Blog » Coaching Models and Techniques » Coaching Tools: Finding Your Ikigai
Coaching Tools: Finding Your Ikigai
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that means “a reason to get up in the morning,” There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, we must each seek our path to joy, curiosity, and passion. Identifying your ikigai requires perseverance and ongoing refinement, as it can help you reflect on your actions, behavior, and interactions with the world.
The information in this article about finding your ikigai will help you reflect on what is important and how you can find better ways to meet your personal ikigai.
In Brief : How to Use Finding Your Ikigai in Coaching?
- STEP 1: Complete The Ikigai Questionnaire – Identify joy-inducing activities, those inducing a flow state, or routine tasks enjoyed as components of Ikigai, emphasizing doing something that matters and considering potential sources of inspiration.
- Do Something That Matters To You – Pursue impactful actions aligned with personal aspirations, encouraging thinking big and considering sources of inspiration and frustrations.
- Do Something You Can Be Paid For – Acknowledge the financial aspect in Ikigai, incorporating money-making activities through work, goods, services, or a combination, recognizing the need to sustain one’s chosen lifestyle.
- STEP 2: Form A Visual – Create an Ikigai map from questionnaire insights, noting themes and keywords, checking emotions, and optionally exploring intersections of mission, vocation, passion, and profession for focused options.
- STEP 3: Form A Plan – Incorporate Ikigai components into life through rituals, aligning with identified themes, and consider hobbies and jobs that bring fulfillment, aiming to fuse enjoyable and fulfilling activities for a sense of purpose.
- Rituals – Connect fulfilling moments to identified themes in daily activities, incorporating established or new rituals aligned with Ikigai, such as morning strolls or social interactions.
- Hobbies – Identify organized pursuits outside of work that contribute to Ikigai, requiring more time and planning compared to rituals.
- Jobs – Explore job combinations for desired income, considering full-time employment alongside side projects, hobbies, or teaching, with an awareness of opportunities for selling products.
What Is The Purpose Of Finding Your Ikigai?
- What You Are Passionate About – Identify joy-inducing activities that boost dopamine levels, such as hobbies like writing or painting, forming a key part of your ikigai.
- What You Are Good At – Combine enjoyment and proficiency in activities, whether natural talents or developed skills like videography, contributing to the discovery of your ikigai.
- What You Can Be Compensated Or Rewarded For – Ensure your ikigai contributes to financial reward, covering daily needs and expenses, emphasizing the importance of earning a living from your passion and skills.
- What The World Requires – Align your ikigai with societal needs, finding purpose and fulfillment by contributing to a better world, recognizing the value in work that makes a positive impact.
What Are The Benefits Of Using Finding Your Ikigai In Coaching?
- Increase Work Motivation – Implementing ikigai enhances life purpose, boosting motivation, longevity, productivity, and happiness.
- Making It Simpler – Understanding life’s purpose aids quick decision-making, reducing errors, and improving business decisions with integrated technologies.
- Quicker At Work – Aligning work with passions leads to faster project completion, emphasizing goal-setting with a well-structured plan.
- Establishing A Strong Work Ethic – Adhering to ikigai gives life meaning, fostering a strong work ethic by recognizing the impact of work on helping others.
- Traditional Benefits – Exploring the enduring Japanese concept of ikigai reveals both traditional and contemporary benefits, influencing research on its positive effects on health and well-being.
Examples Of How To Use The Finding Your Ikigai In Coaching
- Concentrate On The Details – Ikigai emphasizes finding joy in the details, promoting mindfulness, and recognizing the enjoyment in routine tasks, fostering a sense of flow and fulfillment.
- Making Ikigai Stronger In The Workplace – Ikigai is particularly valuable in the workplace, offering a tool to enhance enjoyment and meaning in work by aligning personal strengths and passions with societal needs and market demands.
- Crafting A Job – Adapting your current role to align with your ikigai is achievable through small changes, utilizing tools like the Job Crafting worksheet to understand and reshape how you spend your time at work.
What is the Finding Your Ikigai Coaching Tool?
Finding your Ikigai is a life-long journey of self-discovery. However, you must invest time and energy into the process. It necessitates self-reflection and answering difficult questions. But you will discover a lot about yourself.
A person’s ikigai can be anything, such as a passion, a dream, or a mission. It is something that motivates you to get out of bed every morning. It’s what keeps you going and gives you the drive to do something in pursuit of that ikigai. Some people can quickly determine their ikigai. For others, the search may still be ongoing. Everyone’s Ikigai is unique: it is influenced by your personal history, values, beliefs, hobbies, and personality.
“ikigai” is a topic for interdisciplinary research in psychology, pedagogy, and philosophy because it can be a guideline for an individual’s way of life. It’s a combination of the Japanese characters IKI, which means “life,” and KAI, which means “the realization of hope and expectations.” The Finding Your Ikigai tool is a simple exercise that can help clients find purpose and meaning in their lives by engaging in the Japanese practice of ikigai.
What is the Purpose of Finding Your Ikigai?
Ikigai encompasses happiness, life satisfaction, the joy of doing something, and a sense of purpose. It’s about having the sense that your life is valuable and that you make a difference. There are four things you must cross off your list in your quest to find your ikigai. Knowing what these four things are will help you continue your search in the right direction. Your ikigai should be as follows:
1. What you are passionate about
Your ikigai should be something fun for you. It can be anything that makes you happy; something you would do at any time. It’s something that will boost your dopamine levels, and you’d gladly talk about it and share it with others if given the opportunity. It can be as simple as a hobby, such as writing, making videos, taking photos, painting, dancing, baking cakes, or even collecting stamps.
2. What you are good at
Finding out what you are or would like to be good at can also help you get closer to discovering your ikigai. Is there something you’re naturally good at? Something you can do effortlessly or in which you are considered an expert? Or is there something you’d like to learn, something you’ve wanted to learn, or something you’ve worked hard to achieve?
It could be a skill you’ve spent years honing, like videography, public speaking, fashion design, marketing, counseling, or computer programming. So, if you are doing something you enjoy and are good at, you have crossed two items off your list to find your ikigai.
3. What you can be compensated or rewarded for
You should know what you can get financially rewarded for to find your ikigai. Remember that to survive, we must earn money to cover our daily needs and expenses. As a result, your ikigai should ideally be something that will pay you. It is not enough to simply enjoy what you do or to be good at it. It is also important that you are fairly compensated for it and that it contributes to putting food on the table and clothes on your back.
4. What the world requires
The fourth factor in determining your ikigai is something that the world or a community requires. Knowing that what we do contributes to a better world makes us feel good. It gives us the impression that we play an important role in our community. Nowadays, one of the reasons why many people are dissatisfied with their jobs is that they do not always see the value in what they do. Knowing that your work has the potential to improve the lives of others can help you get closer to discovering your ikigai.
How to Use Finding Your Ikigai in Coaching?
Ikigai assists you in understanding what you are up to and what your life’s purpose is. It is used in many situations throughout life to consider what is good and bad and what to do. There are several ways to use your ikigai, which we will go over in this section.
STEP 1: Complete The Ikigai Questionnaire
Consider what brings you joy, what activities make you forget about everything else, and what makes you feel in flow. It can be a hobby, and you may already be doing it. It could also be a routine task that you enjoy doing.
DO SOMETHING THAT MATTERS TO YOU
Do what will have the impact you want to have, whether it is on your neighborhood, a particular demographic, or the entire world. There is nothing arrogant about thinking big, so go ahead. Consider your sources of inspiration as well as the things that frustrate or irritate you.
DO SOMETHING YOU CAN BE PAID FOR
The last section is about earning money. Although it wasn’t a part of the original Ikigai concept, money is a reflection of the fact that to maintain the lifestyle we have chosen, we must earn a living. Therefore, it’s better if you can include a money-making activity in your Ikigai. It might be accomplished through work, sales of goods and/or services,
or both.
STEP 2: Form a Visual
After responding to the questions, you’ll begin to notice themes and keywords that you can use to fill out your Ikigai map. As you jot them down, check in with your emotions and thoughts. Do you feel happy? scared? full of anxiety? You can go one step further by considering your mission, vocation, passion, and profession as potential intersections for each of these categories. Although it’s optional, it can assist you in developing a list of slightly more focused options to consider.
STEP 3: Form a Plan
This final step may be the most crucial one. It’s about incorporating everything into your life. Ikigai manifests in a variety of ways, and this is how you discover your purpose: by fusing several enjoyable and fulfilling activities.
RITUALS
These are the times throughout your day or week that make you feel fulfilled and in alignment, and they should be connected to the themes you identified during the exercise. Perhaps you already have rituals established, in which case you could tie them to your Ikigai to give them the respect they deserve.
Here are a few instances: a morning stroll, 20 minutes of daily writing, 10 minutes of meditation, breakfast in bed or with a book, a candle-lit bath, planting flowers or vegetables, taking a class, getting together with friends for a drink or coffee, baking, cooking, or journaling…
HOBBIES
These are the pursuits that take up the majority of your time outside of work. They differ from rituals in that they might need more time and a special place. They may also involve more organization and regularity (rather than being spontaneous).
JOBS
What jobs could you combine to generate the desired income? Or perhaps you could work a full-time job and devote your weekends and evenings to developing a side project or hobby. Don’t forget to list the products you could sell as well as the abilities you could teach others.
What are the Benefits of Using Finding Your Ikigai in Coaching?
If you find your Ikigai, you’ll find pleasure and value in what you do. Consider combining what you enjoy, what you are good at, what the world requires, and – the best part – what you can get paid for. Is it even conceivable? It may take years to figure out, but if you can find the sweet spot where those two points meet, you’ll be jumping out of bed every day. Here is a list of the advantages of the ikigai concept.
1. Increase work motivation
We are better able to fight for these goals when we are aware of our life’s purpose. because we are convinced that by putting the ikigai concept into practice, our goals will be achieved in the long run. People who feel a sense of purpose in life live longer, produce more, and are happier, according to Japanese philosophy.
2. Making it simpler
If we are aware of the purpose of our lives, we can make decisions more quickly. Additionally, we will have a better understanding of the elements of our life priorities, which will help us make decisions. Additionally, there is little chance of making a mistake.
The business is the same old, same old. Additionally, businesses need to make decisions that are accurate and timely. Consequently, integrated technologies are needed to aid in the presentation of data in real-time so that quick decisions can be made.
3. Quicker at work
If our work is based on our interests and passions, we will love it more. As a result, we can complete the project quickly. Especially at work, finding one’s purpose in life requires setting both short- and long-term goals. We will be able to complete the task quickly and accurately with the help of a well-structured plan.
4. Establishing a Strong Work Ethic
The Cambridge Dictionary defines ethos as a group’s defining way of life. By adhering to the ikigai concept and realizing that the work we do can help a lot of people, we can give our lives more meaning. We will therefore take every possible action.
5. Traditional benefits
There may be many advantages to our contemporary way of life in the traditional and enduring Japanese way of life that ikigai represents. As a result, there has been a recent rise in research on ikigai as a means of discovering a “reason for living,” as well as on its broader positive effects on health.
Examples of How to Use the Finding Your Ikigai in Coaching
There don’t seem to be many accurate and reliable Western measures of ikigai, despite its significance and extensive body of research in Japan. The various ikigai usage examples that will help you find your ikigai are listed below.
1. Concentrate on the Details
Recognizing and taking pleasure in the little things is one of the objectives and tenets of ikigai. The pursuit of mindfulness and curiosity in everything we do is essential to this. Flow and ikigai are present whether you’re making a spreadsheet or drinking tea. You’ll soon understand that nothing is routine and that even the most basic things can be enjoyable.
2. Making Ikigai Stronger in the Workplace
While applicable to every aspect of our lives, the workplace is where ikigai is most useful. We spend a large portion of our lives at work, so we frequently wonder if there are any ways to make that time more enjoyable and meaningful. Consider the responses to the following questions as you use the Strengthening Ikigai in the Workplace tool:
- What do you excel at?
- What do you enjoy doing?
- What is the world lacking?
- What is required by the market for your organization?
3. Crafting a Job
To be near your ikigai, you don’t have to change jobs. Instead, it is possible to shape your current role into one that helps others and allows you to feel joy in what you do by making small changes to what and how it is performed. But first, you must comprehend how you use your time. Utilize this Job Crafting worksheet to keep track of your daily activities.
What are the Limitations of Finding Your Ikigai?
The framework’s four questions are not ones that Japanese people ask themselves as they reflect on their ikigai (s). If you showed a native Japanese person a Venn diagram, they wouldn’t recognize it as ikigai. Japanese people learn to appreciate ikigai as they experience life and get older. They do not learn about it through a framework.
Ikigai cannot be perfectly translated into English. Iki is roughly equivalent to “life,” and Gai is to “value or worth.” It is the reason you were created and why you are still alive. Either active contemplation or natural evolution can help you discover your ikigai. It is not required to be one thing and can include a variety of interests.
Ikigai for you:
- is not something you must sell to earn money.
- does not necessarily need to be something the world needs.
- is not something you need to be an expert at or highly skilled at
- doesn’t necessarily have to be something you love.
Conclusion
Ikigai emphasizes both the route and the destination equally. Ikigai calls for participation instead of passivity and engagement over keeping a safe distance. I hope the above article has provided you with enough knowledge on ikigai so that you are now fully aware of both its benefits and limitations. Use this coaching tool to truly appreciate your life.
Frequently asked questions
How to further develop your skills as a coach using the Finding Your Ikigai?
It is easier to negotiate the ups and downs of life if your activities are in line with the “thing that you live for.” You can count on your ikigai to point you in the proper way as your profession develops and you are given additional options. This is how using ikigai, you can improve your abilities.
What are other coaching tools employed?
The action brainstorming worksheet is another tool that can assist clients to uncover behaviors that are supporting them in their pursuit of goals. Just as a mechanic is only as good as his tools, so too is a life coach.
What is the procedure for using a Finding Your Ikigai?
The goal of discovering your ikigai is to develop mental power and to comprehend passion, love, and other life fundamentals.
ABOUT SAI BLACKBYRN
I’m Sai Blackbyrn, better known as “The Coach’s Mentor.” I help Coaches like you establish their business online. My system is simple: close more clients at higher fees. You can take advantage of technology, and use it as a catalyst to grow your coaching business in a matter of weeks; not months, not years. It’s easier than you think.
AS SEEN ON
0 Comment