Finding Your Ikigai
Therapy touches on philosophy a lot. Here we explore the concept of Ikigai or 生き甲斐 which translates as your ‘reason for being’.
At first glance it’s a simple Venn diagram, but it’s so much more than that. The four circles represent the four qualities that your work needs to satisfy to become your Ikigai, those are:
- What you love
- What the world needs
- What you’re good at
- What you can be paid for
As therapists, we deal a lot with personal meaning. Many of our students come to us because something is missing in their work – many people do work that the world needs, that they’re good at and that they can be paid for but not that they love.
Maybe that sounds familiar?
You will see from the diagram that without that essential quality, you have a vocation and a profession but not a passion or a mission, what we do is help you to complete the picture by helping you move into work you also love.
Finding a Job You Love Means Never Working Another Day in Your Life
Most of our team became therapists by transitioning from another career which didn’t fulfill them. Some of us were moving away from something that no longer felt right and others were aiming at specific qualities that were missing. We did a quick poll and found some of the reasons:
Some of the things you might want to move away from:
- Working with people you might not respect
- Working for someone whose values are inconsistent with yours
- Compromising what’s important
- The risk of doing something that doesn’t express (or worse contradicts) who you are
- The risk of spending your life not doing what you want to do based on a gamble that you might be able to buy the freedom to do what you want later
Some of the things you might be looking for:
- Work which is cooperative and based on kindness, meaning, and seeking peace
- The flexibility to work the hours you choose, to suit you and those around you
- Being in control of your earnings
- Choosing who you work with
- Working from home
- Work in which age is not a factor and there is no upper age limit
- Work which is interesting and rewarding on a financial, intellectual, spiritual and human level
If some of those ring true for you then you are in the right place and you too can free yourself.
Making the Change Possible
How most of us did it was to study alongside our day job and begin a part-time practice, building that practice until the earnings became comparable and then making the move into full-time therapy work.
We then designed our pathways to make that process as simple as possible, a kind of reverse engineering. On our vocational pathways we built in the ability to generate revenue from therapy in as little as thirteen months, allowing autonomy and control as quickly as possible and helping fund the remaining study.
Although you can make your own plan, you can also follow ours because it’s tried and tested and it works.
It’s a Staged Process
Making a career change is a big decision but it doesn’t have to be a shock to the system. Our pathways ease you gently from one environment to the other, even if you don’t want a complete career change. Therapy is something that can fit seamlessly alongside your other work. It can be studied now and used later or it can be a safety net for the future.
Becoming Part of the Future
Society is undergoing a shift and the stigma that once attached itself to mental health issues is becoming a thing of the past. Because of that the market for therapy services is ever increasing and there is a huge gap to fill. We will never see a saturated market for therapists because there will always be people and there will always be as many individual truths, viewpoints and meanings to be explored and worked with.
At NCHP we believe in leading the cause of making mental wellness accessible to everyone and to do that, we need more therapists.
We hope you’ll join us and share our Ikigai.