What? How? Why?

Leaders create a view which allows people to believe what they believe. In Samuel Sinek’s Ted Talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” he touched on how forming your why is critical before you try to lead a group or idea. Without knowing WHY you’re doing something how are you going to do it. He relates this golden circle shown below to the sections of the human brain, which was very interesting. The outside portion of the circle represents the neo-cortex, which is the language barrier and controls our speech. The middle two sections make up the limbic brain which controls the way we feel and the basis of our behavior, in other words it is our emotion center. The way the golden circle is suppose to work is to go from the inside out. This triggers expressing the way you feel about your passion and stating how and what your going to do with it, not the other way where you’re just giving the hard earned facts and not expressing what/how you feel about them. Stating the big thing first draws people in rather than stating the facts and losing people along the way.

One thing that stuck with me from this video was “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” To me this simply means that if you portray your visions and your goals as a belief and the center of your dream, then people will follow your dream because they believe in that same idea. It’s the one common bond that drives a whole group to the top. It allows people to succeed in what they believe. The followers that you have aren’t there for you either, they’re there for them selves because they want to do something with this passion that they have and put it into action. This spreads around and creates more followers on their ‘why’ as well. With out the ‘why’, there can be no how or what. All three of these parts in the golden circle depend on one another and without one, there is no action. “There are Leaders and there are those who lead.” Leaders hold a position at the top and and hold authority, but those who lead allow us to believe in something and inspire us all.

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”- John Quincy Adams