Ikigai in Japanese means your reason for being or your purpose in life. It is your calling or your sweet spot in your life. This is a combination of your personal, professional, and spiritual interests that comes together when you pursue the right Path in everything that you do and are happy about being on that Path. It is NOT a destination, but, rather, a state of Being. To most, finding your Ikigai is life’s work, often taking a lifetime to find. Many leave this planet wondering why they never found theirs!

In some belief systems Ikigai can be confused with Nirvana. Actually, it is quite its opposite. Nirvana (in Sanskrit) refers to one’s liberation from the endless cycles of suffering and reincarnation; Ikigai is reaching a state of Being, joy, and engagement in whatever life you are cycling through! Nirvana literally means “Blown out” (such as a candle or a life—Moksha in Sanskrit); Ikigai can be interpreted as burning brightly as you go through life, giving light to others!

Very rarely do individuals have a sense of what their Ikigai is and where they are in its pursuit, and those who do have that sense innately, display an early affinity for it. Examples are Edison, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zukerburg, and other prodigies, including artists (Yehudi Menuhin), sports figures (Tiger Woods), and others. Of course, there are examples of late bloomers who discover their calling in their later or even sunset years as they pursue what they always believed in and then finding a way to actualize it through hard work, luck, and serendipity (Alexander Fleming, Col. Sanders, actress Helen Mirren, Martha Stewart).

The vast majority of the masses discover or uncover their Ikigai as they engage in their vocation, often through trial and error, finding and then converging on a way that leads them to zero-in on their Path that eventually brings them closer to their Ikigai. When you have reached Ikigai the joy of being there makes all the attendant struggles and distractions irrelevant and you focus only on your state of Being, not doing! In that state of existence your struggles, obstacles, and distractions simply become irrelevant, even though they exist, sometimes with greater ferocity!

Almost 80% of the people maunder through their life and wonder when they will find their Ikigai; they never do! They plod along, struggle collecting a paycheck, and living a mediocre existence. Often, prospects come to me when they find themselves resigned to their professional lives, devoid of joy in what they do, looking to get closer to their ever elusive Ikigai. In my coaching practice I have found an approach that works for most such clients using a structured process that entails first finding their own inner spark or force (their genius) and then aligning that with an appropriate vocation or opportunity in a resonant verbal form (résumé, bio, LinkedIn Profile).

So, what process exists for people to uncover their inner genius that, when applied in the right place, will get them closer to their sweet spot? There are three ways to approach this: One is through extensive aptitude and personality assessments (Strong, MAPP, DISC, Leadershp Aptitude tests, etc.), which often end up giving confusing guidance (“you can be an airline pilot or an architect.; a surgeon or a cook”); the second is by re-visiting your past and uncovering where in that past you found your Aha! moments of joy (being in the Zone) and how you would codify those; and the third is when, in even rare cases, an individual is thrust into an opportunity that reveals their true calling and they conquer that space by virtue of how everything comes together for them, both by the sheer dint of their willpower, their gifts, and their skills. For the second path, once you codify these Aha! moments then you can develop your message (your value proposition) to vector it to “That which the world needs” in the above graphic. This is something that can get you Paid as a added bonus.

For most of us, the second approach of finding our Aha! moments and codifying them can be addressed through a structured process to find your innate genius (you are good at and love to do). This is achieved by revisiting your work history with a different perspective and going through a structured discovery process that brings a new meaning to the Aha! work you’ve already done. By going through a structured, disciplined process of bringing a new meaning to the past Aha! work you can find patterns that define situations and opporunities that provide you the inspiration to shine, give you a sense of Being, and get you lost in the Flow. Going through a few of these experiences and verbalizing the essence of those experiences provide you the groundwork on which to construct your value proposition channeled in a particular vocational direction.

It is naïve to expect that such a process suddenly catapults you into your space of Ikigai when you are done with it. Actually, it provides you a direction in which you can launch your efforts and then iteratively converge on your sweet spot as you uncover what is available in that space beyond the door that just opened for you. Once the right door opens you can find your own Path by exploring what works and what needs more work. This, too, is an iterative process, but much more likely to take you to your Path since you have already used your previous episodes of ecstasy to give you a way to pursue it further in a more deliberate way. This can be a virtuous cycle, triggered by the newly-defined door that you just opened for yourself and engaged your energies in unprecedented ways because now you have found your Path!

Once you find your sweet spot the real work begins, but now this work is different in its calling. Work in this space becomes an exploration and a joy, and in the process, you start getting in the Flow of it. As Malcolm Gladwell emphasized in his book, Outliers, the culmiination of these efforts to make a master in your craft requires at least 10,000 hours of diligent work sharply focused on your Path and then continuing on that Path with increasing sense of joy and engagement.

Of course, there are no guarantees that a pursuit found by uncovering your genius, packaging it in a verbalized form, and developing a value proposition around that discovery will result in getting you on a Path to your Ikigai, but it is a good bet that you would. As a career and life coach, having now worked with more than 6,000 clients in multiple countries in one-on-one engagements, I have found that this approach works for most of them. When it works, it does not just change how they go about their job and career, it transforms them in every way. So, if you are struggling with your work, job, career, or life it may be worth giving this approach a try and seeing if it helps you get closer to your Ikigai!

Good luck!