It’s the time of year where everyone sits down, the world gets slower and we reflect. For most people, this can be their only free time off where they get to do this. Leaving them to squeeze a year’s worth of goals, planning and dreams into just a few days.

Some have dreams of a new body. A new job. Higher pay, more free time. The list goes on. For most business owners, this is the time to analyze their previous performance and set new objectives to reach higher.

When we practice goal setting this way, we tend to be operating from a feeling of ritual obligation and pressure from surrounding expectations. If we slow down and take a deeper look, we can ask the most important question toward goals and objectives: Why am I even trying to achieve this?

It is critical for business owners to gain a deeper understanding of what true desires are driving their behaviors and analyze if that aligns with what they truly value. 

Before We Get to The Practice, One Last Thing

As mentioned above, understanding your desires means understanding the drivers for your behaviors in your life. When we get to the bottom of why we do things, we can understand other areas in our business and in our lives from a fresher perspective.

For some, we reveal what we maybe already knew and didn’t want to come to terms with. For others, we understand why something is important to us, and helps us be even more driven to keeping our values. 

When we analyze our desire and beliefs driving us, we can make decisions on changing them. We set better goals for ourselves, in our business and around us when we can come from an alignment inside and outside. 

It makes sense when we don’t hit our goals if they never really aligned for us in the first place. So, let’s practice this with goal setting for the New Year and see how this exercise helps us create better objectives.

The Five Why’s Practice

The Five Why’s practice comes from a mental health perspective to problem solving. Maybe there’s a regular issue or occurrence in your life that negatively affects you. When you use the Five Why’s you can help understand the drivers for the behavior and work on the root rather than addressing symptoms of an issue. Ultimately helping you let go of bad patterns by creating different behaviors to counter a bad belief or desire.

In this case, I am suggesting we also use this in goal setting this year as business owners. When we set goals, we often have a root driving that objective, an entire belief system surrounding it that could be helpful- or very unhelpful. To prevent the long list of objectives that aren’t really relevant to what you value, are maybe non specific to you, or are simply unrealistic to what you want- let’s practice together the exercise and see how it helps. 

Example

Someone may write down the goal: I want to 5x my revenue in 2026.

Let’s ask them for the first time: Why do you want to 5x your revenue in 2026?

They say: Well, I really need to make more money. 

Let’s ask them for a second time: Why do you need to make more money? 

They say: I have dreams for a lifestyle I want to live, and I have finances to take care of. 

Let’s ask them for a third time: Why do you have those dreams for that lifestyle? Why are there finances to take care of?

They say: Well, I guess I feel like I want to have accomplished something. And the finances I have to take care of is my debt. 

Let’s ask them for a fourth time: Why do you want to feel accomplished through money? Why are there debts to take care of?

They say: I want to feel financially accomplished because then I would feel meaning and purpose. My debts are from business loans and poor financial planning. 

Let’s ask them for the fifth and last time: Why does financial accomplishment give you purpose? 

They say: Well I am not sure, I never really thought about it.*

*Now the answer to the last question is going to have a different outcome for  everyone. Financial accomplishments are often tied to purpose, but we may not always know why we even believe that and are not willing to go a step further to uncover it. 

In this example, we uncover this person is in financial debt, from business loans and bad planning resulting in them wanting to make money. We know they want to live a certain lifestyle but we don’t truly know why. Some might infer that a better goal would be to live below their means, and stop increasing their spending. Oftentimes a revenue growth comes at a cost and is completely different than more profit and take home pay to pay off debts. Increasing their revenue might come at the cost of their true goal, which is to be debt free.

When we practice the five why’s towards our goals, we gain a deeper understanding of our beliefs and behaviors. We may be chasing things we don’t truly understand, or should have better goals put in place for what we actually want and need in our lives. 

Doing It Yourself

Now grab a piece of paper and a pen or pencil and get ready to write. It’s important that you write the immediate things that come to mind without judgment- no ones watching, just be yourself. 

Take one of the goals you wrote down for yourself. Write it down at the top of your paper. 

Ask yourself: Why do you want to do this?

And write your reply. 

Then to your own reply, ask yourself again why that is important or why you want to do this.

Repeat until you’ve asked yourself five repetitions diving deeper into each reply you give. You are your own interviewer. 

What did you find out about yourself and this goal? Does it align with what you value? Are there other ways to accomplish this?

Alignment of Values

We can clearly see that some goals come from places we don’t want to continue. Someone might be setting a weightloss goal because they believe its the only way to be accepted or love themselves. It might not be a good goal to pursue for themselves just yet. Because just as the behavior of a goal or action is important, so is the reason why we do them.

Make sure that when you’re setting goals they truly align with what you value in life. And question when you value unhealthy things. We sometimes uncover what’s deeply important to us, such as supporting our family, giving to those around us, or living a meaningful life. 

Create objectives that support those things. Ask yourself ‘why’ five times and uncover what truly matters to you. Work from there instead.