Ikigai is a Japanese concept which loosely encompasses the idea of what makes your life worth living.
It’s a concept many of us outside of Japan are familiar with, and you may have seen popular memes such as this one (original source unknown) floating around the internet in the past few years:
It’s an idea I came across awhile ago, and it’s been referred to as one of the key components helping people live longer, healthier lives, mentioned in the studies on the so-called “Blue Zones” – the areas around the world where a larger proportion of the population live to a ripe old age.
I’ve just finished reading an interesting and thought provoking little book on the subject by Yukari Mitsuhashi.
As in the diagram above, in western cultures ikigai is often understood to be involving a person’s career – but this is not necessarily so. Your ikigai can be more accurately considered as a really broad thread which runs through your life and gives it meaning, rather than the narrower, more career-focused definition it is often given in our culture. Whilst many of us may find that our ikigai is added to through our work, for many that’s not the case.
I often guide my career-coaching clients to explore ways to find meaning in their work or career, but it can be problematic to focus on trying to find our “purpose” as if there could be only one source of purpose for each of us. Whether in relation to career, or any other area of our life for that matter, focusing on the possibility that each of us has a sole purpose causes problems for us. Thinking about purpose or ikigai in this way might mean that we’re here to find the ONE thing we’re on the planet to do. What say we never find it – permanent existential angst? Eternal frustration? FOMO?
With all of this said, I do want to speak a little about some of the ways our ikigai can be brought into our career to help us find a greater sense of meaning and fulfillment out of what most of us tend to spend a significant amount of our time doing – working!
Job-crafting
One of the concepts in the book that I found really helpful, is the idea of “job-crafting” a term coined by Jane Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski in the early 2000’s. Job-crafting is shaping your job to make it a better fit for your motives, strengths and passions. It involves actively creating your job as compared to passively taking the job that was given to you. I have always done this, but never really thought of it as being a “thing.”
Interestingly, I’m noticing that there appears to be a trend (certainly at mid-senior organisational levels) towards broader job descriptions and a desire to hire for potential and cultural fit rather than spelling out the myriad specific tasks the person is expected to do. And assisting people with how to “onboard” themselves to set themselves up for a great start in a new job is something I have only recently been asked to do with any frequency. To get in, shape the role and make it your own will inevitably lead the person to organically focus on the aspects of the job that they enjoy and are good at – their unique contribution according to their particular strengths. It doesn’t take much of a leap to see the potential here for greater engagement, performance and contribution by that employee. In fact evidence-based strengths studies have consistently found significantly higher levels of those things in employees who are enabled and encouraged to use their strengths at work.
It’s also a “win” for the person themselves. Who wants to do work that doesn’t feel meaningful or useful in any way? Naturally the challenge is to help people to find and connect in with the role’s deeper meaning or contribution, and this is something I regularly help people to explore when they’re job-hunting or considering their next career steps.
You can do this yourself either when considering a new job or within your current one by asking some insightful questions, such as:
- What tasks would I be doing?/am I doing?
- How do I feel about these tasks? Would I/do I enjoy them?
- How would I/do I spend my time in the job? … and how do I feel about that?
- What contribution does my work make?
- Who do I connect with? How do I feel about that?
These are small, simple and ultimately profound things to consider, yet many of us are just plodding (or rushing) our way through our working life with minimal time or headspace given to asking ourselves how well our work works for us.
On a broader note
When thinking about our ikigai beyond our work, this is where things can get really interesting! Get curious about the moments in your life when you feel truly happy or fulfilled. Drill down into them and examine what’s really going on here. What lies at the heart of the positive feelings?
And, pay attention to things that pique your interest, there are always clues here. In my case, one of the things that drew me to coaching was that I kept reading, watching and generally seeking out things that taught me something about human behaviour and the mind. Looking back on it, I now see that this is something I’ve been curious about my whole life: trying to understand why people do what they do. For me this is endlessly fascinating and something I’m likely to be intrigued by my entire life.
Ikigai helps us keep on keeping on
Another significant benefit to getting clearer about our ikigai is that it can help make it easier to keep going in times of turmoil or uncertainty, kind of like a guiding light. This surely makes it particularly relevant right here right now. Whether through a reassessment of priorities or forced change, many people are using the current situation to ask bigger and more profound questions of their work and life. Creating some clarity about what is meaningful to us and what makes our life worth living, can help us more consciously commit to doing more of it. Knowing this not only helps make it easier to make good decisions – it delivers feel good benefits!
“If you’re not able to find your ikigai, maybe you should stop looking so hard. I think that ikigai is something that you happen to come across. You just bump into it and when you know, you know. Ikigai is something very internal and you pursue it even if the rest of the world wouldn’t understand. Ikigai comes from within.” Ryuichiro Takeshita