Finding Your Ikigai

Happy morning from Sunday Morning Coffee! It is rainy and crisply chilly and a very good day to be cozy (inside) with a cup o’joe.

Do you have weeks where you feel like all you did was work? Yeah. That was my week. And the one before that. I don’t normally do that…work 12 hours a day every day…at least not in the past year. Prior to that, it WAS the norm for me. Then I’d spend my weekends catching up on all the life work that has to happen, like cleaning, laundry, paying bills, repairing stuff…and I’d also have to recharge (sleep and eat), so by the time Monday rolled around, I was good to go for another grueling week but there had been little to no joy or pleasure in my non-work time.

That’s no way to live. I hope you aren’t living that. It’s an insidious thing, this work-taking-over-my-life thing. You have to look for the signs. You know, when you’re with non-work friends and family and all you can really talk about is your work because let’s face it, it’s all you do. Or when you start counting stops at restaurants when you’re on the road as pleasure. Or a perfect cup of coffee somewhere is suddenly the holy grail (and if you tell me you found that in a conference center somewhere, we REALLY need to talk). If you'r closest friends are the people with whom you work and the friends you can count outside of work that you actually spend time with, that’s a red flag too.

If you’re feeling defensive or a little sad right now, you may be overworking. Don’t worry. I’m not judging. I’ve spent 38 years of my work life largely spending too much time at work, thinking about work, and talking about work. The past three weeks are evidence that I still do, on occasion (I know I said only two weeks earlier, but I’m feeling guilty about fudging that now. It’s been three weeks of 10-12 hour days, 6 days each week with at least a couple of hours on Sundays.)

So here’s the thing…part of the reason I work like that is that I take time-intensive gigs. I like the challenge of going into a space with nothing and making something from ground-up, or going into a hot mess and getting it in ship-shape. Another reason is that I’ve picked industries that, let’s be honest, don’t particularly care about their employees’ best health. You’d think education wouldn’t be that way, but I’ll tell you…educators work more hours than any industry I’ve seen without being compensated for it, and the ‘overtime’ is not only expected, it’s written into the contract, per se. When your schedule is managing students for 7 hours with one hour to grade papers, call parents, attend IEP meetings, and go to the bathroom, then all the prep work has to be done some time (aka your own time). I blame my career for the fact that I wolf down every meal put before me in 30 seconds flat, since that was usually the time I had for lunch for the past 38 years. And don’t get me started on corrections. At least there you get OT pay for the extra 8 hours you work after your 8 hour shift (not me, of course, because as an administrator I didn’t qualify. And before anyone says anything out loud about how admin makes the “big bucks” and don’t need OT pay, every officer on the payroll eventually made more money than admins even though they too were working way more than 40 hours/week).

But another reason for this fascination with work is that for me, my work is part of my ikigai (pronounced eek-key-guy).

What is ‘ikigai’ you may ask?

I’m so glad you did ask. Ikigai is a Japanese word that roughly translates to English as “reason for being.” A lot of Japanese words and concepts have made their way into the Western world over recent years, but I really like this one the most. It encompasses life and work and really resonates with me. Author Héctor García really brought the ikigai framework to the world, and if you’re intrigued, you should read him. I’ve been researching the framework for a while now, including it in curricula for incarcerated and justice-impacted learners just starting their career planning journey.

Ikigai can be viewed as a giant Venn diagram. It asks you to ask yourself four questions:

• What do I love?

• What am I good at?

• What does the world need?

• What can I be paid for?

Where these circles overlap, you find an additional four areas. Where what you love and what you’re good at intersect, you find your passion. Between what you love and what the world needs, you find your mission. The intersection of what the world needs and what you can be paid for is your vocation. And when you see the overlap between what you can be paid for and what you’re good at, you’ve arrived at your profession.

The convergence of those four areas is your ikigai. Your reason for being.

When you arrive there, at your ikigai, life changes. I’m incredibly lucky to have found that early in my career. I didn’t want to be a teacher. Everyone in my family were educators. Great ones to boot. So I was an art major. Even though I wouldn’t know about ikigai for another 40 years, my 21-year old self knew that being an interior designer wasn’t it for me.

But see, it is someone else’s ikigai. When you start with those four questions and keep digging deeper, you get to your heart…your ikigai…and suddenly work doesn’t seem like work. My answer to “what does the world need?” is fewer people incarcerate, open doors of opportunity for the oppressed, real justice, fixing a broken system, ending racially-biased politics, repairing past societal wrongs…my list goes on. Someone else may answer “the world needs more beauty, aesthetically pleasing homes, tranquility, a place for gathering” and their ikigai is interior design.

And ikigai is how I can partially justify my work-a-holic ways. My work is central to who I am, how I define myself, what brings me joy, my passion, mission, vocation, and profession. You have to find joy and pleasure in things outside of your work, yes, but when you find what you’re meant to do, that’s the sweetest of sweet spots.

Your ikigai can also change, so you should delve into the framework as you go through life. I started teaching because I wanted to share my love of theater with students, I became an assistant principal because I wanted to eliminate bullying and make school a safe place for kids, I became a principal because I wanted to make school a happy place for teachers and kids, I became a superintendent to create a system where incarcerated students and the educators serving them would remember or be introduced to the doors of opportunity that education can open…and that’s been my ikigai for a while now, even though my job title has changed a couple of times.

Do I get paid an obscene amount of money? No. At least not if by “obscene amount” you mean a lot. But that question about what I can get paid for has an answer from me that may be lower than yours. And that’s ok. That’s your ikigai, not mine.

Pretty cool, right?

I encourage you to do a bit of research and take some time to really look at your own ikigai. You’ll either arrive at the realization that you’re there already or that you want to work toward something else.

If you want help with student curriculum, staff training and professional development, career readiness programming, or just want to chat, contact me here.

Happy wintry, coffee-drinking weather day to you! I’m going to spend the rest of it NOT working (I’ll let you know how that goes).