I was recently introduced to an interesting little website called 7 levels deep. It’s a great tool for figuring out why you do what you do – so often we do things because we are expected to, they are the next obvious step, or for no really good reason. It can be a useful exercise to stop and think about why we are doing something. 

Here’s how it works – you put in something you want to do, and then the website asks why that is important to you. You put in your answer, and it asks the same question again. Seven times, in fact, forcing you to dig deeper and deeper each time. Of course, you can put in surface responses, but you won’t learn much from them.

I’ve done it three times so far with my current main intention, and it’s been quite fascinating to see how I pull different answers out of my mind each time. Some of them are quite evasive, but others go pretty darned deep. It’s certainly food for thought.

So often we lose sight of the reasons we started doing something, and we continue out of inertia or because we think it’s too late to stop (that famous sunk cost fallacy I’ve mentioned before). It’s a good idea to check in with ourselves on a regular basis to make sure we are still doing what is important to us. 

The other thing is that things that are worth doing can be difficult or monotonous to achieve, so it is definitely worth reminding ourselves of the intentions behind them, so we can stay consistent in our efforts.

If you give it a try, I’d love to know what you think of the exercise!