Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle

We’ve spoken about why knowing your strengths and super strengths is important, but now we’ll focus on your ‘why’.

We’ll also look at how your ‘why’ – or your purpose – might help you to identify different sectors, organisations, or roles of interest to you. You can think of your ‘why’ as what makes you excited in life or work. This model can help you to narrow down your job search.

Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle is an excellent analogy for the process you can go through to really understand your ‘why’, and transform it into finding a career that you’ll be passionate about.

Simon Sinek is a business author whose Ted Talk became, at one point, the third most watch of all time. His experience and research, published in his book ‘Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action’, led him to believe that the most successful companies all have one thing in common – they start with their ‘why’ and work outwards from there. You can apply the same thinking to your own career.

The three circles are:

• WHY: Your purpose, your reason for existing, your motivation and purpose
• HOW: Your process, specific actions that are taken to realise your why
• WHAT: Your result, what do you do and what is the result of your why

Let’s go back to Aalyiah – she’s just about to graduate from her psychology degree and is thinking about what she wants to do next. She’s already identified that she’s good at presenting, and her super strength is research, which makes her think perhaps she’ll go into academia. Makes sense, right? She’ll get to do her own research and present to university students on a daily basis. She uses the Golden Circles model to help her find a little more direction for her job search:

WHY: Aalyiah loves to help others, whether it be tutoring her peers at university, or taking part in local charity bake sales. She wants to do good in the world, and studied psychology as a way to understand how people act and make decisions.

HOW: There’s lots of ways she can help others, in her free time, or as part of her job. She wonders which sectors she might be able to do this, perhaps working for a charity would enable her to give back to people in need. But there’s lots of roles in charities, so she thinks about how she can match her super strength of research into a role within charity.

WHAT: She looks at some jobs in charity through a charity jobs board, and finds a role called ‘bid writer’. She researches it and finds that the role:

• Encompasses her passion for helping others, as she can do this by bidding for grant funding to support charitable work
• Supports her strength of presenting, as she may need to present business cases to funders to ensure the charity receives funding
• Requires her to undertake research into the charity’s mission, as well as into what kinds of funding are available, as well as to understand how bid writing works.

She thought she would go into academia, but this exercise really helped her to understand where she can apply her strengths, whilst also linking to her ‘why’.

This can be a useful exercise to go through when considering your future career – you can work out your why, the motivations you have, how you might realise those beliefs or utilise those motivations, and what jobs could enable you to feel fulfilled and utilise your strengths.