Why Ikigai Is a Better Life Compass Than Goal Setting Alone

Ikigai and goal setting go hand in hand, particularly if they are smart goals, but more on that later.

Ikigai is a Japanese cultural process used to discover your purpose, what makes you get up in the mornings.

It is a combination of four principles: what we love to do (passion), what we are good at (vocation), what the world needs (mission), and what we can be paid for (profession).

By combining these four principles, we can find our Ikigai.

Most of us look to use Ikigai to align our careers with our goals, particularly when we consider one of the principles and what we can be paid for.

We are encouraged to be balanced and find our Ikigai in our personal, professional, and spiritual lives.

This Venn diagram helps us to visualize how the four principles are used in creating our Ikigai.

When considering our Ikigai in our personal, professional, and spiritual lives, the principle of what we can be paid for, we can shift our mind from being dollars and cents to the value we bring to any part of our life or the value of the service we bring to our community.

It can be cleaning the floors at your place of worship. On a personal note, creating the opportunity in the family home to plant a nice garden for the family to enjoy.

When it comes to goal setting, I am sure we all have experienced making resolutions on New Year’s Eve, binding ourselves to a new set of commitments, thinking this is a great idea. With no thought to what really moves us and what gives deep value to our lives. only to find after a short period of time, a couple of weeks into January, we have given up.

Or we have sat down with excitement to draft up and set a new goal only to find ourselves in a few months not achieving anywhere near where we thought we would be or not at all.

It is typical for most of us to start with lots of enthusiasm; however, over time our enthusiasm diminishes over time. Why is this?

Over time it may cause us to question our ability to complete future goals with an intense fear of failing again. It can be emotionally exhausting becoming overwhelmed, paralyzing our motivation over time.

Often our goals are not aligned with our true beliefs, our values, or our aspirations; this causes friction, something like driving with one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake… just blowing a lot of bad-smelling smoke.

For instance, let’s say you made a smart goal to become a hairdresser, and you save long and hard for the money to complete a course. You complete the course and land a great job at a highly respected hairdressing salon. Great…fantastic excitement … I can hear the corks popping off the champagne bottle.

Months after starting the position, you are enjoying it—the chat, the laughter in the store. After a period of time, the chat and laughter start to become harder to generate.

Getting started in the mornings and becoming enthusiastic is a non-event. You’re realizing hairdressing isn’t fulfilling the dream you had. and struggle to go to work every day.

You may have discovered you don’t have the capacity to be standing on your feet all day or the aching hand of snip, snip, snip, and it is taking its toll.

This happens more likely when your goals don’t align with your beliefs and values. It is important to consider going through the process of identifying your Ikigai first using the four principles: what we love to do (passion), what we are good at (vocation), what the world needs (mission), and what we can be paid for (profession).

By combining these four principles, we can find our Ikigai, discovering our deep purpose in our personal, professional, and spiritual lives. Creating a meaningful journey… that honors our purpose

Once we have our Ikigai, we can go about setting some smart goals that may keep evolving over our lifetime.

If our goals aligned with our values and aspirations, we would be more motivated to invest a greater effort to achieve the outcome we set out to complete.

So in conclusion, if we had first found our Ikigai in regard to our careers, maybe hairdressing might not have been on our radar when we had considered all four principles of finding our Ikigai.

Steve Hudson