The beauty of the Ikigai system is that it tries to isolate the various different factors that drives you for something that you do. We tend to struggle with choice of what we want to do because there are different drivers and we are weighing across them. Today I’m just going to focus on identifying what one is good at.
Ask Others
We often find it difficult to come up with what we are personally good at because we belittle those things. They seem so easy to us and effortless perhaps or comes too naturally to us for us to think much of it. Ask your spouse, parents and close friends what they think you’re good at. It could be a skill, an area of management, an aspect of leadership
Observe Others
Consider the kind of work you’re always allocated in a team in your current workplace. Or the work that you’ll naturally and happily take up when the responsibilities are not laid out too clearly. It should not be due to a sense of obligation but out of your natural strengths.
Self-reflection
Dive into your memories from childhood; what were you praised for? Any areas of skills or domains of work? Pay attention to those areas where you might have inadvertently invested time and effort developing because you happen to have found yourself relatively strong in it. For example, you might have been happy to do more Maths problems because you tend to score well in them – it might or might not be that you enjoyed working on them.
Try to distill all of these into specific work roles or potential work positions and list them down properly under the ‘What are you good at?’ header in your own personal worksheet (Download the worksheet here).
This is the second part of a multi-part series of writing on Ikigai. The cover article explains why I’m writing this.
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