The One Thing You Must Never Do

I will not lose sight of my why again.

My WHY is to show up and ask how can I help. I want to help others freely with no strings attached regardless of who someone is. I can see the possibility when others may only see a barrier. People come to me when they have tried several strategies for tackling a problem and are stuck. And that's my super power. With my entrepreneurial spirit, I can be a sounding board, an idea generator, or a fixer.

I had to get really clear about my WHY because when Covid first started, I found myself without a job. I knew it was coming when lockdown orders started. I had worked at this company for 3 years and was really excited month after month, to work towards growing the business and bringing on more customers. Sales were great. We were retaining customers. We were starting to set ourselves apart from competitors. All indicators pointed to growth that would lead to an eventual public offering. My WHY wasn't a WHY at all, it was a WHAT and a HOW. At work I knew WHAT I was doing day in day out, and HOW I was going to do it. Jobless, my WHAT and HOW vanished overnight and I was only left with my WHY.

I had given days and nights and some weekends to this job. I believed that we would make it. And then circumstances happened completely out of our control. A pandemic and then a shutdown and then total uncertainty. At first it was two weeks and then it was the rest of that month, and then it was another month. And then it was wait for a vaccine, and then it was vaccines take years to develop but we think we could do it in six months.

So I sat at home and watched the news. I found myself grieving day in day out. I was grieving the loss of my job. The loss of my freedom. I was stuck at home, without a job and no prospects. Without my job, what did I do with my time Monday through Friday, and even mentally on the weekends? What was my purpose? What was my WHY? How did I contribute? And in these questions, I realized my success should not be narrowly defined within the confines of my job or the salary I made.

“In the course of building a business or a career, we become more confident in WHAT we do. We become greater experts in HOW to do it. With each achievement, the tangible measurements of success and the feeling of progress increase. Life is good. However, for most of us, somewhere in the journey we forget WHY we set out on the journey in the first place…For great leaders, The Golden Circle is in balance. They are in pursuit of WHY, they hold themselves accountable to HOW they do it and WHAT they do serves as tangible proof of what they believe.” (Start With WHY by Simon Sinek)

You can lose a job, you can experience failure, and you can get off track. However, if you have a clear WHY, you will always have a compass guiding you towards that next step or that next move.