Ikigai Representation

This is an article relating to a quick exercise to represent how you see yourself and your activities, and how you see your Ikigai.

Ikigai is a harmony reached between what you do that is useful and self sustaining, and promotes a wellbeing between your and life. The journey towards an Ikigai is more important than the destination. Taking time developing your own willingness to explore and invest in you and your interaction with the world. Your perspective of your Ikigai may also develop and shift over time, and so it may be a constant journey that never really gets to its destination.

The exercise can be done as part of a self directed personal development approach to understand more about where you are in terms of your Ikigai, and does this give you more information about how you want to proceed in life or change what you do.

Tools

• Ikigai Template:

Connections

1. Write a list of your activities or work initiatives that you are currently doing

Concepts

1. Print out the Ikigai template or create an electronic copy that you can annotate
2. Add your natural affinities as you see them to the template. (Affinities are those activities that you just love to do where time falls away and you can disappear into the activity, and not considered as work. Your affinities may be interpreted as a representation or an expression of you.)
3. Add any initiatives or personal projects that you do to the template
4. Add your current work activities to the template

Concrete Practice

1. Looking at your completed template:
   1. What does this tell you about your activities and your Ikigai?
   2. What could you change to get closer to your Ikigai?
2. If you have done this exercise before, how has your understanding of your Ikigai changed?

Conclusions

1. Draw up an action plan or approach to implement your changes to get closer to your Ikigai

See Also

• Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life