… and why it’s important.
Many successful business owners, entrepreneurs and CEO’s attribute their resilience and ability to stay consistent, to having a strong connection to their sense of WHY.

Ultimately this determines your ability to motivate yourself and those around you in the long term. Having some initial excitement will power you through the preliminary stages of any project, but what keeps you going in the long run, is a strong sense of WHY.

If you and your team are fully aware of, and in sync with the reason WHY you’re doing what you’re doing, there’s a collective push towards the end goal. Your WHY will pull you through the dark days, through the feelings of despair and resentment, and those days when you dread getting out of bed.
So how do you connect with it? The first step is to first identify it. It’s likely that you already have a WHY, you can’t build a business or self-made career without one.

This may have started with something material like:
“I’d like to be successful so that I can buy my mum a house”

Or a collective goal for the business might be:
“I’d like the business to quadruple its revenue in 2 years”

And these are perfect, but we need to take it further and really anchor in the emotions that these achievements would bring… This is the next stage, which is called anchoring the goal. With your material goal in mind, ask yourself these questions:

• What would it feel like to achieve this? Excited? Relieved? Grateful?
• What would it bring you? A sense of achievement? A sense of giving back?
• How would your mum’s expression when you hand her the keys make you feel?
• What sort of house would it be? Where would it be? What would it look like?
• Where would you host the staff Christmas party if you quadrupled your revenue?
• What drinks would you serve, what awards & prizes would you dish out to the staff members?

A refined version of the goal might be: “I’d like to be successful and buy my mum a house so that she can look towards her retirement with more financial freedom”.

 Get as clear as possible with feelings around the goal, and the details around what it would mean for you. Aka, buying a house with a spare bedroom so that you could visit your mum, or a house with a big garden because your mum loves gardening. These are all just examples, but the principle is the same, the idea is to anchor in as many sensory inputs as possible around the goal and be connected with all of the feelings around that goal.
The final stage is to surround yourself with reminders, this could be visual, auditory with a song you might associate with your mum, a certain smell or a combination of the three. It could be that you drive through the neighbourhood where you’d like to purchase the house or book a viewing in one of the property’s that’s vacant. Even if you’re not yet ready to buy, you’ll give yourself the inspiration to do what it takes to get there.

This means that you can revert to these reminders any time you need to, this will help you to stay consistent and carry you through to the completion of this goal. Go get that house!