The five whys

The Health Growth Letters is a weekly publication of tips, frameworks, and lessons to help you build a more balanced life based on faith, health, and wellness. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.

What’s on the agenda:

• A Verse

• A Lesson

• A Puzzle

A verse:

I think an interesting perspective on this verse is that iron sharpens iron, but only when hit in a purposeful, specific pattern.

Most of the time, a blade is used it actually gets dulled. When two swords clash, they are dulled; when you chop dinner, the knife slowly dulls. If a steel blade is left in the heat, it dulls. If a blade gets wet, it rusts and dulls.

In fact, there is only one situation in which steel is sharpened, and that’s when it’s ground against a tool in a specific way.

The same tool that dulls, when used properly, sharpens.

Friendships are a lot alike.

Sharpening each other

We often have a lot of friends, but we don’t always do things to build each other up or to build a stronger relationship. We don’t ask purposeful questions. We don’t challenge each other in our beliefs or ways of life. We don’t share our struggles and hardships.

But we should, it’s the secret to growth and staying sharp.

Make sure to spend time with your friends having fun, but also make sure that you're spending purposeful time building each other up.

A lesson: the five whys

Have you ever gotten upset with someone only to realize later on that it wasn’t about them at all, it was about something else?

This is an example of a downstream reaction. A response to some stimulus or situation that manifests a response elsewhere.

In relationships, if we are truly trying to sharpen each other, like from the verse above, we typically uncover these hidden reasons as we seek to reconcile or work through our emotions with each other, but relationships aren’t the only place where we have downstream reactions.

These happen in relationships, but they also happen in our habits, actions, and work.

The problem is that we rarely unpack why we do what we do, or why we respond to situations the way we do.

The Five Whys

I had a job where process improvement was a core function of my responsibilities. One of my key roles what looking at the way we do things and looking for ways to improve those processes and maximize efficiency and quality.

But to do that, I needed to understand why we did the things we did.

That’s where the Five Whys Exercise comes in; it’s a simple exercise where you ask why, not once, but five times, to dig deeper and deeper until you hit the root cause.

How the Five Whys Works

The Five Whys Exercise is a great tool for process improvement. It helps identify core issues or problems in an organization that create problems and inefficiency across the board, but it’s also a great exercise to use in our personal lives.

It can help you understand what’s causing an emotion, unpack desires and your true motivation behind them, or help you make your life easier by identifying the culprit that’s messing everything up and addressing it.

Here’s an example of how the Five Whys Exercise works:

Imagine you feel anxious at the end of the day.

You pause and ask yourself:

1. Why am I feeling anxious?
   Because I didn’t finish everything on my to-do list today.

That’s the first why.

2. Why does that bother me so much?
   Because I feel like I’m falling behind.

Second why.

3. Why do I feel like I’m falling behind?
   Because I set aggressive goals for myself this week.

Third why.

4. Why did I set such aggressive goals?
   Because I wanted to prove to myself that I’m disciplined and productive.

Fourth why.

5. Why do I need to prove that to myself?
   Because deep down, I worry I’m not good enough as I am.

Fifth why.

So what just happened?

At first, it looked like you were anxious about incomplete tasks. But the Five Whys Exercise uncovered the real issue: that your anxiety isn’t about productivity. It’s about self-worth.

If you’d stopped at the surface, you’d just stew in resentment against your coworker. But now, you can address the real issue – your fear about job security. Maybe that means clarifying expectations with your boss, or simply giving yourself grace.

Using the Five Whys to get to the real issues

I find that personal growth often comes down to emotional archeology.

You need to brush away the dirt layer by layer until you find the hidden relic of truth beneath it all. The Five Whys is your tool for that excavation.

It’s rarely what you thought it was, but it’s always what you needed to find. I’d encourage you to take a crack at using the Five Whys Exercise to work through something that’s going on in your life.

Maybe it’s anxiety or fear.

Maybe it’s a lack of peace.

Maybe it's a bad habit or action that keeps popping up.

Whatever it is, using the five whys is a great way to get to the bottom of what’s really going on and identify the core problem instead of trying to build and strive processes or habits to fix a downstream problem

Keep digging deeper.

A Puzzle:

A rebus is a puzzle that uses pictures, symbols, and/or letters to represent words or parts of words. The challenge of the puzzle is to decipher the hidden meaning behind the symbols and solve the puzzle.

Here’s this week’s puzzle:

The answer will be given in next week’s letter.

The answer to last week’s puzzle was “The plot is thickening”.