My Ikigai – Explore Your Direction and Boundaries

Ikigai is a Japanese concept that can broadly be understood as what makes life meaningful or worth living. It can involve work, but it may equally involve relationships, hobbies, everyday activities, or being important to someone else.

You may have seen a diagram with four overlapping circles: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for. This is a modern Western interpretation that can help organise your thoughts. It is not an original traditional Japanese model, nor is it a scientifically validated method for deciding which career is right for someone.

In this tool, we use the four areas as open questions for reflection. They can help you notice possible connections, tensions, and things you would like to explore further. You do not have to make all four circles meet in the centre for the exercise to be useful.

Work that mainly provides security, stability, and income is just as legitimate as work that feels like a calling. Many people find meaning in family, friends, communities, hobbies, faith, or volunteering rather than in their job.

You do not need to turn a passion into a job or find one single calling. What fits can change over a lifetime – with studies, health, finances, family, and the opportunities around you.

Green Guidance brings climate, the environment, sustainability, and social justice into conversations about education and working life. This might involve looking at the problems people want to help address, as well as how different organisations use resources, affect the natural world, and treat people.

Green Guidance is not limited to specialist environmental careers. Sustainability can be relevant to engineers, healthcare professionals, economists, teachers, designers, skilled tradespeople, and many others. At times, your financial needs, practical opportunities, and personal values may point in different directions.

When exploring what the world needs, you can start close to home. What is needed in your school, your neighbourhood, among the people around you, or in wider society? You do not have to save the world on your own, and you do not need a grand life mission. Everyday acts of care, consideration, and long-term responsibility can make valuable contributions too.

Examples, not right answers: reducing waste, energy-efficient buildings, accessible services, fair working conditions, safe care, inclusive education, biodiversity.