Your deeper WHYs, your scores, and your first 3-month goal
Today you turn a vivid vision into a direction: discover what actually drives you, update your vision with it, and decide and start your first goal.
Why your WHYs matter
Your “whys” are the reason for your actions at your very core. They drive you, motivating you intrinsically. Actions that don’t align with your fundamental drivers won’t gain traction.
A clear why simplifies choices and decisions by acting as a filter: if something doesn’t align with your why, it’s a no, either intentionally by choice or unintentionally through inaction. Used deliberately, that filter reduces distractions and makes sure your energy goes on things that actually matter.
Ensuring your why underpins your decisions and actions also helps prevent burnout, because everything you do benefits you directly, and you get the rewards along the journey, not just at the end. And knowing your why is magnetic: people are drawn to purpose-driven individuals.
Discover your deeper WHYs
This exercise works on several levels of consciousness, so do all of it even if a pattern emerges early or it feels monotonous. When you get an ah-ha moment, pause and sit with it, then continue. If later rounds produce the same answer, keep going: the repetition reinforces its importance to your brain. It’s also ok to get bored. Boredom has a purpose.
A prioritised list of desired outcomes
Use a sheet of paper or a spreadsheet, and your answers to the seven Future You questions from Stages 2 and 3.
- List your outcomesCreate a bulleted list of individual outcomes from your writing (one row per outcome if using a spreadsheet).
- Count repeatsNext to each outcome, track how many times it appears across everything you wrote.
- Level 1 whyUnder each outcome, write a few words on why you want it. What will it give you?
- Level 2 whyOn the next line: what will your level 1 why give you?
- Level 3 whyOn the third line: capture what your level 2 why gives you, in 1 or 2 words.
- NoticePause on any insights or trends and give yourself a moment to absorb them.
- ScoreScore each outcome out of 10 for its importance to you.
- Top 10List the ten outcomes that scored highest.
A prioritised list of WHYs
- List your level 3 whysAll of them, one per row.
- Count repeatsTrack how often each appears.
- SortMost frequent first. That’s your prioritised list, with your most important and most fulfilling whys at the top.
- Flip pains into gainsIf a why is about avoiding pain (“I don’t want to be sad”), flip it into a positive gain. We move towards gain and away from pain, but brains resist change unless it removes pain, so state your whys as gains you’re moving towards.
Update your Next Version of Me
Fold your WHYs back in
Go through your prioritised outcomes and whys, and using your new insights create succinct answers to: what do I want to BE, DO and HAVE in 5 years? What do I want to spend my money, time and energy on? And one more: what do I want to give myself?
Then write a vivid, detailed description of your Next Version of Me to use in your daily visualisation exercise.
Next Version of Me exercise
Read your new description, then imagine for 5 minutes being your Next Version of Me. Vivid, detailed, all senses, full emotion. Play it like a movie trailer, flicking between seeing yourself and experiencing it as yourself.
Fulfilled Me exercise
Read through your prioritised list of whys. Then imagine, for a few minutes, living a life where you have your whys in abundance. What does it look like? How do you feel? Who are you? See yourself and be yourself, fully immersed in this life.
Score your transformation
Give your Next Version of Me, the probability you’ll achieve it, and how achievable it feels a score out of 10 each.
Note it down: “NEXT ME <score>, Probability <score>, Achievability <score>”, e.g. NEXT ME 10, Probability 10, Achievability 10
Compare them with your Stage 1 scores. That gap is your transformation.
Reflect on what you have accomplished
Over the past six days you have:
- Familiarised and focused your brain on the life you want, the person you want to be, and what you want to do.
- Started shifting your brain’s focus to what you want (not what you don’t want), giving you direction and a compelling destination.
- Made your destination more specific, clear, familiar and therefore less scary and more achievable.
- Begun leveraging your human brain (PFC) and animal brain together to get what you want.
- Used your human brain to simulate possible futures your PFC will keep using when planning and predicting.
- Started shifting out of a victim mindset into one with purpose, direction and agency.
- Uncovered the deeper WHYs that make all of it worth doing.
Acknowledge it. Celebrating achievements is not optional in this method: it’s the dopamine that keeps the loop running.
Decide and start your goal for the next 3 months
Why only one goal?
- It enhances your focus and attention, enabling deep work, and reduces decision fatigue, overwhelm and burnout.
- Consistently directing energy at a single goal compounds results and builds momentum, motivation and confidence.
- Knowing what to focus on every day minimises procrastination and indecision.
- Committing to one goal cultivates discipline and consistency, which transfer to everything else.
- Progress is easier to track, and achievements are clearly attributable to your actions.
Why 3 months?
A 2009 study on habit formation by Phillippa Lally and colleagues found it took participants on average 66 days of repetition for a behaviour to become automatic. Three months gives you enough time to establish routines, habits and your brain’s internal map for the goal, and it’s long enough to see meaningful results yet short enough to keep urgency and motivation.
- Achieves one or more of the highest-ranked outcomes from your prioritised list
- Aligns with as many of your prioritised WHYs as possible
- Is based on your ideas, and benefits you more than anyone else. Your first priority is you. (Parents: this is true for you too. Your children need you at your best, and they copy what you do, not what you say.)
State your goal and objectives
State your goal simply, specifically, and with a date (this course is built around 3 months). Then write your objectives: how you’ll achieve it. Each objective should be action-oriented, specific, measurable, and have a date or timescale.
Example. Goal: improve overall health and fitness to a healthy sustainable level for me by the end of 3 months. Objective 1: exercise for 30 minutes, 5 times per week to improve strength. Objective 2: reduce sugar intake to 30g a day over the next month. Objective 3: sleep at least 7 hours per night for the next 4 weeks.
Take the first step
Write down the very first small action towards your first objective, and take it today or tomorrow, while your brain is primed.
Keep the habit
Continue the Next Version of Me exercise daily. Each repetition strengthens the neural pathways towards your vision, and your updated description makes it stronger still. Remember to acknowledge and celebrate your achievements along the way.
Congratulations, your transformation has started. Keep going!
This course is educational and not a substitute for therapy or medical advice.