Five whys

So this is thing number one that will allow you to drop unnecessary shoots and find better ways or figure out what are your stakes and what is important.

And so with a client, we're going to do five whys exercise.

Five whys.

Basically, you ask yourself, why is it important? Why do I think it's important? And then why? And then why? And then why? Until you truly understand your reasoning.

And your brain gets it.

Dean Graziosi popularized a specific process for getting to that why, called the seven levels deep.

That process itself is rooted in something even older, a technique of Toyota's manufacturing floor called the five whys.

Toyota's engineers found that if the machine broke down, asking why just once usually got you a surface explanation.

But if you keep on asking why again and again, about five times deep, you'd eventually hit the actual root cause, not the symptom.

The real answer is never sitting on the surface.

It's buried under layers of logic, ego, and the stories we've gotten used to telling ourselves about why we do what we do.

The Yota's five whys wasn't invented by a psychologist either.

It came out of a factory floor solving mechanical problems.

And it's the double click and double click and double click.

So in the Toyota production system, like very technical there, or if anybody's familiar with Six Sigma, there is a classic root cause analysis called the five whys.

Maybe it's the seven whys.

Oh my gosh, I've been out of, I've clearly been out of school for a while.

wow

so interesting you know within the chapter uh you talk about the five whys and i realized as i read them how important the answer to those five whys are you explain that a little bit

yeah the there's this process that we use to identify the the root whether it's a root issue or a root core motivation or the the core kind of personality driver when you're trying to get to the core of something something at work something in a relationship something that you're feeling when you're trying to get to the core of it we have this process that we call the five whys and the five whys is really nothing more than asking yourself five questions or asking your target five questions that all start with the word why and are all based off the previous answer.

And what happens with that is essentially if you think of a person like an onion, every time you ask a new why question, you're peeling off another layer of the onion and you're getting closer to the core, closer to the center of the problem.

So when you're trying to ask yourself, you know, why am I mad at this person? You start by saying literally like, well, why am I upset at Gus? Oh, because Gus didn't tell me the truth.

It's incredible how it works.

So if you're smart

and you're honest with yourself, and you ask these five whys and give yourself an honest answer, it can probably save you a lot of unnecessary work in your life or unnecessary mistakes in your life, really.

And today I want to show you how I use two of my coaching tools together.

So one of them is the Vexanova technique and the other one is five whys or five levels of why.

So think of this as a mini coaching session.

So I know that we've had a lot of episodes with guests and amazing information and stuff along the way.

But today I actually want to invite you in to what it would be like being coached by me.

So grab a notebook, choose something that you've been struggling with and work through it with me.

So I want to start by introducing the five whys or five levels of why, which I tend to call it more.

The five whys isn't something that I created.

And that really helped them turn around to be able to have those in-depth questions.

The other thing I teach people is the five whys.

So you don't just ask why or ask a question once.

You then ask another question on top of that and then another one just to really get in depth of what someone's talking about.

So your beliefs that are sitting under all your operating system are running your life.

And attached to the bottom of this under this video, there is, um, a link to what's called the Five Whys technique because the reason that we do things is rarely the obvious one.

So you might have, for instance, I work very hard.

I overwork because I want to make money.

And why is it to feel valuable? Because I don't think I'm valuable enough.

So you can actually get to the reason why you do things and find that you, you have behaviors which are a response to something that you've really not wanted often to recognize, that you're running an operating system, uh, which you've inherited or then created on top of an inherited start.

So I think if you could use the Five Whys technique if you find yourself doing something, and you're aware that the doing, the, the doing of it is not particularly useful for you, and then you try and interrogate the belief and use the Five Whys technique.

And what I think is going to be really useful is that you can use that technique, but there's actually a really, really quick way to find out what your beliefs are that we're going to do in the next episode, and it's the one that all of us use all the time.

Like, the symptom is me overeating, especially at the end of the day." Let's just call it that.

Where exactly does this come from? And I like to use this process called, like, the, the five whys, which is, like, you keep on asking yourself why.

Even though you answer a question, you keep on asking yourself why as if you're trying to peel an onion and get deeper to the core.

So I asked myself these five whys.

So I was like, "Why do I eat at night? Oh, I eat at night because I'm stressed." Okay.

So, uh, why do you, uh, why do you end up eating your stress? Uh, I end up ending my, eating my stress because it just, like, makes me feel good.

It's if you want to know how your insecurities are really ins- inspiring or influencing your de- decisions today, you have to go back to where that insecurity started, find the root cause of that insecurity, and then work from there.

And the way I do it is I ask the five whys, and I know this sounds a little bit cliché because many people have heard the five whys, but I've modified it a little bit.

I say, "Why does this matter to me?" And what I found is that when we ask that simple question, let's say something happens, something as simple as, uh, you get, you get cut off in traffic and you get upset.

If you start asking, "Why does this matter to me?" Once you ask that five times, you start to realize that you can get to a root cause of something that, that dates back years.