an individual player, I set out at the beginning of the season that my main focus was on helping my team win. I held my own personal achievement on the back burner and focused all my energy being the best teammate I could be. This helped me discover a lot about myself and helped give me directly through my career, and was the being of me discovering my “Why”.

I wrote a blog post last month about motivation called "You cant be soft your whole life"  which was inspired from several conversations I had about the loss of motivation with a few of my clients and friends. In my opinion if you "lose" motivation to do something, either you don't know your "Why", your "Why" is to complicated for you to apply to your goals, or your "Why" is not defined through a purpose; therefore you are just going through the motions and working towards nothing like a ship with no rudder. There are steps that you can take to discover your "Why" and define it with purpose and direction. I use three three steps to define my "Why" which are:

1. I write down a my objective in five words

2. I set up a plan of action with steps

3. I go to work

   This is a fluid process and sometimes I skip steps (due to my ADD lol) but this process helps keep me focus, especially when things are not going as planned, miss out on an opportunity or when I fall short of a a benchmark I have set for myself or my company.

You may have several "Whys" that you just don't know how to define or focus on, but with honesty and effort you can define, and discover your “Why” and be on your way to a more fulfilling life.