Practicing Ikigai helps to improve your resilience
What resilience is all about - The definition of resilience is your ability to cope with and bounce back from life’s challenges.
Considering that our complex lives in today’s world can be full of difficulties, your ability to be resilient will play a massive part in your life. And it can mean the difference between having a happy, well-connected and contented life to the absolute opposite.
This week we delve into what makes people resilient and how you can become more tenacious, adaptable, tough and persistent which are the hallmarks of resilient people.
If you are a very resilient person, you will still experience all the physical and psychological fears that a less resilient person will feel. You will just be better prepared to deal with them and bounce back more quickly.
While resilience can be an innate genetic quality, for most people it also involves the learning of new skills.
Life’s problems can come in many forms and cause various levels of physical and mental anguish. Thankfully, successfully coping with any of these crises means that you will employ the same set of skills time after time. Let’s take a look at what some of these skills are.
Having purpose in your life - I have gained some fascinating insights about purpose from reading about Okinawan women who pursue their ikigai. I hope you do too.
Okinawa is one of the islands of Japan and ikigai – finding meaning and purpose – is practiced widely across the island by their women who amazingly have an average life expectancy of ninety years.
One of the primary elements of traditional Japanese medicine is that your physical well-being is directly affected by mental and emotional health. A state of well-being can be achieved by the devotion and mastery of activities that you enjoy and that also bring a sense of achievement. So ikigai is a reason to get up in the morning!
If you practice ikigai well, you are likely to experience a sense of having worth and gaining benefits by taking part in these activities that you already enjoy.
In a sporting sense, you hear sportspeople talk about being ‘in the zone’. They have a brilliant feeling of flow and are able to effortlessly perform a string of best moments one after the other.
No matter what your own level of sport is or has been, you will understand and clearly remember your own highlights. And that’s what it can be. Your own amazing highlights reel.
In golf it was that time you broke ninety for the first time and effortlessly drained long putts all over the course.
That time you made that snooker break of twenty-four and potted nine consecutive balls. Normally you’d struggle to pot three in a row. And better still was the look on the face of your mate when you beat him for the first time.
Or that time your cellar-dweller netball team effortlessly beat the competition’s leading team, and you scored the winning goal with a long-range shot.
The Okinawan women’s range of activities which they love and are good at would be wide and varied and no doubt encompass cultural, sporting and many other fields.
An added benefit occurs when the activity brings value to others. A further less altruistic benefit occurs when you actually get paid for it.
How to practice ikigai - You first write down activities that you really like and are good at – or even potentially good at with a bit of practice.
Work out a plan of how you can regularly take part in these activities and improve your performance. And better still if they help other people and even better if you can get paid for doing it.
If you are still working and really enjoy your occupation, this is a great benefit. If you are still working and do not enjoy your work, the ikigai principles would mean that you could spend some time looking at more pleasurable options.
Purpose to your life – Purpose in life can be any activity which brings you pleasure and that you are passionate about.
With Ikigai the bonus is when you become expert at something. Being expert is only one way of having purpose. You can gain equal pleasure and satisfaction from sport, art, travel, family, hobbies or any other activity which gives you a good reason to get up in the morning.
Well-connected socially – You will be well connected and value and care about the relationships you have with your friends and family. You are also likely to be an active social media user to enable regular contact with loved ones who you live away from.
The famous US Grant Study has been running for eighty years and examines the lives of hundreds of male Harvard graduates and a large group of more underprivileged men. It overwhelmingly proves that strong and loving relationships across the board are far and away the most important factor in people’s health, happiness and longevity.
It also says rather starkly that ‘loneliness kills.’
I personally have never felt really lonely and have a great deal of sympathy for those who do. Adding to this loneliness can be apprehensive feelings about meeting with strangers in different situations.
One really good way of overcoming this is to either join a club which involves something you are interested in, like a sport or a cultural activity. You are still with strangers; the difference now is that you immediately have something in common with them.
The same would apply if you were volunteering at say an op shop or other community charitable organisation. You are all there for the same reason and with one united goal in mind.
Closer to home in your own neighbourhood, if you do not know the people in your street perhaps talk to a few and there may be interest in having a street party or something similar.
Through the various media outlets, we know a lot about wars and other international news from far-flung places without even knowing our next-door neighbour!
Positive attitude - You are optimistic and positive most of the time and have a great attitude to life. This sort of attitude is a real asset when things get tough, and you are likely to be quite a naturally resilient type.
If you are a negative and pessimistic type of person, it will be more difficult to bounce back when problems arise. The key here is your recognition of this bent. Once you are aware that your attitude will not help you to recover from a tricky situation, the more likely you are to be able to find a solution.
Fitness - You will place considerable importance on being physically fit and are likely to be quite proficient in each of the five BAFFS – these are balance, agility, fitness (cardio), flexibility and strength. This is a real asset when the going gets tough.
Living in the present - You mostly live in the present and focus and are present in your day-to-day relationships with friends. It is unhealthy to dwell too often on the past, particularly if this involves negative stuff like stressing out over missed opportunities.
You can certainly learn from experiences, both good and bad. Resilient people will use the past positively and learn from past difficulties and enjoy the fond memories with family and friends.
If you live in the present, you are seeing clearly that moment in real time. Whatever the context, whether it is maybe the brilliance of a sporting moment, a colourful bird flying by or anything else, you are in there living it first-hand.
If you are being continually distracted by other things that are happening in your life, you will often miss out on life itself.
Flexibility - You are flexible, know your limits and able to make other plans.
You may have set your heart on something and worked hard to achieve it. It will not always come to pass. Sometimes you miss out. It is important that you have the ability to accept this, maybe learn some lessons from it, and move on.
Arch Jelley the famous athletics coach told me this story about ‘using the difficulty’.
Arch let his driver’s license lapse when he turned 100. Only a short time later his wife Rachel lost her license and so ‘they were without wheels’. They used this difficulty by walking more and getting fitter and actually saving money.
In my case recently, being diagnosed with a back condition meant that continuing to play golf and tennis could mean further deterioration. Knowing my limits and unwilling to take this risk, I gave up both. After a lifetime of playing these sports, this was pretty tough. I used the difficulty by undertaking various exercises and stretches to strengthen my back.
After six months of core strengthening rehab and getting the nod from my back specialist, I was delighted to be back playing golf, albeit with a much-abbreviated swing.
There are so many aspects of your life where negative stuff pops up. Rather than reluctantly accepting your fate, if you have the ability to turn these to your advantage the difference is quite massive.
Evidently Covid gave many people the opportunity to take time to re-evaluate their careers with many deciding to completely change direction. They used the difficulty which Covid presented and moved from careers they were unhappy with to a new field.
Being open and flexible means that you will always be better equipped to deal with life’s inevitable disappointments and crises.
Self-reliance - You like spending time on your own. This sounds counter-intuitive to the other resilience measure of being well connected. What it means is that in our busy, complex and connected lives, time on our own can be a wonderful change. On the other hand, a person who craves others’ attention and company at all times may have some self-worth issues.
This can be the one-on-one situation of co-dependency. This is where time away from each other causes problems like feeling a lack of self-worth. Or it can be in the wider context of one person almost fearing being left alone away from their normal network of work colleagues, friends and family.
In both cases this is a real shame, because time away from the day-to-day hurly-burly of workplaces and homes can be a precious and sometimes well-earned commodity.
If you feel that you may have become co-dependent, it may be worth talking to your partner or those close to you as to how they view this and, if necessary, seek some counselling.
On the other hand, resilient people will jump at the chance to spend some quality time on their own and have no qualms about it.
Gratitude - You are grateful for what you have. You can easily get sucked into the world of negativity that surrounds us with the seemingly endless media coverage of wars, storms, fires, politics and much more.
I get sucked into this too and need to make a conscious effort to focus on what the positive elements of my life really are. And as you get older and have to give up stuff, focus on what you can do, not what you can no longer do.
I have a list of things in my head that I am truly grateful for and when things get a bit bumpy, cheer myself up by thinking about these truly positive things in my life.
Finally – I hope you have enjoyed this blog. I love to get feedback and don’t hesitate to ask me a question.