Finding Your Ikigai
A while back, I had read the book called “ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life”, written by Francesc Miralles and Hector Garcia, which inspired me to write a couple of words on the topic of the so called “ikigai”, in terms of what it is and how it can help us improve and reshape our lives.
I enjoyed the book due to its simplistic style of writing and it was also a short yet impactful read so I would suggest it to plenty of other people for them to give it a go.
The main idea behind the book and the concept of ikigai is about helping you find your true purpose in life, a purpose that feels aligned with your interests and how those can help the world around you.
So if that sounds like something you would like to learn more about - which is something that I think anyone could benefit from - then you have come to the right place.
WHAT IS AN IKIGAI?
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that means your ‘reason for being.’ ‘Iki’ in Japanese means ‘life,’ and ‘gai’ describes value or worth. Your ikigai is your life purpose or what truly lights you up on the inside. It’s essentially what brings you joy and inspires you to get out of bed every day.
It’s also important to highlight that the traditional Japanese philosophy focuses on finding your purpose in life while the adapted westernized version of the ikigai has made it a method of finding your dream career.
Japanese psychologist Michiko Kumano (2017) has said that ikigai is a state of wellbeing that arises from devotion to activities one enjoys, which also brings a sense of fulfillment.
The Westernized version of ikigai says that your dream career has to include the following aspects:
What you love
What you’re good at
What you can be paid for
What the world needs
A visual representation of what makes up your ikigai
WHY BOTHER DISCOVERING YOUR IKIGAI
Gives you a greater sense of what you want in life
Better decision making (More time and money saved)
Makes it easier to say no to things and to say yes to the right opportunities
Better use of your time if you roughly know what you are after
Finding the best balance between doing what you love, what is useful to the world and what you are also good at
Can make meaningful contributions to the world sooner
Can increase your expertise and understanding in a field by focusing more on it
Being able to plan ahead for potential future struggles and issues that may arise in your field
HOW TO DISCOVER YOUR IKIGAI?
STEP 1: Answer the 4 fundamental questions
What you love:
What are your interests and passions (broad and niche)?
What are your favorite past time activities/ hobbies?
What do you enjoy/ not enjoy about your work and hobbies?
Do you feel a sense of being absorbed/ flow state during your work and hobbies?
Do you feel excited about your work and hobbies?
What you’re good at:
What are your top personal strengths and skills?
Do people ever come to you for advice with what you do?
Do you ever receive compliments for your work?
Do you find that that you excel at what you do?
Are your hobbies and profession intuitive to you or does it take more time to learn?
What you can be paid for:
Are other people making a career/ getting paid for the same work and hobbies you do?
Do you currently make a good living/Will you eventually make a good living from the work you do?
Have you noticed people wanting to buy what you do or make?
Is there a healthy level of competition regarding your work and hobbies?
What the world needs
Would you say your work and hobbies are in a high demand currently? What about the future?
Picture the next year, 10 years, and 100 years — will your work still be valuable?
Are you solving either a social, economic, or environmental problem?
STEP 2: Narrow it down
Based on your answers, write down a list of career opportunities that sound exciting and interesting to you and write down how your ideal day would look like (What you would be doing)
STEP 3: Learn about it
Learn about those career paths either through reading more about that specific career, educating yourself through online platforms or by asking someone who has the job you want to do, how their day looks like and what kind of benefits and struggles they face.
STEP 4: Try it out
After learning, put your ideal career/ ideal day into practice. Try it out and see wether that is actually something that you enjoy doing? Would you do it everyday? Would it be too intense or would you get bored?
Ask yourself what did you enjoy about it? What was less enjoyable and why?
Also consider how could you tweak your ideal day/ career to make it even more enjoyable to you?
How To Make The Best Of 2021
With 2020 now behind us, it is time to start looking ahead into the new year, 2021. In order to make the best of the year ahead, we have to make sure to set our goals, our intentions, and establish a vision in terms of what we want to achieve for this year.
Creating the "best year of our life" is not something we are just given, so we have to input effort and work into making it the "best" we can.
With this blog post, I hope to share some advice on how to make this year great and full of amazing opportunities, how to set goals for the new year, and how to get what we want from this year.
If you want to join me in the journey of making 2021 an amazing year, I encourage you to read on and I hope to fill you with inspiration, motivation, and ideas to power you up for the upcoming year.
You got this :)
SETTING GOALS - THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFOREHAND
Consider the 5 W's:
What resources will I need to achieve my goal?
How long will I need to get to my goal?
Why do I want to achieve this?
How will I achieve this?
When will I make time to work towards my goal?
Have a source of feedback throughout the process of getting to your goal
Identify some potential problems, setbacks, and distractions before starting
Breakdown long complex goals into simpler and shorter ones
Frame the goal as a learning task and not just a performance task
In order to make sure that you get to the end, consider potential outcomes and rewards you will give yourself to motivate your progress further
THE PROCESS OF SETTING GOALS
START WITH SOMETHING GENERAL
I am pretty sure that the majority of you who will be reading this will have already been familiar with the SMART format of setting goals, where the S stands for Specific and requires us to set a goal that is primarily specific and requires us to know exactly what we want to achieve.
However, whenever I try to use this template, I find that trying to be too specific in the beginning is not the right approach because a) I’m either not sure how specific to get about a goal and b) because it actually hinders my process of getting to the goal because it encourages the mentality of having to have everything figured out before you can start moving towards your goal. I am not however saying that this is a problem for everyone, however, if you do find this issue familiar, then I suggest first set a general direction in which you want to go.
For example in the case that you want to be more of a physically active person, say that you want to start running more. This is your general direction. If you instead straightway force yourself to be super specific about what you want to achieve, you are more likely to get stuck before you even start.
GET SPECIFIC
Once you have a general goal in mind, start thinking about the specific of it and begin to narrow down what exactly in that field you want to achieve. This stage is also where you implement all the other aspects of the SMART goal format which are also essential to consider when setting goals.
Other areas to consider:
Measurable: How can I measure my goal? When will I have known that I have achieved my goal?
Attainable: Is this goal realistic with my current circumstances and will I be able to properly manage my time and energy to achieve it?
Relevant: Is the goal that I am heading towards relevant to me and meaningful enough for me? If it is not relevant enough to your personal interests, you are likely to lose motivation in the initial stages
Time-bound: In what time period do I want to achieve my goal? How frequently will I be working towards achieving my goal? On a daily, weekly, monthly basis?
IMPLEMENT
Now that you have made your goal much more specific and you are much more precise in terms of what you want to achieve, start to implement the necessary actions that will take you towards your goal.
Put aside one week to test out and see how you do with sticking with your goal and how realistic it is for you. This is the time where you are able to see all of the faults in your goal and all the other things you did not take into account during your goal-setting process.
For example, if your goal was to read 50 pages of a book each day for 7 days a week, and you found out that realistically you were only able to read that 4 days in a week, then that is a sign that you need to adjust your goal.
The point of this step is not to make you guilty that your goal was set inadequately, but instead to allow you to see the ways in which you have to alter your goal in order to actually achieve it. The theory is often very different than when we practically apply something in our life.
ADJUST AND IMPLEMENT AGAIN
After you have tried to implement the necessary actives on a daily basis you would have likely noticed that more adjustments have to be made to your goal. Maybe you were expecting too much from yourself, maybe too little. Perhaps you did not have enough disposable time in your day, or you simply did not find the goal enough interesting or meaningful by the end of the week.
This is all okay and all should be treated as valuable feedback towards creating more realistic and relevant goals.
Now take these adjustments and changes and input them into your initial goal. Change things around based on your previous experiences, and give things another shot. Set aside once again another couple of days of experimenting and see whether this time you do better with sticking to the goal.
If you find yourself still slipping back and not sticking to what you set out to do, look towards making changes once again or perhaps considering other areas that may be preventing progress, such as maybe not having enough personal discipline to stick with it. This simply means that you have to improve on some other areas before starting out on achieving your goal since you will need some other skills r knowledge in order to get to the finish line.
For example, if your goal is to make 3 drawings per week in order to make you fit for an art competition and you are a beginner at drawing, maybe the issue is not that you don’t have enough time or motivation, but perhaps you would need a little more work on your art technique in order to enhance your drawing ability. This will later then greatly help you out with coming closer to your goal.
GO AND ACHIEVE IT
Once you have made your goal specific, have tried it out in practice, and had made sure to make any necessary alterations to it, now is the time to go out, commit to your goal, and also achieve it.
You will with no doubt encounter setbacks and delays in between the progress, but just keep pushing, adapting, and pursuing your goal. Let your goal be flexible because life around us is constantly changing so make sure to take that into account when moving towards the finish line.
I recommend that you do this exercise with a maximum of 3-5 goals per time because otherwise it just becomes too much to handle and think about, especially if we have already got plenty of other work on our back.
QUESTIONS TO REFLECT ON
What are my top 5 intentions for this year?
What am I going to continue doing?
What do I want to change completely?
What will I do to step out of my comfort zone?
How will I make sure to learn from my future mistakes?
What are the top 3 things I want to accomplish this year in my academic life/ career?
What are the top 3 things I want to accomplish this year for my health and personal wellbeing?
What are the top 3 things I want to accomplish this year in terms of my health and personal interests?
What will be my purpose this year?
Which existing relationships do I want to focus on and strengthen?
What kind of new people do I want to attract into my life?
In what ways will make this year matter to me when I look back?
How will I help and provide value to others?
What personal qualities do I want to strengthen?
What skills do I want to learn?
How will I take care of myself?
What places do I want to visit?
What occasions and opportunities will I say “no” to?
Who will I ask for help and support from?
What kind of person do I want to become next year?