Of late, I had been reading a lot of autobiographies based on lives of some of the greatest leaders of the world. One thing that I found common amongst all of them was that they had discovered their passion and kind of knew what they wanted to be known for. The more I read about them, the more I wanted to know about my own sense of purpose. I was asking myself all sorts of nasty philosophical questions like:
- What is my identity?
- What is it that I want to be known for?
- Why am I even born?
Forget asking, even discussing these questions with family and friends earned me a “crazy monk” tag.
But the questions themselves were becoming so intriguing that I had to find an answer. Consequently, I was left reading even more than before, and got introduced to a very interesting Japanese concept called Ikigai- which literally means “a reason for our existence”. It is aimed at delivering a personal mission statement that should make you get up and going every morning. Application of this concept in my life did provide an answer for the questions that had been troubling me. My intent, here, is to introduce the concept to you along with an example of how I applied it in my own life. I do wish to be able to put my thoughts in a way that it leads all of you onto a journey to discover yourself.
While taking reference from the original concept, I understood that Ikigai basically consists of four main aspects- and if you are able to resolve these four aspects of your life, it should lead you closer to your purpose of being. Each aspect here is represented by one circle and the common area between these circles becomes your Ikigai.
1) Passion – which means finding something that you love to do. To further add, passion is that one thing you are always compelled to do, something that makes you feel lively and energetic at any time of the day. While thinking about it during my self-reflection exercise, I discovered that I love to talk- no wonder I am a woman! 😁 To put it more sensibly, my passion is to have meaningful conversations with people at the end of which both sides learn something from each other.
2) Mission – which means finding something that the world needs. Of course, we do need to fix several things when we see the world from that perspective. What I chose to pay attention to were the sights of poverty, terrorism and nuclear wars. At the heart of these problems lie unhappy and pessimist people who have, for whatever reasons, turned hostile. Given a choice, need of the hour for me is to align these people to emit more positivity.
3) Profession – which means identifying what are you good at. This doesn’t necessarily have to be your current profession, but generally thinking about the qualities that you have to offer to rest of the world. If your answer to this question has been none so far, trust me, you haven’t given this topic the time and attention it definitely deserves. I discovered that I am good at expressing myself- whether in writing or talking.
4) Vocation – which means what is it that you could be paid for. Again, this doesn’t have to be what you are paid for currently. Rather, this could be something that you would LIKE to be paid for. I certainly think that being a great communicator is something along those lines for me.
At the end of this exercise, I added my own findings to this chart to make it look like this.
Looking at the complete picture, I understood my Ikigai to be a motivational speaker since it would allow me to talk and express myself in order to bring the best out of others- while still getting paid for it.That’s how I discovered my reason for being, and would like to urge you to find your own too.
This content was originally presented in Toastmasters International Club as a speech, a recording of which can be found here.
