Mark Twain said “The two most important days in your life are the day you're born and the day you find out why.” Most people give little thought to their personal motivations or their “calling.” They pursue a life, a career, relationships, and direction without delving into what they really want. Then they’ve settled into a life that is not fulfilling.
Dr. Gary Sanchez, CEO and Founder of the WHY Institute, set out to give people a way to align their life with their core values and unlock a life of passion, confidence, and purpose. He’s successfully done this with a software algorithm that evaluates answers from a questionnaire that provides insight into who you really are and what you really want.
Dr. Sanchez told us, “We help people find a more focused and fulfilling life. We dispel their uncertainty. I could sit down with you and help you discover your WHY in about an hour and I started doing it for anybody that would let me. I conducted it with thousands of people for free over the next seven years and I just started to notice patterns and trends and similarities. I accumulated a lot of data that became the basis for the algorithm that we call the WHY.os.”
Dr. Sanchez spent 32 years as a dentist in Albuquerque before developing his WHY method, although he pursued it as a personal side interest. After a near-death experience with a critical stay in the ICU, he looked at his life’s direction and decided that helping people achieve their full potential was what he felt fulfilled doing. Dr. Sanchez says, “When I got back to my practice, a patient in his 80s said to me ’Gary, you got a second chance at life. When you get to my age and you look back on your life, are you going to be glad that you stayed a dentist or are you going to bring this wise thing to the world?’ I sold my practice and have been invested in the WHY Institute for four and a half years.”
Now, Dr. Sanchez gives lectures all over the world and over 300,000 people have been in his program. He gives talks to executive groups and many in senior management take the program back to their organizations to internally align their teams. He’s also written several books on the subject.
He sees the program as a great benefit to youth as well. He told us, “The typical path is you're in high school, and you have no idea who you are or what you want to do...not a clue, and you're supposed to decide where do I want to go to school, what do I want to do. Then you have to pick a major and how am I supposed to pick my major? Then once you pick a major you’ve got to figure out what are you going to do with that major...very challenging, so most people just live life by default and they pick something and then once you pick it you could go into more schools...maybe post Graduate School and then you start accumulating things like houses, cars, spouses, kids and you get kind of stuck if that's not what you really wanted to do. Now you got all kinds of overhead and all kinds of expenses, and you can't just make a change.”
The WHY Institute helps people find their calling in life. They are an Albuquerque-based organization, and you can get more details on their website: https://whyinstitute.com/
“We help people find a more focused and fulfilling life. We dispel their uncertainty."